RSS Feed Menu“The real divisions today in the Republican Party,” according to Jim Leach, “are not between liberals, moderates and conservatives; they are between pragmatists and ideologues.” Leach – now President Obama’s nominee to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, made that comment in the 1980s when he was a Republican Congressman from Iowa, but it still defines his politics today. Prior to his election defeat in 2006, Leach was one of the most prominent moderate, pragmatic Republicans in the House. He gave the GOP an aura of reasonableness and integrity that helped keep moderates in the party who might otherwise have been put off by the antics of the New Right. The Obama administration’s pick of Leach – like its appointments of other Republican moderates including Jon Huntsman as ambassador to China, Ray LaHood as Transportation secretary, and John McHugh as Army secretary – makes the Democratic Party more attractive to moderates, particularly moderates who once voted Republican. It is one more step in the administration’s long-term project of co-opting the moderate, non-ideological Republican position.
Conservatives will argue that there’s no such thing as a distinct moderate Republican position, and that Leach and his cohorts were really liberal Democrats all along. In this respect they resemble particularly tragic cases of colorblindness, whose sufferers are not only unable to see colors but also any shade of grey.
Leach was long-time chairman of the Ripon Society, the most durable and influential moderate Republican organization. As the head of Ripon, he articulated a position that was different from both conservatism and liberalism, though it included some elements of each. Leach’s major policy statement, his 1981 “Moderate Manifesto,” was different from Democratic liberalism in that it called for radical decentralization, a breakup of the federal bureaucracy and significant cuts in federal employment and spending. But Leach’s program differed from conservative Republicanism in favoring environmentalism, civil rights, and deficit reduction, and opposing corporate subsidy and military bloat.
As a leader of the “gypsy moth” faction in the House – Northeastern and Midwestern moderate Republicans opposed to the Southern “boll weevil” Democrats – Leach also pointed out that the Republican “Southern Strategy” that had been pursued since the 1960s was costing the GOP support outside the Sunbelt. It wasn’t merely that the rest of the country opposed the raw, polarizing conservatism of the region (although that was true). Heavy spending on the Sunbelt’s military bases and public works, along with subsidies to the region’s agricultural and extractive industries, sacrificed the priorities of other parts of the country.
Moderation is a temperament as well as a political stance, and Leach exemplified what many Americans liked to think of as good behavior in politics. As a Foreign Service officer during the early 1970s, he had resigned on principle to protest Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” As a Congressman, he stood for transparency in political funding and decency in campaigning, even when this cost him politically, as it did in his last election when he disavowed the GOP’s negative campaigning against his Democratic opponent. He had long believed that “the biggest block of voters in America are moderate and there is no people in the world more averse to the extremes than the American body politic.”
During the culture wars of the early ‘90s, Leach was one of the moderate Republicans who stood up against attempts to paint the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities as bastions of liberal elitism and taxpayer-subsidized pornography.
Leach could now burnish President Obama’s moderate credentials if the new humanities chairman takes on the political correctness and ideological blinders of leftist academics. Entire fields of intellectual endeavor have been banished from the liberal arts offerings at many universities. Within the discipline of history, for example, an undergraduate may search in vain at most institutions for courses on political, diplomatic, military, intellectual, and educational history, which have been dismissed as uninteresting and irrelevant by the dominant social, ethnic, and cultural historians.
Obama’s nomination of Leach also shows that the President is willing to take heat from his left wing. Many on the left blame the current economic crisis on the former chairman of the House Banking Committee for his role in deregulating derivatives and his co-sponsorship of the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which abolished the Glass-Steagal Act’s separation of commercial and investment banking.
It’s interesting that while one hears a lot of talk about RINOs, one rarely hears about DINOs. Politicians of all stripes used to remember the value of co-opting potential opponents and turning them into allies by giving them sufficient reason to go along with a program they don’t completely agree with. Obama’s appointment of Leach and other moderate Republicans shows he still remembers this key political principle.
balconesfault // Jun 5, 2009 at 9:35 am
“It is one more step in the administrations long-term project of co-opting the moderate, non-ideological Republican position.”Co-opting? Or incorporating?I think that the point of Obama’s early on meetings with conservative pundits, and Republican politicians, was to figure out who would work with him and improve his agenda, and who was going to oppose his agenda no matter what.I think we’re seeing the results of those meetings.Personally, I don’t see these people as abandoning conservatism, or as being so star-struck as to completely adopt everything Obama wants without any input from them. Increasingly, Obama has shown that his primary goal is just to get things done that he promised during the campaign … much to the consternation even of some groups on the left, such as the strident civil libertarians and pacifists who expect every excess from the Bush years to immediately be rolled back.And that, I’m sure, is why these Republicans have felt there is value in joining his adminstration.
