Whatever happened to Moderate Republicans?
Curiously enough, former Indiana Governor and present President of Perdue University Mitch Daniels has decided against running for an open Senate seat. “Maybe I can find ways to contribute that do not involve holding elective office. If not, there is so much more to life,” Daniels told POLITICO. “People obsessed with politics or driven by personal ambition sometimes have difficulty understanding those who are neither.” Or, in other words, he had no chance on winning the seat, despite near perfect name recognition in the state. Mitch is just too damn moderate for the Republican Party of 2023. Somewhere the Club for Growth is popping open bottle of the fizzy in celebration.
(Above: A Club for Growth ad against Daniels for the Senate)
With the exit of Daniels, who had considered running for a single six-year term, all momentum moves to Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), a Trump-aligned Congressman from northern Indiana, who has already been endorsed by Senators J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). Daniels said in a statement he would have focused on safety net programs, would not have run a divisive, Trumpist campaign and wanted to secure the border “without foreclosing on broader immigration reform.” Alas, it was not to be.
The Daniels exit is an interesting piece of news for a few reasons. One, the Daniels campaign statement (that never was) was a classic moderate Republican platform, a blast from the past, which is a little unusual for the Indiana Republican Party of 2023. Further, Daniels is not a MAGA Republican, so he was a bit of a curiosity. The Club for Growth — see the above ad — campaigned against him and probably influenced his decision greatly. Daniels could have made for an interesting intra-primary battle between a moderate Republican versus a far right Trumpist variety. But we will never get to see the results of that theoretical debate.
There really is no moderate Republican political force anymore in our national legislature. The average Senate Republican in the 116th Congress (2019-20) voted against his or her party 3.9% of the time, according to ProPublica. Sure, there are rarities like Romney and Murkowsky, but even they align themselves with the Trumpists at non-moderate rates. They cannot properly be construed as moderates proper anymore. Senator Mitt Romney voted against a majority of Senate Republicans 32 times (or, a timid 4.5%) in the 116th Congress. Let’s face it, reader: there are no more “moderate Republicans,” only libertarian-conservatives with red lines with regards to Trump. Moderates have essentially been absorbed into the (increasingly large) Democratic tent.
Which brings us to Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, the leader of the Main Street Caucus. The Atlantic has a big story out, by Russell Berman, about how this new Main Street Caucus — decidedly conservative, not moderate, definitely not Progressive — exists as an anti-Chaos party within the party. And they might be what saves the country from defaulting on its loans this summer:
Bacon is a leader of the faction of Republicans hoping to serve as a counterweight to the House Freedom Caucus and the far-right hard-liners who extracted all manner of concessions from McCarthy earlier this month in exchange for allowing him to become speaker. During the four days of voting that McCarthy endured, Bacon regularly held court with reporters outside the House chamber, castigating the holdouts as the “chaos caucus” and comparing them to the Taliban.
Bacon, a 59-year-old former Air Force commander first elected in 2016, styles himself as a pragmatist and a realist, and he is keenly aware of the sway that he and other like-minded Republicans could have. Indeed, he and his allies have already blocked two bills backed by some on the far right—including a measure to replace the federal income tax with a 30 percent sales tax—from coming up for a vote. But don’t call him a moderate. “I’d rather be called a conservative who gets things done,” Bacon told me.
In rejecting the moderate label, Bacon is no different than the other 221 Republicans now serving in the House, virtually all of whom describe themselves as some version of conservative.
What is this Main Street Caucus? Wholly without Progressivism, they might just allow Kevin McCarthy the leverage to do the right thing on the debt limit and not cave in to the anti-tax crazies. They are hyper-aggressive in their messaging on social media (“pro-growth, pro-energy security, and pro-workforce”). Also, there is the obsession with standing up to China, which, to be honest, selfish climbers like Bill Clinton never did. But is now the time to pick on China with threats of geopolitical machismo?
The Atlantic article is quite interesting in explaining the Caucus. It goes into how the Caucus served as a “protective guard” of McCarthy during the Speakership vote (?!). They are, unfortunately, very pro-McCarthy (Why? The man has no political principles), but also committed to using their collective leverage to try to save the country from the excesses of the Matt Gaetzes and Marjorie Taylor Greenes in the upcoming debt ceiling vote (Noteworthy, sort of). But as they are conservatives of 2023 and not moderates of, say, 2006, they will try their damnedest to force Biden to negotiate radical spending cuts in order to lift the borrowing limit (Not the least bit good for the poor). It is also highly unlikely that the Main Street Caucus will ever break off and team with Democrats, even though they are much more moderate than the “Chaos Caucus.”
Which leads me to ask, Whatever happened to the Republican Center? The decline of moderate Republicans began, with gusto, probably during the last days of the administration of Bush the Elder, the prototypical New England Yankee (by way of the 7th Congressional District in Texas). As I wrote back in 2009:
While Yankees have deep fiscal differences with the Democrats, their alliance during the Bush regime -- based on social liberalism, the majesty of Science, the power of Reason and realism in international affairs -- was quite amiable. Yankee Republicans and Democrats became strange bedfellows during the darkest days of the Bush Presidency in the same way that neglected spouses tend to stray when taken for granted and then find themselves courted by someone of similar disappointments. Elective affinities.
