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the distinction between the parties is changing…

Posted on Tuesday 28 April 2009

As the day wears on and I read the various Rupublican comments about Senator Specter changing over to the Democratic Party, I find myself feeling sad for him. He is a reasonable person who chose to break from the Republican bloc voting and vote for the Stimulus Bill [as if there were any viable choice]. The response was to ridicule him and mount a campaign to get him out of office. Here’s a version of the Republican response [from Newt Gingrich]:
Arlen Specter’s decision to leave the Republican Party in name as he left it in spirit over the stimulus vote is further proof that high taxes, big spending and big government are unacceptable to Republican voters. This switch is a function of personal survival and will make clearer the profound difference between the Democratic Party of big government, big bureaucracy, high taxes and big unions and the Republican Party of lower taxes, less bureaucracy and small business, with its emphasis on work ethic, civil society and local control back home.

When congressional Republicans forgot that their party was the party of taxpayers and government reformers they lost control in 2006. When they accepted the Bush big spending plans of 2008 they further lost ground. When Sen. Specter voted for a $787 billion big spending bill no elected official had even read, he widened the gap between himself and the tax-paying small-government conservatives who are the base of the Republican Party.

It is clear that Specter concluded he would lose the coming Republican primary, and he admits in his statement today that the vote for the $767 billion spending bill was the final straw. This defection will make the 2010 and 2012 elections an even clearer choice of two directions for America.
Such mythology deserves a response: When he says, "the profound difference between the Democratic Party of big government, big bureaucracy, high taxes and big unions and the Republican Party of lower taxes, less bureaucracy and small business, with its emphasis on work ethic, civil society and local control back home," he ignores the simplest of truths – the National Debt and the Disastrous series of Republican-lead Deregulatory Bills that crashed our economy and made the Stimulus Package a dire necessity. With both Reagan/BushI and BushII, they hid their own big spending in the escalating National Debt.

Arlen Specter is a rational conservative person. I feel sorry that he was expelled from his own political party for being rational. Of course we welcome him to the Democratic Party as a conservative person. There’s plenty of room for a conservative over here. The distinction between the parties is changing from Conservative versus Liberal to…

Rational versus Irrational…
  1.  
    Ralph Roughton
    April 28, 2009 | 10:38 PM
     

    Newt said a true thing: “This defection will make the 2010 and 2012 elections an even clearer choice of two directions for America.”

    It’s true. The voters know which direction they want America to go. The only question is: when the Democrats pick up even more seats in 2010, will the Republicans finally get the message that the American people are not buying what they’re selling?

    They act like there’s some vast silent majority out there that’s just biding its time. If so, they must be lying to the pollsters, because their numbers keep dropping. And, no, Mitch McConnell; they do not want you to keep the Franken-Coleman race tied up in court to prevent a veto proof Senate. They want you obstructionists to start acting like grown-ups.

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