Retiring Republicans
There seems to be another Republican or two announcing their intentions not to seek re-election every day lately. David Brooks writes about one--Deborah Pryce--who chalks up her retirement from Congress to, at least in part, the dehumanizing depths she had to stoop to win in 2006, and barely at that.
When Pryce spoke about the direct-mail letters that went out under her name, she did so with a look of disgust. She said that her friends kept coming to her to complain about the TV ads she was running against her opponent. Finally, her own mother told her she was ashamed of the ads.The truth is, Pryce’s opponents did worse. But it was her own ads that she kept dwelling on, and as she spoke, I could see that she’d been fighting the war that the best politicians fight — the war within herself to preserve her own humanity....
It’s not as rewarding being in the minority, she says, and with the new, longer workweek, it’s harder to get home to her adopted daughter.
I think there's room for sympathy here in some situations. Some politicians genuinely want to be a force for good in the world, and to supply that force, they have to get elected. That, for better or worse, often requires slime and half-truth. Sometimes it requires worse.
But it's sort of hard to believe that a career politician like Pryce realized just recently--after 15 or so years of watching and participating in perhaps the dirtiest era in the history of American politics--that the career can be more soul-sucking than rewarding. I might believe it coming from a novice, but not from her. What I think we're seeing here, and will see more of in the coming weeks, is a realization dawning on moderate GOP candidates that they and their party have done little to speak for them, and that nothing has happened in the last year to help them widen the tiny margins by which they won last November.
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Hmm, moderate GOP candidates. To quote a wise man (okay, fictional, but still), "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Have you seen any moderate Republicans recently? No? That's because there's no such thing as a moderate Republican. Locally or in statewide office, sure, but not at a national level.
There is one wing of my extended family that is universally crazy right-wing, survivalist sort of people, and stubborn as hell about it. I haven't gone to a family get-together in a number of years, because these guys can't resist the opportunity to pick on the liberal guy for more than about five minutes, and they've never let any facts stand in their way of an argument, ever. Even so, a couple of weeks ago I learned from my Mother that my Cousin, one of the most hard-core of them all, recently left the Republican party in disgust. When it's that bad, you've lost basically everybody, or at least everybody who still has a soul and/or the capacity for independent thought. But you still can't peel off more than a few votes to the right side of even the most obvious bills like SCHIP.
Don't feel bad for any of these people, they are all completely nuts. They've walked off the edge of the cliff, and now they're standing there like Wile E. Coyote, looking around for a couple of seconds before they fall. Wait for the poof and the cloud of dust at the bottom of the canyon, and have a laugh at their expense.
I agree, but you're too kind. It's beyond cliche for the worst of the worst politicians to say that life inside the beltway is just too harsh and amoral for their pure white souls, and that they need to spend more time praying with their family or whatever. If she voted with Republicans over the last 15 years in Congress, she doesn't deserve sympathy, she deserves supervised work release.
Well that goes without saying! :)
She (and others) also should be required to wear those ankle bracelets that allow continuous monitoring of their location. How about a rule that says they can't go inside the DC beltway? (LOL)
I have some (fairly faint) hope that the 08 election will have the level of effect on the GOP that the Goldwater defeat had decades ago - reduced to ruble and rebuilt from the bare earth up. We need as a country a moderate left and a moderate right, since without some cooperation our government will either be incapable of action in the public good, or in the varying hands of nutcases. We even more badly need a viable real left to counter the real right (which is highly organized and has lots of cash for long-term infrastructure).
But, reducing the GOP to less than 1/3 of the House and Senate has to be our immediate goal. So we shouldn't make life easier for the GOP remnants to remain in office - let them feel how nasty, brutish and short political life can and should be to those that are bent on destruction of our government's ability to provide for the general welfare, as the US Constitution intends.
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