EDITORIAL:Paladino gives GOP reason to reflect on its future
Republicans in New York, as elsewhere this election season, seem destined to relearn the ancient lesson that whoever the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
The tea party movement demonstrates just how hazardous explosive anger can be, and Carl Paladino exemplifies the risks. An outsider whose campaign for the Republican gubernatorial nomination was fueled by anger, he defeated the establishment candidate in a state that would seem tailor-made for tea party ire. New York, after all, has the nation's heaviest tax burden and legislative districts carefully arranged so that incumbents rarely lose - a combination that has given new meaning to the term "taxation without representation."
Yet Paladino will probably lose in November, at least judging by political polls, and more conventional Republicans risk being dragged down with him. Revolutions are notorious for eating their children, but the tea party revolution seems bent on devouring its parents, the established Republicans who have been moving the party ever-rightward for decades.
Democrats should take little comfort in this. Tea party victories, however alarming, could lead to civil war within the Republican Party. Tea party defeats could propel the GOP into the political wilderness for years. Either way, someone will have to find a way to rebuild a pragmatic, engaged GOP - an entity that's been missing in action for longer than the tea party has been in the news. Indeed, the best thing about the tea party may be that, by wrecking the Republican status quo, it could force a serious debate about what the Grand Old Party ought to become.
The GOP desperately needs such a discussion. The tea party, after all, did not descend from outer space. It's the natural outcome of a long process in the Republican Party, a process of growing extremism that probably dates to Barry Goldwater's famous acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 1964, at which he proclaimed that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." The process was fueled by an influx of Southern whites who deserted the Democrats over the civil rights legislation of that era. Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush each helped propel the process, and the party soon formed the insular habit of playing more and more to its base, a habit encouraged by gerrymandering, the rise of Christian fundamentalism and the Internet.
The Democrats had this discussion during the course of civil rights and Vietnam, culminating in the crushing rejection of George McGovern by voters turned off by radical excesses swirling around him. The party only regained its grip on power with the rise of moderate Bill Clinton.
Goldwater Republicanism was always better as a critique than a governing credo, and in office the party of limited government and fiscal restraint found it easier to cut taxes than reduce spending - making it the party of runaway deficits and shameless hypocrisy. At the national level, in opposition, it has retreated into cynical obstructionism, confining itself to rejecting Democratic initiatives. But here in New York, where Theodore Roosevelt firmly rooted a party based on a culture of business practices that Nelson Rockefeller grew into one with a big tent, the GOP evolved into the party of Alfonse D'Amato and George Pataki and Joe Bruno. It joined with Democrats in making unaffordable pension promises to public employees while sharing in Albany's pernicious culture of cronyism and back-scratching.
Political movements, like religions, are subject to periodic reformations aimed at restoring some earlier state of purity, and these uprisings are rarely sponsored by conventional people. Paladino, for example, talks about cleaning up Albany with a baseball bat, has forwarded racist and pornographic e-mail, and suggested putting welfare recipients in state prisons. Christine O'Donnell, Delaware's new GOP Senate nominee, emerges from a past littered with financial problems and a zealous concern with sexual purity. In Nevada, GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle has proposed eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency, although she's backpedaled from the idea that Social Security be phased out.
But the tea party movement has the virtue of making us ask what the Republican Party should be - and to what extent ideological purity can survive the real world. Tea party candidates say lots of things, but the movement's core message of fiscal responsibility has understandable appeal - and might resonate more widely with voters if it weren't being delivered by such a polarizing retinue of messengers.
Fiscal responsibility doesn't necessarily mean cutting taxes; it means spending when you have to, but not more than you can afford. It means understanding that government can't solve every problem, but must tackle some - and recognizing that without addressing politically sensitive entitlements, our fiscal house will never be put in order.
Republicans have paid lip service to some of these ideas for years and now run the risk of becoming nothing more than a permanently irascible minority. If we are lucky, though, the tea party movement will prove a useful goad to the party that aspires to be about fiscal prudence and smaller government. By embracing the ideals that once defined it, then the GOP could play its vital role in our democracy. hN
