IT'S MY PARTY, TOO: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America
by Christine Todd Whitman
The Penguin Press, 256 pp., $24.95
THE HAMMER: TOM DELAY: God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress
by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid
Public Affairs, 306 pp., $26
Barry Goldwater's firebrand revolutionaries shocked the Republican Party in the 1960s with their uncompromising conservatism. But they look downright tame compared with the hard-right wing that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay leads today. Two new books unintentionally reinforce each other in describing this evolution of what used to be a Grand Old Party.
One is It's My Party, Too, a personal lament by the moderate former New Jersey governor and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman. The other is The Hammer, by Texas journalists Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, a detailed account of the emergence of DeLay and his Tammany Hall-style corruption of the modern Republican Party.
Whitman was there in 1964 when presidential nominee Barry Goldwater delivered his famous speech at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. The Arizona conservative thundered, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the defense of liberty is no virtue!"
That speech amounted to an early obituary for GOP moderates. While Goldwater was wildly cheered, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, the moderates' champion, was jeered. "I'll never forget the mayhem when he took the podium," writes Whitman. "The Goldwater partisans started booing and heckling him with such vehemence that they totally drowned him out."
Goldwater himself took issue with the intolerant tone his party acquired in his later years. But to no avail. Gone now are the GOP's days of championing limited government, fiscal discipline, and social tolerance. Today's party embraces profligate spending, culture war, economic injustice, and political corruption.
If there is a fundamental flaw in Whitman's book, it is that she is guilty of profound self-deception. The title of her book is simply wrong. The Republican Party is not her party; it's DeLay's. And it is not likely to return to the moderation of Whitman's youth in the foreseeable future.
There are a few remnants in today's GOP of the moderate Republicanism of Rockefeller and former New York Sen. Jacob Javits. But the federal agency Whitman headed would consider them an endangered species. In 1964, Javits, too, wrote a moderate manifesto for the GOP titled Order of
Battle: A Republican's Call to Reason. The trend then, and certainly later, ran against the centrist wing of the party. Today, moderates like Whitman are derisively known in the party not
as elephants but as RINOS (Republicans in name only).
Over the past 40 years, interrupted only by the relatively moderate Nixon-Ford interregnum, conservatives have solidified their power in the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan began his ascent with his celebrated address on behalf of Goldwater in 1964. Reagan's victory, Newt Gingrich's 1994 revolution, and George W. Bush's triumph were all landmarks on the way to right-wing dominance of the GOP.
A key factor in this ascension was the conservatives' alliance with the religious right, many of whose members are former Democrats. Whitman despises them. Labeling them "social fundamentalists," she argues that they are virtually an alien force that has invaded the party. "There is no doubt that the rise of the social fundamentalist wing of the GOP is a serious threat to the long-term competitiveness
of the Republican Party," she writes. "The social fundamentalists could even cause the party to lose
its hold on the Congress and the White House before the end of this decade."
But what the patrician Whitman largely ignores is the fact that the party's true agenda -- redistributing
wealth upward -- desperately needs a populist component. The culture war and values issues have mightily benefited the GOP by connecting with middle- and lower-income voters who might not share the party's economic agenda. Whitman decries the key agenda item of opposition to gay marriage. But it was the Republican establishment led by Bush, not Jerry Falwell or James Dobson, that exploited the marriage amendment as a wedge issue in the last election.
Yet the dirty little secret of the Republican Party is that, behind closed doors, its establishment has contempt for the religious right. The GOP illuminati do not leave their homes in the morning with a passion to prevent Jim from marrying John, or to save a fetus from an abortionist. Many have loved ones who are gay, or they may be gay themselves. The powers of the GOP are far more concerned
with eliminating the estate tax for multimillionaires than with halting the death of the unborn.
Here is a thought experiment: If you really believed that the sacred institution of marriage was in dire
jeopardy, would you make private Social Security accounts your top legislative priority?
The GOP bigwigs pay obeisance to the religious right because it provides the shock troops for their campaigns. The Republican establishment cynically manipulates the cultural issues because a party that is dedicated only to redistributing wealth upward has little chance of majority status. Once elected, Republicans reward the religious right with some crumbs, while the real goodies are handed out to their wealthy donors and corporate cronies.
Yet, except for briefly alluding to the influence of big money on environmental policy and Bush administration fiscal irresponsibility, Whitman barely pays any attention to the economic policy of the modern Republican Party. Yes, the religious right is divisive and even radical in its aims. But the Republicans' economic policies, such as seeking to completely dismantle the progressive tax
system, are just as outside the mainstream.
Whitman does recognize that the key to success in American politics is to capture the center. She writes, "Throughout the course of American history, whichever party most closely identifies with the mainstream of political thought -- which in the United States has always run down the middle of the road -- tends to have been the most successful."
The Republican who would most thoroughly reject Whitman's thesis about appealing to the vital center is DeLay, perhaps the most powerful congressional leader in the party today. In The Hammer, journalists Dubose and Reid colorfully chronicle DeLay's rise from a Houston pest
exterminator (who was infuriated by federal regulations regarding fire ants) to the Boss Tweed of Capitol Hill. The authors tell how a party animal known as "Hot Tub Tom" in the Texas Legislature became the tribune of the social fundamentalists on Capitol Hill.
If Whitman is the darling of social moderates, Delay, the congressional leader of the religious right, is the anti-Whitman. Whitman wants to reach out to the center; DeLay devoutly believes in the politics of the base. As the former EPA administrator, Whitman is concerned about sensible environmental protection. DeLay, the former exterminator, was prompted to run for Congress to destroy the very agency she led. In DeLay's old line of work, it was all about the scourge of bugs, and the EPA's regulation of a dangerous pesticide led him to believe the agency was the evil empire.
If Whitman represents the long declining Northeastern moderates, DeLay is the embodiment of the
ascendant Sunbelt hard-right wing of the GOP. And if Whitman is troubled by the role of the religious right in the party, Delay is overjoyed.
More than anyone else, DeLay embodies how Republicans have become corrupted by power;
Dubose and Reid ably chronicle the advance of his reign of cronyism. The story begins with the antiestablishment House Republican revolution of 1994, but it quickly spins into the gaudy tale of a
Tammany Hall operation that now far exceeds the hubris and arrogance of the previous Democratic congressional regime.
The many greedy side deals that have been struck in back rooms and dark alleys along the way are already the stuff of legend. Highlights include the infamous "K Street Project," the fixing of the House
Ethics Committee, and the alleged fleecing of various Indian tribes of tens of millions of dollars. Details of the reported Indian tribe lobbying scams are still dripping out in law enforcement investigations and Senate Indian Affairs Committee inquiries. There may yet be indictments
and significant political repercussions. For now, though, DeLay's castle stands.
Ultimately, Whitman and DeLay embody the tales of two parties. One is a Republican Party of fiscal
restraint, social tolerance, and ideological centrism. The other is a party of fiscal and ethical corruption, social intolerance, and ideological rigidity. Unfortunately, the Republicanism
of Whitman is long gone and the ideology of Delay dominates the once Grand Old Party.