Chrisc23 // Jun 7, 2009 at 9:58 pm
I scratch your back, if you scratch my back. If Governor Huntsman makes President Obama look good now, President Obama will make sure Governor Huntsman looks good later. I see that where I live all the time. And that is politics. “bipartisanship”
Churl // Jun 8, 2009 at 1:02 am
Co-opt or incorporate all you want, but don’t forget this wisdom “It’s the economy, stupid”. Then see the graph here:http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/06/shock-big-government-spending-programs.html
midcon // Jun 8, 2009 at 6:04 am
While I believe that Obama’s resume is pretty thin, I do not mistake that for lack of intelligence and common sense.As the ire of the far left rises to equal that of the far right, it is evident that he will not be bound by party labels, platform and ideology.
RightNow09 // Jun 8, 2009 at 6:12 am
“antics of the New Right”?”Conservatives will argue that theres no such thing as a distinct moderate Republican position, and that Leach and his cohorts were really liberal Democrats all along”?These are broad brush strokes usually committed by super-partisans like Limbaugh, Maddow, Hannity, Olbermann, etc. Rather disappointing, I must say.This conservative Republican liked Leach, truly appreciates moderates in the party, but still supports a conservative GOP (albeit a flexible and pragmatic one) to counter the Democratic Party, which is indeed far more left than conservatives like Mr. Leach, Hugh, or LaHood.We definitely agree on some things (perhaps many), but I do believe you’re view of the conservative world is mistaken. Pragmatists don’t necessarily need to be moderates. In fact, conservative pragmatists not only existthey are what brought the party its brightest days and biggest successes. Think about it.Overall, Leach is a fine choice. But he doesnt make Obama any less liberal. And conservatives (and I consider this site a conservative, not moderate, blog) are just not what you claim them (at least all of them) to be.
mpolito // Jun 8, 2009 at 6:12 am
The fact that Leach lost proves something. It demonstrates that you can as moderate as anything, but if the voters want a Dem, they’ll vote for the real thing. Even these raging moderates cannot weather a Democratic tide, like the ones in 2006 and 2008.
ottovbvs // Jun 8, 2009 at 6:43 am
This is another bit of nifty tactical footwork by the president that enables him to burnish his centerist credentials which in many ways are legitimate. He is a centrist but what many on the right won’t recognize is that for a host of reasons the center has shifted left. Wherever you look the central theories of conservative governance over the past 25 years are perceived to have failed either because the ideas on which they were based were flawed or because of incompetence and ideology. You even have noted conservative intellectuals like Judge Richard Posner writing books about “The failure of capitalism.” This has coincided with substantial demographic changes and the full flowering of two well known Republican strategies which were perceived as awfully clever at the time they were conceived but have ultimately led the party into a canyon. The Southern strategy and Polarization using wedge issues, mainly social, have turned the GOP into a party that no longer reflects the demographic makeup of the country or the social mores that increasingly prevail. The Democrats were always a somewhat wider coalition than the Republicans, that’s basically why they have traditionally been more fractious. The alliance between Southern Democrats and Northern liberals being an extreme example of this principle. Polarization and the Southern strategy have essentially put all the conservatives where they really belong in the Republican party but in the process has made their electoral coalition much narrower both demographically and geographically. The Democrats have remained more open are basically more in tune with the reality of America in 2009. These are the basic realities of the political landscape and there’s a mountain of data to support it. The challenge for conservatives is how do they make the adjustment to this new reality. To start with you have to recognize it exists. At the moment there is little propensity to do that…..hence the situation in which the Republican party currently finds itself.
