Elephants Under the Big Tent - A couple of recent articles ponder the direction of the Republican Party in 2004.

First, the LATimes takes a look at the Bush campaign's strategy of sticking to a message that favors the party's conservative stalwarts, rather than wooing the elusive "swing voter." The article notes that by giving up on such tactics, Rove et al. are steering their campaign on a very different tack than the Kerry folks. (Question: isn't that a role reversal from 2000, when Al Gore was arguably more focused on his base than Bush, who reached out with his "compassionate conservative" appeal?) As Cokie Roberts opined in her Monday morning NPR call-in, the Bushies are convinced they won't win a single Gore vote from 2000, so they figure they'll need a huge turnout from true believers. The campaign is therefore geared to deliver them to the polls in droves this November.

Then from the opposite coast comes this NYTimes piece questioning the GOP's capacity to tolerate moderates within its ranks. Comments from arch-conservative Tom Delay (who notes that prime-time speeches at the convention will be dominated by the likes of Ahnuld and Giuliani) are contrasted with a somewhat bitter Christie Todd Whitman (a disillusioned Bush appointee who is writing a book arguing "you cannot be a national party if you are excluding people"). The article claims that moderate, fiscally responsible and socially "pragmatic" Republicans like Whitman are retiring from politics, especially in the Northeast (some are being driven out by the likes of the Club For Growth). This allows seats to be picked up by Democrats in the general election. The message to party apparatchiks: you won't keep your congressional majority for long if you keep alienating us.

I've always been dismayed by the tendency of an evenly divided electorate to drive partisan division. Rather than focus of the broad areas of commonality, the parties seem to retreat to their ideological cores. The result is to deliver clout to the hardliners that is not at all commensurate to their grass-roots power. This happens regularly in fractured parliamentary systems. In Israel, for example, small religious parties wield enormous influence because even their tiny numbers are enough to tilt the precarious balance-of-power between the equally-matched major parties. I would argue that something similar is going on in the GOP right now.

It would be a great step forward in American politics if the moderates on both sides of the partisan divide -- like the Republican Main Street Partnership and the Democrat's DLC -- recognized that they had more in common with like-thinking members of the opposite party than they do their own bloviating ideologues. Moderates represent a far larger bloc, and if they could act in concert, they'd easily broker power in Washington. But loyalties run deep, and while such a major rift in the party fabric may be coming, I unfortunately don't see that happening in the short term. Instead it may take a major GOP presidential defeat to convince Republicans of the wisdom of middle-of-the-road policy.