I like to quote Sen. Barry Goldwater's floor speech at the 1964 National Convention where he said "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." I think it shows that not only are the Republicans crazy, but they've been that way for quite a while.
But that doesn't mean that modern-day centrism is the answer.
One person that espouses the "Third Way" is my fellow Wacoan Marshall Wittman, the Bull Moose Blogger. I think he is an intersting if enigmatic person, if the reason is that I can never decide what exactly Wittman stands for. Other than being against partisanship.
But, my readers, partisanship wasn't built into the system, it developed on its own. And that is because groups of men rallied around ideas. Some saw a country with a strong national government as being the way; other sought to increase the power of the many states. All worked together in political parties to promote their ideas.
It is the same today, two parties competing with two very different views of the world. Certainly no one falls purely on one side or the other, but we find the ideas that attract us most and we side with them.
Wittman seems to take an entirely different appoach; that is to find a person and follow them no matter what those ideas are. His blindly following the likes of Sens. McCain and Lieberman make me wonder if he has a vision for what America should be and what we should do, or is opposing the established political parties enough?
Wittman often likes to talk about his hero, Teddy Roosevelt. Certainly there are a lot of things I like and dislike about T.R., but I would consider him one of the good Republicans. He campaigned hard for Republican victories, was elected Governor of New York as a Republican, was elected Vice President as a Republican, succeeded to the presidency as a Republican, and was re-elected president as a Republican. He only formed the Bull Moose party after he failed to gain the Republican nomination over the incumbent Republican president in 1912. And his third party only succeeded in handing over the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
T.R.'s legacy is that he was a Republican that Republicans hated and derided as a traitor to his class. And that is because of his mostly socially-liberal policies, like ending child labor and trust-busting. T.R. had an ideology and that's why he ran for president over his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft. That's admirable.
Wittman doesn't do that. He rejects parties outright and seeks some middle way that holds no promise of new ideas or new leaders. Wittman jsut takes the leaders he likes that occassionally bolt from their party, wraps his rhetoric around their personalities and continually tries to position himself based on what others have already said. That's not the way to win votes, nor is the way to govern a country.
In a free-thinking Republic, we should be wowed by ideas, not soundbites, not positioning and not some personal story. Wittman can't get past the surface to see what's inside the candidate and that's why he has no vision.
Thanks to Ezra for pointing all this out before I got a chance to write something.
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