ottovbvs // Jun 8, 2009 at 6:52 am
mpolito wrote 31 minutes ago”Even these raging moderates cannot weather a Democratic tide, like the ones in 2006 and 2008.”…….What was really significant was they couldn’t weather a Democratic surge even though they were sitting in seats which had been gerrymandered to protect them. What this sort of move by Obama does is consolidate the shift that has occurred. Repeat this effect dozens of times and what you create is the Democratic Blue Wall.
sinz54 // Jun 8, 2009 at 7:27 am
Jim Leach was so liberal that the DailyKOS admired him. They didn’t work to knock him out because they disagreed with his philosophy. On the contrary, they deeply regretted having to knock him out, but believed it was necessary for numbers–to get a strongly liberal Congress.These Dem activists realized that the best low-hanging fruit was in moderate or even liberal areas of the country, where Republican moderates were incumbents but could be defeated if those areas tipped even further left thanks to Bush fatigue. Christopher Shays was another one of those.But that works both ways. Those areas could elect moderate Republicans again–if those areas sour on Dem management of the nation.
sinz54 // Jun 8, 2009 at 7:34 am
mpolito: Those areas didn’t want a Dem. Christopher Shays, a moderate Republican, was in Congress for over 20 years, through 10 elections (including those that elected Clinton). In 2008, Christopher Shays lost due to the general disgust with Bush and with Obama’s big win. If Bush had been more popular, Shays would still have his seat.It would be a terrible mistake if we just wrote off his district as unwinnable from now on. The result would be the GOP huddling even more inside its cocoon of socially conservative districts.How can the GOP ever gain back its clout in Congress if it doesn’t start to win back the districts it lost?Above all else, we have to drop this “Good riddance” meme.
Churl // Jun 8, 2009 at 7:38 am
While we fret here about the ascendancy of left wing ideas here, it is instructive to take a look at recent events across the pond. The British Labour party has just taken a whacking of historic proportions in local and European Parliament elections. There might be a lesson or two for us in this if we study the background.http://blogs.ft.com/westminster/2009/06/how-bad-worse-than-ramsay-macdonald/
Churl // Jun 8, 2009 at 7:41 am
In other matters, any bets on when Mr. Kabaservice will start whooping for Tim Pawlenty, the Harold Stassen in Waiting?
MSheridan // Jun 8, 2009 at 8:58 am
I wouldn’t go so far as to call Jim Leach a liberal, but otherwise I think sinz54 is correct about how and why he lost re-election. As for him eliciting praise on DailyKos, a site I visit and post at far more often than this one, there are several Republican pols, ex-pols, and appointed officials who are well thought of there by at least some of the site’s readers. Just off the top of my head, Lugar, Hagel, Snowe, Collins, and Hatch all have gotten complimentary mention, as has Robert Gates. The recent death of Jack Kemp produced a diary post: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/2/727258/-Breaking:-Jack-Kemp-Dead, that elicited 532 comments, most commonly versions of “I didn’t agree with all his politics, but he was a good man.” Because there IS such a widespread difference of opinion on the Left, no politician (including President Obama) is universally liked on DailyKos but it would be incorrect to assume that only liberals are admired there. I remember reading the words of praise that Markos Moulitsas, eponymous site owner, had for Daniel Larison, a writer at The American Conservative. Because of that, out of curiosity I started visiting that magazine’s website and have several times been favorably impressed. One thing that makes DailyKos interesting to me is that diary posters there range the political spectrum from a few people so far to the Left that they match the caricatured stereotype of liberals held by the Right to a few stubborn libertarians and Blue Dog Dems who are politically on the Right side of center, even if not so much as the current Republican party. I think it’s regrettable that the Republican Party no longer seems to have such diversity in its ranks.
ChristianMiller // Jun 8, 2009 at 12:11 pm
“It is one more step in the administrations long-term project of co-opting the moderate, non-ideological Republican position.”My God you guys are so stuck on the “who” and not the “what”. Let me get this straight. Person X identifies himself as a Republican. Because the author agrees with his positions he is deemed “reasonable” while those who disagree are unreasonable by implication and whose efforts are disparaged as “antics”. Person X after being DEFEATED gets an offer from Obama for a job. He takes the job because he has nothing better to do. The position is not high profile in the least either and we have yet to see this moderate make any headway in reforming the NEH. This is supposed to elevate Obama’s credentials as a moderate or centrist, as though everything else is happening in a vacuum. OK got it.