Imagine if the Democrats won an election with a candidate who
made vague liberal sounds from time to time, but decried abortion,
viewed the homosexual agenda as a cultural menace, supported tax
cuts and limited government, rejected affirmative action, called
the Greens “left-wing crazies,” consulted with Michael Reagan
regularly, and had once given money to Alan Keyes. Would
rank-and-file Democrats consider that win a real victory? No, they
would seethe with rage. “Our leaders just handed the conservatives
a victory,” they’d say.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Republican equivalent of this
scenario. He is a de facto Democrat and Hollywood liberal. Should
he win, state Republican leaders will have engineered a victory not
for rank-and-file Republicans but for the liberal
establishment.
Liberals of varying gradations now head both parties in the
state. No longer even recognizably Republican (judging by the
party’s platform), the state party executive board offered an
“unprecedented” endorsement of Schwarzenegger. Martha House, vice
chairwoman of the board, explained the vote by saying: “Contrary to
popular belief, we do want to win.”
Translation: Since we lack the conviction and courage to beat
the Democrats on principle, we will join them and endorse a de
facto Democrat. An ordinary Republican, hearing House’s comment,
can reasonably conclude that the party stands for nothing except
winning. In which case, why does the state Republican party exist
at all? Why doesn’t it just merge with the California Democrats?
Then it could win every election.
Political parties exist not to win willy-nilly but to win on
their principles. Victory is not the end, but the means to the end,
which is the enactment of the party’s platform. If substanceless
winning were the purpose of political parties, platform documents
would be blank.
California Republican leaders have turned the means into the
end, and thereby turned the party over to liberals. Their talk of a
Republican rebirth is laughable — unless they mean that the party
is being reborn as a sister party to the Democratic one.
A party that seeks victory for the sake of its principles can
renew itself. But a party that abandons its principles for the sake
of victory is hopelessly lost. One longtime California GOP
activist, who has watched the party progressively lose its “brain
and spine,” likens the liberalization of the state party to the
“Stockholm syndrome.” California Republican leaders identify with
their liberal captors while they view with hostility Republican
rescuers like Tom McClintock.
Like robots programmed by the Los Angeles Times, state
Republican leaders said repeatedly that a real Republican “can’t
win.” They parroted this yearly liberal prophecy, treated it as
fact, then made it fact by torpedoing McClintock so that he
couldn’t win.
The problem with the Republican elite is much deeper than
confusion. They didn’t accidentally swallow a liberal lie; they
fervently believe it. The “McClintock can’t win” line was bogus
from the start. The recent USA Today poll shows that
McClintock would win easily in a race against Cruz Bustamante. What
the Republicans were really saying was not that McClintock can’t
win but that he shouldn’t win. “McClintock scares the hell out of
the Republican establishment, because he represents fundamental
change and they don’t want that,” said the GOP activist. “When Tom
had a good chance of winning last year in the Controller’s race,
they didn’t lift a finger to help him.”
The Richard Riordans and Gerry Parskys of the party call on
conservatives to “be team players,” though liberal Republicans
rarely behave like team players when conservatives are running.
McClintock will “pay a price” for remaining in the race, Republican
leaders warn. What price will they pay for gutting the party of its
principles?
If Schwarzenegger wins and governs like a Kennedy liberal — a
good bet — McClintock could reemerge as his Republican primary
opponent in 2006. The rank-and-file, disgusted with a Republican
establishment that has given birth to yet another Jim
Jeffords/Arlen Specter, will not care one whit that the
establishment has scorned McClintock. If anything, respect for
McClintock will grow as it becomes clear that his hardheaded fiscal
conservatism is the only authentic answer to the crisis.
Recall that Ron Unz, the Republican who challenged Governor Pete
Wilson in 1994, got 34 percent of the primary vote. I asked Unz
recently if he would have done better had he gone into the primary
with the national attention McClintock now enjoys. “There is no
doubt about that,” he said. Unz doesn’t count McClintock out,
especially if a Schwarzenegger administration is as “disastrous as
it might be.”
