Andrew Samwick Wants to Take Back His Party

From Andrew Samwick:

Whitman Republicans? | Capital Gains and Games: On Thursday, Governor Christie Todd Whitman visited campus. She may be the only unabashed Rockefeller Republican with any political prominence today.... She articulated as well as anyone I've heard recently the case for decentralized, responsible, and effective government. If she were running this year, she would have my vote.

So I started to wonder whether she might be a viable candidate.... [W]hat about 2012 against a Democratic incumbent? She seems to have recovered from her frustrating years at the EPA and has parlayed her success with It's My Party, Too into a PAC, which has now merged with the Republican Leadership Council (an odd name for a centrist organization given today's Republican leadership at the national level). She's clearly still active. Maybe the opportunity will present itself.

Comments

[Ron Sturtevant-Stuart]

I'm sorry, but at this point in time, I can't imagine a way for any republican who has been associated with the Bush administration to have established why they deserve to be dog catcher. Did I miss a senior member being fired because they failed to follow directions from the white house?
Did I miss a major press conference where major scandals were disclosed? No, of course not...

[a]

Christie Todd Whitman? Isn't she the idiot who used the New Jersey pension fund to speculate on the stock market which ended up losing billions for the state of New Jersey? Gosh, when it's possible to go from failure like that to the President of the U.S., it makes finanical CEOs in America look downright underpaid.

[Ezekay]

How soon some of us forget! Considering all the people Rockefeller had killed in Attica, I guess she is a Rockefeller Republican: She was running the EPA and lied to the inhabitants of lower Manhattan that the air was quite safe after 9/11. Presumably their lives and health were an acceptable Rockefeller Republican price for getting Wall St. running immediately and keeping New York City at the center of world finance.

[Ezekay]

How soon some of us forget! Considering all the people Rockefeller had killed in Attica, I guess she is a Rockefeller Republican: She was running the EPA and lied to the inhabitants of lower Manhattan that the air was quite safe after 9/11. Presumably their lives and health were an acceptable Rockefeller Republican price for getting Wall St. running immediately and keeping New York City at the center of world finance.

[John Emerson]

Like everyone else who worked for the Bush Administration, her credibility has been destroyed:

"Whitman appeared twice in New York City after the September 11 attacks to inform New Yorkers that the toxins released by the attacks posed no threat to their health. On September 18 the EPA released a report in which Whitman said, "Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C. that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink." She also said, "The concentrations are such that they don't pose a health hazard...We're going to make sure everybody is safe."Later, a 2003 report by the EPA's inspector general determined that such assurances were misleading, because the EPA "did not have sufficient data and analyses" to justify the assertions when they were made. A report in July 2003 from the EPA's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response gave extensive documentation supporting many of the inspector general's conclusions, and carried some of them still further.Further, the report found that the White House had "convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones" by having the National Security Council control EPA communications after the September 11 attacks."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Todd_Whitman

The pity I have for rational Republicans is overwhelmed by my need to gloat. For 27+ years they've been enabling a destructive political movement while making quiet peeps of dismay in the privacy of their homes.

I'd love to see the Republican Party dwindle to a fanatical, no-nothing rump while the centrist Democrats fought it out with the liberal Democrats.

[piotr]

"Christie Todd Whitman? Isn't she the idiot who used the New Jersey pension fund to speculate on the stock market..."

Christie is not an idiot by an archetype of a moderate Republican. In their case moderation consists of mixing very reasonable ideas, say, that giving healthcare to poor children is good, with something wild, like total fiscal irresponsibility. Or balancing the support of reproductive rights by voting to approve the most retrograde judicial nominees.

In essense, their moderation is in following reason in moderation, and fiscal responsibility is very hard to fit in such a package.

In the particular case of Whitman, fiscal irresponsibility was the whole rationale of her gubernatorial campaign. A lesser woman would renege on her campaign promises.

[christofay]

Christie Todd Whitman, a benefactor of the Whitman Sampler fortune

life is like a box of bon bons for me

[David Lloyd-Jones]

.

Problem is, America doesn't need a Rockefeller Republican party. Rockefeller (a midget, incidentally, who was so rich that photographers always shot him on their knees, so that he looked five foot six) is the guy *most* responsible for America's insane drug policies, which have continued America's historically high crime rates from Prohibition on into the present generation. He's also the guy who looted the joint clean to pay for his ridiculous, uh, rock installation on which albany's government perches. What a fool!

What America needs is a good healthy two or three party system. At the conservative end of the spectrum it would be good to have a dependable policy-oriented conservative party: the Democratic Leadership Council and the Clintons supply a good model of what this might look like.

Then it needs a functioning party representative of the general interests of the people. I don't know that America has ever seen such a thing at the Federal level, but the German Social Democrats and some of the State Democratic parties suggest what this might look like.

It might be nice to dream of a Third Party, a Ginger Group, similar to Canada's socialist NDP, though that's not likely to emerge under present American laws. A Supreme Court ruling to the effect that present day Congressional Districting methods are unconstitutional -- equal protection of the laws, or what-the-hell, cruel and unusual punishment :-) -- might help things along a little.

What you would hope for, then, is long term dominance by the social democratic group; their occasional dependence for legislative majorities upon the Ginger Group when they got too lazy, and a once in a generation house cleaning by the conservative Clintonistas, when the Natural governing Party gets too arrogant.

There's a name for all this: it's the Canadian Model, and it works very well, thank you very much.

.

[Maynard Handley]

Let's ignore all the floors in Whitman, let's just concentrate on the basic premise here.

"She may be the only unabashed Rockefeller Republican with any political prominence today."

So, even though the man admits that lunatics still control the GOP, we should vote for its single solitary supposedly sane member as president. Why exactly? Has Samwick forgotten that the US is not a monarchy?
If, as he concedes, the party remains in thrall to the nutjobs, will those people not still have major control of the country? WIll they not be the ones providing personnel and advice?

Or does Samwick have in mind some bizarre scenario whereby someone campaigns for president as a member of the Republican party and then, the moment they are in power, draws their entire collection of staff, advisors and so on from the Democratic party?

[Valuethinker]

This is a bit like being romantic for the days of Lyndon Johnson, or the 'yellow dog' southern Democrats (yes, the racist ones too).

Ernest Hollings will never rise again for the Democrats. (in fact, laterly, Fritz Hollings was elected with something like 35% of the white vote, and 95% of the black vote-- a last Democrat in probably the staunchest Republican state in the Union other than Alabama).

And neither will north eastern liberal Republicans for the Republicans. Their power base is southerners, evangelicals, conservatives (with a libertarian fringe out west, but note how Ron Paul pandered to the nativist right). The balance of power in the electoral college, as well as the population balance of the USA, has shifted decisively south, and south by southwest. The Republicans are the party of the southern exurbs, not Connecticut.

There is a word for an old style liberal Republican-- environmentally aware, fiscally and socially moderate :

she is now called a Democrat. Think Sibelius in Kansas.

Bobbie Jindal is a closer guess for 'new Republican'.

[Valuethinker]

Whitman is also a lobbyist for the nuclear industry along with 'Greenpeace founder' Patrick Moore (but Moore broke with Greenpeace over 20 years ago).

There is an environmental case for the nuclear industry, but its economic case is dependent on large US government subsidies (even with a tradeable carbon permit system).

You could argue being in bed with big business is same old (for both parties, but especially for Republicans) liberal Republican.

People who are nostalgic for liberal Republicanism tend to be, in reality, Democrats, I think.

the political polarization is much greater now, and just as southern whites have largely left the Democratic party (at least affluent southern whites) so liberal northeasterners have largely left the Republicans.