Rush to Judgment

You know the admonition about speaking truth to power?

Power, to borrow the words of a Jack Nicholson character, often can't handle the truth.

In this instance, I refer to the current Republican Party, which has long been accustomed to calling the shots but has been reduced to spectator status in recent years.

If the elections of 2006 and 2008 weren't enough to persuade the members of the party that they were in trouble, folks like former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr and former Secretary of State Colin Powell have been saying it, quite plainly, in recent days.

And, this week, the unofficial leader of the GOP, Rush Limbaugh, testily suggested that Powell should "close the loop and become a Democrat instead of claiming to be a Republican interested in reforming the Republican Party."

"He's just mad at me because I'm the one person in the country who had the guts to explain his endorsement of Obama," Limbaugh said. "It was purely and solely based on race."

It seems to me that is the wrong attitude to take when constructive criticism is being offered. And Powell was offering constructive criticism, observing that the country has changed while the party has not.

Powell is a Republican. Even though he endorsed Obama shortly before last November's election, his words do not indicate that he wants to change parties but that he wants his party to change. Powell's words indicate that he wants to see his party grow and expand, becoming more inclusive rather than exclusive.

But that cannot happen if the GOP leans farther and farther to the right.

Granted, in portions of his speech at a Washington conference on Monday, Powell would have been wise to choose more diplomatic words, befitting a former secretary of state. For example, he said, "I think what Rush does as an entertainer diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without."

If Powell had asked for my opinion, I probably would have recommended a different word than "nastiness," although just about any other word I can think of as a substitute still borders on the personal.

And perhaps "nastiness" is a better choice than some of the words I came up with — like "maliciousness" or "spitefulness" or "viciousness."

But it's hard to argue Powell's basic conclusion. In the last two elections, the Republicans have lost more than 50 House seats and more than a dozen Senate seats. His observation that the Republican Party is "getting smaller and smaller" is not a partisan opinion. It's a fact.

The Republicans' collapse has been visible in other ways, such as the defection recently of Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. In large part, it prompted a thoughtful analysis by Alan Silverleib at CNN.com, who writes about how liberal and moderate politicians have been driven from the Republican Party over the last four decades.

The famous "Southern strategy" helped elect Republican presidents like Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes, but, in the process, it shoved Northeastern voters into the Democratic camp.

"Even after FDR started tilting the region to the Democrats," writes Silverleib, "it produced a slew of moderate GOP officeholders, postwar leaders like New York's Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits, Pennsylvania's Richard Schweiker and John Heinz, Maine's Margaret Chase Smith and William Cohen, Massachusetts' Leverett Saltonstall and Ed Brooke, Connecticut's Prescott Bush and Lowell Weicker, Rhode Island's John Chafee, New Jersey's Clifford Case and Maryland's Mac Mathias."

But today, the Northeastern states from Maryland to Maine "have 18 Republican representatives in the House and three in the Senate," he writes.

The Republican Party has been reduced to mostly a regional party, relevant primarily in the South and Southwest. Neither tantrums by Limbaugh nor what currently appears to be an unlikely rebound in 2010 will be enough to reverse the party's fortunes.

Powell realizes that single–party domination is not a good thing in a democracy. There will always be a majority party and a minority party in a democracy, and the minority party must be healthy for democracy to thrive.

Today's Republican Party is not healthy. If it does not take steps to restore its good health, it will go the way of the Whigs.