Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Quote of the Day

Sen. Olympia Snowe's (R-Maine) NYT's op-ed column on the Republican loss of Arlen Specter:
In my view, the political environment that has made it inhospitable for a moderate Republican in Pennsylvania is a microcosm of a deeper, more pervasive problem that places our party in jeopardy nationwide.

I have said that, without question, we cannot prevail as a party without conservatives. But it is equally certain we cannot prevail in the future without moderates.
[...]
There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities — indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.
A moderate Republican Senator giving voice to the on-going death spiral of the Republican Party.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Neither party can succeed without a broad tent. The question is will the Republican Party hold too long to the ultra conservative agenda that does not have broad support. Will the Democratic Party that seems now to have a broader tent holding conservatives, moderates and liberals, be able to sustain the middle and the extremes? With 60 votes, it is up to the Democrats to show how to whip it together for the big ticket items, while allowing a wide variance other issues? We will see. As for now the RNC is lost as the result of its own missteps and misadventures.

matt said...

as a republican senator who is partially responsible for the collapse of the party, inasmuch as she was a republican senator during the collapse, Olympia Snowe's opinion matters little to conservatives.

just as the democrat success was a result of republican failure, so too shall the re-emergence of the republicans, whenever that is. in 2006 and 2008, the democrats offered no new ideas, nothing ground breaking, nothing that hadn't been done before - they just weren't republicans. all political gains are cyclical and are almost always as result of the implosion of the other party.