The Vital Center

Ann Coulter made news at the 2007 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) by calling John Edwards a vulgar term for a homosexual. At CPAC 2009, Rush Limbaugh urged conservatives to “stamp out” those in their movement who thought the era of Ronald Reagan had ended.

Bottom scraped? Not quite. Next week, Glenn Beck will headline the 2010 CPAC.

It’s been a decade since I attended a CPAC, but back in the 1980s I used to plan my year around them. They gathered more ambitious Republican politicians in one place than any other event except a party convention. It was at a CPAC that I first heard Newt Gingrich speak and saw Reagan in the flesh.

The gathering did something very important for conservatives: it introduced them to one another.

CPAC was launched in 1974 by activists at the American Conservative Union at a time when the Republican Party was still dominated by its moderate wing. CPAC activists helped transform the conservative intellectual movement into a political reality — one of the great organizational achievements of American politics.

Conservatism’s achievement was matched by an equally epic failure: the implosion of the GOP moderates. The GOP endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment in every one of its party platforms from 1940 through ‘76. From 1970 to ‘74, Richard Nixon signed more environmental legislation than any other President in U.S. history. In ‘74, Nixon advanced a proposal for universal health coverage — decades before those offered by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Today that brand of moderate Republicanism remains a force in state and local politics. At the national level, however, it is nearly extinct. Northeastern or California Republicans who aspire to national office often feel compelled to reinvent themselves: see Romney, Mitt, career of.

Yes, when unemployment exceeds 10%, the GOP can elect a Senator in Massachusetts. But what happens when the economy returns to more normal conditions? The Republicans’ recent electoral successes do not overcome 20 years of GOP difficulty appealing to women, young people and the college-educated. It wins elections by accumulating a huge supermajority in one demographic: whites, especially white men, who are not poor but who have not finished college. That’s a big slice of America, but it’s a shrinking slice.

Moderate Republicans sometimes blame conservatives for edging them out of public life. But politics is a competitive business. If the conservatives bring more voters, more dollars and more intensity to the table, well, of course they get the bigger chair. They’ve earned it. The fault is with the moderates themselves. The moderate tendency still exists in the GOP. It expresses itself in quiet dealmaking in the halls of the Senate, in pragmatic decision-making in state capitals. But when challenged, the moderate tendency goes mute.

Who’ll speak up for Utah Senator Robert Bennett, chief co-sponsor of the Wyden-Bennett health proposal that was the best hope for truly market-oriented health care reform? Bennett now faces a serious nomination challenge. Once the excitement of Massachusetts subsides, who’ll champion the non-CPAC-style Senators on the ballot in 2010: Mark Kirk from Illinois or Rob Portman from Ohio?

Members of this new miniwave of moderate Republicans support national defense, are eager to cut other federal spending and are hostile to Democratic attempts to reregulate the economy. But these newcomers also understand that the health care status quo is unsustainable. They seek a middle way on abortion and gay rights. They want to protect the environment. And they eschew the inflammatory rhetoric of the tea parties and town halls. We don’t even have a name for this kind of Republican. In the 1980s, we called them Gypsy Moths, after a pest prevalent in the Northeast. But this new strain is not found only in the Northeast, and it is not a pest. It represents the best home for a center-right politics of the future.

If moderates are to flourish, they need an infrastructure to support them. The Democrats worked hard in the 1980s and ’90s to showcase their centrist governors. They invented superdelegates to balance the left-wing activists who had saddled them with unelectable presidential candidates. They altered their primary schedule to enhance the clout of must-win states in the West and border South.

Republicans can learn from these examples. But first they have to say it loud and say it proud: The time has come to restore the center to the center-right coalition. Maybe it’s even time to start a new convention so the centrists can meet face to face at least once a year, just as their conservative colleagues do. CenPAC, anyone?

Originally published in Time on February 15, 2010