Here in SC, RINO-hunting simply results in an increasingly Talebanic party of white men determined to stay in power and keep the rest of the state under their heel:
Republicans have taken the same tack over the years, and we can see the results of it quite easily. Thanks to foolish crusades against “Republicans In Name Only,” the GOP after 2006 had virtually no representation in the Northeast outside of Senators like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of whom have long been the bane of conservative Republicans for years. Even after the GOP started to experience a Northeastern renaissance with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, the quest for ideological purity didn’t go away. On those occasions when Scott Brown, or Chris Christie, have strayed from GOP orthodoxy on issues like extension of unemployment benefits, offshore oil drilling, or cap-and-trade, they’ve been foolishly denounced as “RINOs” and some Republicans have even said they should be challenged in future primaries by more conservative Republicans. Of course, nominating someone further to the right of Scott Brown in 2012 would merely mean handing the seat to the Democrats, but the ideological purists don’t seem to care. Perhaps the most absurd act of ideological purity, though, came in Christine O’Donnell’s defeat of Mike Castle in the GOP Senate primary this summer, an event which guarantees that a once winnable seat will state in the Democratic camp.
What this quest for ideological purity in both parties forgets is the fact that America’s major political parties have never been overly ideological. While there have always been a core set of principles that unite Republicans and Democrats, there has typically been enough room within that core to allow for regional variations. The Republican Party of 1978, for example, was broad enough to include Ronald Reagan and Charles Percy of Illinois, and that year Reagan campaigned vigorously for Percy even though the two disagreed on many issues, and despite the fact that there was a more conservative candidate running as an Independent. Similarly, the Democratic Party of 2006 was broad enough to include Nancy Pelosi and Heath Schuler. Writing Schuler out of the party as Berman suggests, which many just send him into the arms of the GOP, strikes me as foolish in the long run, just as it was ultimately foolish for conservatives to unite behind a flaky candidate just to punish Mike Castle for the “sin” of supporting cap-and-trade.
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