Bush the Elder — Yankee moderate — did great things with Democrats. Yankee Republicans were political cousins to the Rockefeller Republicans, another extinct breed that used to roam the Northeast corridor. “A ‘Rockefeller Republican’ means fiscal prudence can coexist with a social conscience," Gregory Clay in Inside Sources reminds us. "... Rockefeller, Gerald Ford’s vice president, supported civil rights for Black Americans, rejected conservative Barry Goldwater, supported cultural liberalism, and advocated investment in national health care, higher education and labor unions." Also, Nixon, Ford's predecessor, initiated the Environmental Protection Agency and even seriously explored a Guaranteed Minimum Income. Libertarians believe that we as a people are only as great as our Fountainheads; Moderates — and, of course, Progressives — believe that our prosperity should be used to raise the quality of life of the least of us, particularly in times of surplus.
In other words, there was such a time when a significant amount of Republicans believed in the power of Government for Good. Nowadays, however, the “Chaos Caucus,” the “Freedom Caucus” and the “Tea Party” that narrowly control Congress have obliterated that Moderate wing. They are at present obsessed with shrinking American government down to a convenient size so that they can strangle it to death in the bathtub. It is a significant and decidedly Libertarian victory. Ayn Rand would be proud! The death knell for the Moderate Republican was probably the moment Bush the Elder — in 1988 — uttered the words, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” It was a promise no moderate should ever have made as the winds of Fortune have a way of unpredictably shifting.
Bush won the Presidency that year. Then, in his first year, he raised taxes as events came up during his Presidency that merited such a decision. He cooperated with the then-Democrat controlled Congress to clean up the aftermath of the (bipartisan) savings and loan crisis. “Ending that crisis, which festered through the Reagan years, ultimately cost financial institutions and taxpayers $481 billion,” John Harwood wrote for CNBC. “But it protected the savings of 25 million customers at insolvent S & Ls.” In defying conservatives, Bush the Elder altered the landscape of American politics forever, earning the white-hot wraith of the Club for Growth, until the day he died.
It is deeply ironic that the tax increases of George Bush the Elder — proto-Moderate Republican — ultimately helped result in the budget surpluses of the Clinton era. History has not been kind to the old man, to say the least. Bush the Elder has yet to get any credit for his courage to raise taxes and the resulting strengthening of our economy in subsequent years, even if they were deeply unpopular with his base and led, not inconsequentially, to his electoral loss. His successor, Bill Clinton, took full advantage of the good fiscal stewardship of his predecessor.
The Bush, 41 campaign postmortem is as insightful as it is painful to read, in retrospect. From Time magazine:
Had Bush honestly said, as did Dukakis, that he would raise taxes only as a ‘’last resort,’’ the country might have had a genuine debate.
Why didn’t he? Why, instead, did Bush voluntarily saddle himself with a seemingly intractable position? Roger Ailes, the media magician who crafted the Bush ads that permitted Dukakis no quarter, was one of the architects of “Read my lips.’’ The “point is really pretty simple,’’ says Ailes. “At the time, the race was close, and Dukakis had given us an opening by talking about taxes as a last resort. Now, let me tell you, the people believe politicians are going to raise their taxes. All the polls confirm this. So they’re interested in figuring out which candidate is really going to do it only as a last resort.
“When a guy like Dukakis says what he says, no matter how responsible it may be, the people take it to mean that he’ll raise taxes as a first resort. What you have to say to get on top of an issue like taxes is that you’d rather see your kids burned in the street than raise them. It wasn’t the easiest case to make to Bush, but he understood the stakes. We did what we had to do.’’
Enter: Roger Ailes; Exit: Republican Moderates. Another irony of history is how Roger Ailes, who went on to build Fox News, crafted the “Read my Lips” push and profited, mightily, from the backlash. Along with Grover Norquist, who is still relevant in the Republican Party today, even as the Moderates are relegated to remote antiquity.
Opinion: How Russia outmaneuvered the US in Africa (CNN)
Trump’s 2024 fail: Struggling campaign raised less after presidential announcement than before. (Salon)
“Trump’s more outspoken critics, for their part, have sought to explicate what exactly makes DeSantis so attractive. Many believe he’s smarter and more disciplined than Trump. Some note that DeSantis quite masterfully frames his crusades in religious, rather than political, terms. In the words of Rodney Kennedy, writing for Baptist News Global, ‘He fights like an evangelical culture war preacher.… Watching [him] fill the boards of universities with conservative trustees reads like a page out of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.’” (TNR)
Could America Raise Teachers’ Salaries to $60,000 a Year? (Slate)
China’s box office surges as local films lead $1B in sales post lifting of zero-COVID rules (SEMAFOR)
“Given that the DCU is still very much in its earliest stages, the execs were light on some specifics: No directors have been attached to any projects (although they said they’re “very close” on signing at least a couple), and no actors are attached, either. The exception is Viola Davis, who will star in the HBO Max series ‘Waller’ as the amoral, self-imposed superintendent of the DC universe, Amanda Waller.” (Variety)
“‘One of our strategies is to take our diamond characters, which is Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and we use them to prop up other characters that people don’t know,’ explained Gunn.” (THR)
So you’re a journalist that’s been laid off (Context Collapse)