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Coming home to the GOP
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March 6, 2000 | Bush traveled to Fairfield University, a Jesuit college a few miles from his mother's house in Greenwich, Conn., and delivered a blistering attack on Dukakis' budget-and-tax policies. A few days later, of course, he was elected president. Twelve years later, Bush fils faces a similar moment -- Tuesday's make-or-break "national primary." And on Friday, he was supposed to replay his father's gambit with a large-scale rally at the same Jesuit university, conveniently perched on the edge of both the New York and Connecticut media markets.
It was to have been a return to his clan's home turf: not only the preppy postage stamp of soil where his father grew up, but the political terrain of Northeastern, moderate Republicanism, at a moment when Bush is still under fire for his glad-handing appearance at fanatically anti-Catholic, segregationist Bob Jones University. That was the plan. What happened instead speaks volumes about the nature of the Republican schism on the eve of Super Tuesday. George W. Bush didn't show up in Fairfield County, but John McCain did. Bush canceled his Fairfield University rally just hours before it was supposed to start, his staff offering confusing and contradictory explanations ranging from weariness to difficulty securing landing rights for his campaign plane. Meanwhile, McCain blew in to a different Roman Catholic college across town, drawing a cheering throng of thousands. There is more to this story than just ironic campaign scheduling. That Bush, from a family deeply rooted in the reform Republican tradition of patrician New England, is now hopelessly laden with the baggage of the religious right, while Southern-rooted McCain now pitches himself as the voice of civil libertarian moderation and inclusion, suggests a Republican Party turning itself inside out. "It's pretty wild -- and it spells one thing, T-R-O-U-B-L-E," admits Chris DePino, Connecticut's Republican state chairman. DePino is representative of a Republican tradition -- pro-civil rights, pro-choice, moderate on social issues -- that went underground with the election of Ronald Reagan. That tradition was exemplified by Sen. Prescott Bush in the 1950s and his son Rep. George Bush in the 1960s before his conversion to Reagan conservatism: Both were ardent supporters of Planned Parenthood; George helped found the Yale chapter of the NAACP. And that was the sort of Republican to whom George W.'s compassionate conservatism was supposed to appeal, which is one reason he attracted the early support of a moderate like DePino. "I've never thought I had much in common with Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell," says DePino, admitting that Bush's lurch to the right since New Hampshire "has been difficult, even though I know why he is doing it." At the same time he points out that "until recently, McCain had nothing but hugs" for the religious right. DePino, like the rest of Connecticut's GOP establishment, remains firmly in the Bush camp. But the fact that Bush and McCain are running neck and neck in Connecticut, as well as in New York, Massachusetts and other key Northeastern states, suggests that the GOP may in fact be confronting something more profound than McCain's transitory charisma. That something is the party's own history. Once upon a time, patrician liberals and moderates like New York's Jacob Javits, Connecticut's Lowell Weicker and Massachusetts' Edward Brooke and Elliot Richardson, appealed to a strain of good-government Republicanism stretching back to Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. This was a reform Republicanism that fought corruption in urban Democratic machines, that took the side of agrarian and entrepreneurial enterprise against corporate trusts and that produced early support for reproductive rights and environmental reform. But for nearly 20 years, moderate Republicans have seen such reformers vanish from the political landscape, washed over by the tide of Reagan conservatism. McCain, beginning with his campaign-finance rhetoric and continuing with his frontal assault on the religious right, has given that reform GOP tradition its first national articulation in a generation, even if the messenger himself has a deeply conservative voting record.
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