Dismissing Republicanus Rockefellus

TW: Another Ross Douthat piece and again interesting if flawed. I certainly concur with his suggestion that the Republicans need moderates, but I strongly disagree with his dismissiveness towards the so-called political genus- Republicanus Rockefellus. After all as I have mentioned previously I perceive myself an adjunct member of that genus. Even if it is fair to say the genus has truly been expunged from the Limbovian Republicus species and is now more accurately identified as the Democratus Rockefellus genus of the Obamian Democratus species.

I agree with Douthat in that not all moderates are created equal and someone like Specter may exhibit an exceptional degree of weasel even by the low standards of most politicians. But Douthat dismisses the entire old line Rockefeller Republican strain including contemporary members such as Snowe and Collins from Maine as essentially worthless closet liberals in part because they voted for the Obama stimulus package.

Does someone who votes for the Obama stimulus exhibit "intellectual vacuousness" as Douthat charges. Douthat appears to head down the path of asserting anyone not following the Hooverian cut spending amidst the worldwide demand contraction program is mentally challenged. In other words, supply side ideology at all costs.

Perhaps more distressingly for someone who to me appears to be a voice of reason within a species short of such voices, Douthat seems to dismiss the notion that a Republican Senator can vote in accordance with her own constituents. Maine and for that matter Pennsylvania are not South Carolina and Alabama. If Snowe and Collins want to retain their seats in deep blue Maine, they have to vote more progressively than most of the Republicans (the same is true obviously for the Ben Nelsons and Evan Bayhs of the world). This stuff is not rocket science.

From Douthat at NYT:
"...Political debates are often framed in binaries: Middle-of-the-roaders versus hard-liners, moderates versus ideologues. But American politics is more complicated than that. There are multiple rights and lefts, and multiple middles as well. So-called extremists can serve the country well. And self-conscious moderates can be intellectually bankrupt.

Specter himself is an almost too-perfect example of this point. The Republican Party will miss the Pennsylvania senator’s vote, but it’s hard to imagine anyone taking inspiration from such a consummately unprincipled figure.

The larger species to which he belonged — Republicanus Rockefellus, the endangered Northeastern moderate — likewise has little to offer a party in distress. Indeed, if you listen carefully to high-profile Yankee moderates like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Lincoln Chafee...

The Northeastern moderates tend to style themselves as fiscal conservatives, spinning a narrative in which they’re the victims of a doctrinaire social conservatism and its litmus tests. But many of them are just instinctive liberals who happen to have ancestral ties to the Grand Old Party. Chafee fit that bill; so did former Senator James Jeffords of Vermont, who amassed a distinctly left-wing record after he bolted the Republican Party in 2001 to become an “independent.” For that matter, so does the retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a New England native and Republican appointee who often gets described as a moderate, but boasts the jurisprudence of a reliable liberal.

Others, like Collins and Snowe and (until last week) Specter, are simply horse-traders and deal-cutters, whose willingness to cross party lines last month to vote for $800 billion dollars in deficit spending tells you most of what you need to know about their supposed fiscal conservatism. They’re politically savvy but intellectually vacuous. Their highest allegiance isn’t to limited government. It’s to meeting the party in power halfway, while making sure that the dollars keep flowing to their constituents back home..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/opinion/05douthat.html?ref=opinion