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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > May > 08 > Entry
Martin Gottlieb: Can national hardliners reshape Ohio GOP?
OK, so Arlen Specter leaves the Republicans, having decided he was insufficiently conservative to prosper among them. And, as this column briefly documented last week, the next least conservative Republican senator is probably Ohio’s George Voinovich.
So where does that leave the Ohio Republican Party? After all, all its holders of the biggest statewide offices in the last decade — Voinovich, Mike DeWine and Bob Taft — have some problems with conservatives.
Here’s Voinovich on the subject of the people behind the challenge to Specter in the 2004 and 2010 Republican primaries in Pennsylvania:
“They’re really not interested in Republicans,” he said, “even ones that are relatively conservative. (They say,) ‘If you don’t pass my litmus test, then you don’t qualify.’”
At issue, specifically, is a national organization called the Club for Growth, whence sprang the challenger to Specter. Voinovich, when asked specifically if he thinks the Club for Growth is a problem, said, “I think it is. I think it’s a big problem.”
You would, too, if you were him.
The club — on whose board sits former Ohio politician J. Kenneth Blackwell — applies big money to the task of promoting tax cuts, among other conservative causes. The club Web site says:
“The primary tactic of the separate Club for Growth PAC is to provide financial support from club members to viable pro-growth candidates to Congress, particularly in Republican primaries.”
The club and its supporters would love to take Voinovich out of the Senate if he were running again, which he isn’t. (Whether they could come up with a “viable” Republican alternative is another question.)
Voinovich, after all, believes that tax policies and spending policies should be somehow connected. For some reason, he has a problem with the whole idea of taxes going down while spending goes up. This put him at odds with his party when the spending was being done by Republicans.
When a party has suffered a string of losses like the Republicans lately, it inevitably has an internal fight over its soul. The fight takes an inevitable form, like a choreographed dance.
First the hardliners say that the party’s losses result from it having become too moderate, too much like the other party. Then the softliners say that is the single dumbest thing they’ve ever heard in their lives.
Or, as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., says more gently, “We are not losing blue states and shrinking as a party because we are not conservative enough. If we pursue a party that has no place for someone who agrees with me 70 percent of the time … then we are going to keep losing.’’
Jump ahead to the end of the dance: the party makes a comeback. Always. It’s built in. It’s not an accomplishment, any more than the tide deserves credit when it comes back in.
When the “in” party runs out of luck, the “out” party comes back in. So the shape of the parties is of some interest.
The Club for Growth and other hardline conservatives are not likely to go after many incumbent Republicans in primaries. After all, most congressional Republicans are already quite conservative. But the club can have impact without launching many races. It can deliver a message about what happens to the few independent-minded people, a message that will be heard by Republican politicians in moderate states like Ohio and places like Dayton.
That’s the “big problem” Voinovich referred to: that Republican politicians will feel that meeting Graham’s 70 percent standard will not sustain them in office, not satisfy the hard right.
What would happen to Ohio Republicans if they went in the Club for Growth direction. Well, what we know for sure is that Ken Blackwell suffered a loss of historic proportions when he ran for governor in 2006. Admittedly, it was a bad year for Republicans; DeWine lost, too.
The upshot of that history may be the emergence of somebody like former Congressman Rob Portman, who splits the ideological difference.
But what splitting the difference means is that he is right in the mainstream of a party that is dominated by the south and west, not places like Ohio, which is why so many Republican officeholders have diverged from party orthodoxy in the first place.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
Comments
By RAW
May 11, 2009 11:27 AM | Link to this
By “independent-minded”, do you maybe mean more liberal-like? Why is it that when anyone opposes massive federal spending, especially on unprecedented scale, thay are not independent-minded. Seems to me that given the current political climate, the opposition to government-controlled businesses and presidential intimidation to effect policy is independent-minded. I am referring, of course to publicly berating hedge-funds during the Chrysler bankruptcy announcement and the request for common stock in lieu of repayment of TARP money from the banks. Main-stream media would have you believe that the entire country is behind these policies. Therefore, it would seem that the opposition to this would have the more independent view. So, maybe what needs to be said is, more conservative need to think like liberals. Opposition is a good thing. This country needs to hear and see more of it. Obama is not always right. Democrats are not always right, just like Bush and the Republican are not alway wrong. Maybe someone should report that.