Desperately Seeking Moderates

TW: This is the back half of the Ross Douthat piece about which I wrote the other day. Here Douthat focuses on the "moderates" he would like to see in the Republican party. I think he is right on in suggesting the Republicans emulate some of the Democratic 1980's initiatives which put meat on the bones of the centrist wing of the Democratic party.

I agree Jack Kemp was an innovative thinker in that he did not merely hew the existing party line at all times. On the other hand, the late Kemp was as an ideologically rigid supply-sider (Lafferite, cut tax rates and tax revenue will increase) as their was in the party. Kemp also did not challenge the cultural conservative orthodoxy of his party either. To get true innovation as Douthat suggests, will require folks within the Republican party to challenge some of the rigid orthodoxies which bind the party currently to its own interest groups narrow agendas.

From Douthat at NYT:
"This doesn’t mean that Republicans should be happy that their tent is shrinking toward political irrelevance. But more Lincoln Chafees and Olympia Snowes aren’t the answer. What’s required instead is a better sort of centrist. The Reagan-era wave of Republican policy innovation — embodied, among others, by the late Jack Kemp — has calcified in much the same way that liberalism calcified a generation ago. And so in place of hacks and deal-makers, the Republican Party needs its own version of the neoliberals and New Democrats — reform-minded politicians like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, who helped the Democratic Party recover from the Reagan era, instead of just surviving it.

Hart, Clinton and their peers were critical of their own side’s orthodoxies, but you couldn’t imagine them jumping ship to join the Republicans. They were deeply rooted in liberal politics, but they had definite ideas for how the Democratic Party could learn from its mistakes, and from its opponents, in order to further liberalism’s deeper goals.

No equivalent faction — rooted in conservatism, but eager for innovation — exists in the Republican Party today...Maybe it can bubble up outside the Beltway — from swing-state governors like Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty, or reformists in deep-red states, like the much-touted Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Utah’s Jon Huntsman. But to succeed, such a faction will have to represent something legitimately new in right-of-center politics. It can’t sound like Rush Limbaugh — but it can’t sound like Arlen Specter either."