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"The media keeps saying there isn't one," the narrator says. "For once, they're right. There are actually forty-one voices. Forty-one strong voices, forty-one Senate Republican voices."
Make that forty, now that Arlen Specter abandoned the GOP last week, giving his party a lot to think about, if for no other reason than for his answer to the most fundamental political question about the party's future: what does the party stand for?
It's true, of course, that Specter's defection is rooted more in his political viability than his philosophic purity. The five-term senator faced a primary against former Pennsylvania Congressman and Club for Growth President Pat Toomey (the fiscally conservative group is now run by former Indiana Congressman Chris Chocola) that he was likely to lose: a Rasmussen poll last week found Specter twenty-one points down. He beat back a 2004 challenge from Toomey by only 17,000 votes, of more than a million cast. And since then, Pennsylvania Democrats have added 493,987 voters to the rolls (+13%) while Republicans have lost 44,439 (-1%)---making the Republican primary electorate increasingly conservative.
Nationwide, only 21% of Americans now identify themselves as Republicans, the lowest level recorded in the Washington Post/ABC News poll since 1983. That is, the Republican Party hasn't been in this dire of straits for an entire generation.
This is an inconvenient trend for the GOP, to say the least, because it signifies a fundamental realignment of the American electorate---and even worse, crucially, one to which it has failed to adapt. Millions of once-Republicans have thrown up their hands with their stubbornly divisive party and called it quits. This week, Arlen Specter became just one more of them.
What's left, then, is a radicalized shell of the Republicans' former self: a fierce core of pro-life, anti-gay, pro-gun conservative reactionists. Accordingly, instead of taking the moment of Specter's departure as a moment for self-reflection, Rush Limbaugh called Specter "dead weight," and RNC Chairman Michael Steele rejoined the same, leaving moderate Maine Republican Olympia Snowe to grieve in the New York Times last week that, "you often get the distinct feeling that you're no longer welcome in the tribe. But it is truly a dangerous signal that a Republican senator of nearly three decades no longer felt able to remain in the party." FOX News linked to Snowe's op-ed with the title, "Don't let the door hit you..."
You get the feeling, indeed.
This Rovian experiment of playing to the base is over. Instead, what the party requires for viability---far from more Sarah Palins, Bobby Jindals, Mark Sanfords, and Rick Perrys---it can find in Indiana. The party must soften its stands on social issues, release its xenophobic grip on the immigration debate, and shift towards pragmatic policy ideas. It should use as a model Republican leaders like Mitch Daniels, Richard Lugar, and at least if recent history is any indication, Evan Bayh.
There's a future for an Evan Bayh Republican in the GOP.
Bayh's last two years have been stunningly erratic: he's gone from being the 72nd most conservative member in the Senate (2006) to the 47th (2008)---and in the Democratic caucus, from the 16th most conservative member (2006) to the 1st (2008). That is, if one were to forecast such things, keeping that dizzying rate of change linear (y=-12.5x+72), he'll be more conservative than any other Republican in the Senate by September 4, 2012---just in time for the next Presidential election!
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In National Journal's rankings Bayh now leads Nebraska Senator Bill Nelson for the first time, who was once commonly thought the most conservative Democrat in the body and, who like every other member, has been markedly more ideologically consistent in his voting (see chart).
In some sense it's surprising that these shifts only half-track with the political winds, though it's true that Bayh moved dramatically to the left in 2005 and 2006 as he plotted his ill-fated campaign for president.
But perhaps it's more revealing to consider them in the context of Bayh's suffocating personal ambition: a move to the left to prepare for a presidential campaign, a moderate tack to enhance his Vice Presidential prospects in 2008, and a dramatic conservative shift ever since.
What bizarre timing for the final break, it would seem, given that the Democratic Party's popularity is at its highest point in Bayh's political career, and Indiana, after all, voted in 2008 for the Democratic candidate for President, the first time since 1964. Yet this too makes sense, as Bayh has come to recognize that his future in the Barack Obama-dominated Democratic Party is dim: he was passed over for Vice President, never emerged as a Claire McCaskill-like confidant, and became an irrelevant bridge to a sinking Clintonian island when Obama deftly neutralized Hillary Clinton's internal opposition by making her Secretary of State.
Bayh's reaction has been to position himself as the single most obstructionist Democrat in Congress, just in case Obama's popular presidency goes south. Bayh's installed himself leader of a "Blue Dog" caucus in the Senate of sixteen moderate Democrats, who meet regularly with the implicit purpose of putting the et tu brakes on Obama's legislative agenda---or as Bayh put it in the Washington Post, "Many independents voted for President Obama and the contours of his change agenda, but they will not rubber-stamp it."
In March, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell gleefully read one of Bayh's anti-Obama screeds from the Wall Street Journal into the Congressional record, suggesting as Bayh did that Obama "jeopardized [his] credibility" on the deficit with the proposed omnibus budget. Last week, Bayh was one of only three Democrats to vote no. "If you're going to get to 60 votes in the Senate, you're going to need the vast majority of this group. We can be the fulcrum upon which policy will balance," Bayh threatened last month.
So this is as good a time for Bayh as any other to bolt, for him and for the Republican Party. It needs to retool to the realities of a realigning electorate, and Bayh could be a perfect GOP response to what may end up being a presidency of liberal overreach (think a former Democrat as a "New Republican"). And he needs a new party to entertain his ego, which is surely becoming exhausting to Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
As Specter finds his "political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans," Bayh might ask himself the same question. He could follow the Pennsylvanian's lead, and be just as politically self-serving in his answer. Why not become that new voice of the Republican Party? The door might not even hit him on the way out.
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