Angst in Republican Ranks

The political scene just got a little more tumultuous with Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic Party. How much this will actually change things in the Senate is unclear, but his decision does crystallize what has been happening to the Republican Party.  

President Obama may face a faltering economy, foreign uncertainties and a possible health emergency. Nevertheless, despite some misgivings, a majority of Americans are responding favorably to his energy and determination. Republicans have tried to block every initiative with phony claims that Democrats haven't pursued a bi-partisan effort to engage the minority. But what they really seem to be saying is that, although rejected in successive election cycles, bi-partisanship for them means staying their course.

Specter and others say the party isn't the one they joined years ago, having shifted too far to the right and become less of a big-tent party. Conservatives with the loudest voices and the narrowest vision are in charge. They supported questionable Bush policies and their insistence on a social agenda that is less important to most people has further eroded the party's general appeal. Specter may not champion every Democratic cause, but at least, he will mitigate the sixty-vote filibuster threshold Republicans held with their belligerent "no" tactics. And when Al Franken is finally seated, Democrats will have a solid sixty-seat majority in the Senate.

In the delirium that sets in from denying reality for so long South Carolina's Senator DeMint downplayed Specter's defection as a sign of Republican weakness saying "the people" are on his party's side. Perhaps he misreads the frustration people feel over job losses, bank bailouts and corporate greed because their outrage is directed at the very capitalist adventurism Republicans so admire. Putting two and two together doesn't invigorate the mental processes of the tea-bag crowd. Likewise critics of national health-care ignore the fact that business-provided employee health benefits make companies less competitive with countries that have government plans. And their rationing argument doesn't address the reality that insurance companies do exactly that in our present system.

In an interview on Wednesday's Washington Journal Representative Paul Broun, R-GA, made some odd remarks about health care, especially considering he is also a physician. Echoing President Bush he tried to debunk the claim that health care isn't available for many Americans. After all, he said, emergency rooms everywhere are obliged to treat anyone who comes to their door. That's the kind of mindset that keeps the GOP so out of step with the nation's problems and so ineffective at framing solutions for them.

Senate Majority Leader McConnell is using the fear approach that worked so well for Republicans in the past, declaring Specter's new affiliation "a threat to the country." Do "people want the majority to have whatever it wants without restraint..." he queried. Still the usual suspects manage to capture media attention. Karl Rove keeps up the self-preservation rant about how, if we investigate who maneuvered us into torture mode, we'd be like a banana republic. And Fred Thompson, one of the country's most inane political voices, has branded Obama "inept, naïve and arrogant," as opposed, apparently, to the fatuous group of ideologues who relentlessly hammered the country into its current failed state.

There remains real concern about how the matters of job outsourcing and the influx of illegal workers will be addressed, and undercurrents of social division still exist. People can, for example, express bias without making overtly racist remarks. In the midst of his overblown critique, when Fred Thompson called Obama "arrogant", one wonders if he really meant to say "uppity." And a caller to Monday's Washington Journal conveyed what seemed to be her residual store of feelings about people of color when she said there must be "white people" who could do the jobs illegals are doing in her state of Alabama.

The Republican Party's "southern strategy" still seems to have a certain appeal for some voters which is probably why many of the states John McCain carried were in the Deep South. It may also help to explain why someone like Senator Specter began to feel uncomfortable under his party's banner - - along with his perception that he would be unlikely to make his way past a Republican primary challenger from the far right.