Does the Right Make Might?

So today I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can to deserve your trust.

President George W. Bush, November 3, 2004

W e stand at a historic juncture in American politics, a critical crossroads for both the Republican Party and for the nation. The choice to be made is momentous. Will the GOP interpret the president's reelection victory as a mandate, even a requirement, to continue to cater to the demands of the far right on a series of key wedge issues? If so, the party will further fuel the fires of overheated polarization by pushing positions that alienate tens of millions of Americans. The recent demand for a total ban on all embryonic stem cell research and the call for amending the Constitution to prohibit gay marriage—only the second time in history an amendment would restrict individual freedom—are just two examples of policies that will jeopardize the ­long-­term viability of the party's margin of victory. Or, at this critical crossroads, will the party decide to broaden its base into a stronger, ­long-­lasting majority by returning to a focus on the core Republican values? Those core values—smaller government, fiscal responsibility, and strong security—unite conservatives and moderates, even moderates in the Democratic Party, as Ronald Reagan proved. If the GOP musters the will to move forward in that more expansive way, it cannot only consolidate its hold on power, but also heal the wounds of extreme polarization and make great strides in facing the many challenges ahead.

The party must remember that while winning elections is surely important, it is every bit as important to win them in ways that allow you to govern all the people once the ballots are counted. The president was clear in his victory speech that he wants “the broad support of Americans,” and he pledged that he would “work to earn it” from those who opposed him. But the rhetoric from the leadership of the ­far-­right faction, even today, shows no indication of willingness to reach out—either to those within the party or those outside it—on anything other than their terms.

Just hours after the president declared victory, one longtime conservative activist, Richard Viguerie, wrote, “Now comes the revolution. . . . Make no mistake—conservative Christians and ‘values voters' won this election for George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress. It's crucial that the Republican leadership not forget this—as much as some will try.” James Dobson, the head of the conservative group Focus on the Family, asserted that President Bush must now move to pass a constitutional amendment regulating marriage, to overturn Roe v. Wade, and also to prohibit all embryonic stem cell research. “I believe that the Bush administration now needs to be more aggressive in pursuing these values,” he said, “and if they ­don't do it I believe they will pay a price in four years.” Christian conservative organizer Phil Burress boldly proclaimed, “The president rode our coattails,” while another, Austin Ruse, said that his ­pro-­life group has essentially “earned” the right to name the next chief justice of the Supreme Court.

These groups—headed by people I call social fundamentalists, whose sole mission is to advance their narrow ideological agenda—argue that they tipped the balance in the election and that the party ­can't win elections without them. As the Reverend Jerry Falwell said just weeks before the election, “The Republican Party does not have the head count to elect a president without the support of religious conservatives. I tell my Republican friends who are always talking about the ‘big tent,' I say make it as big as you want to but if the candidate running for president is not ­pro-­life, ­pro-­family, ­you're not going to win.”

Yes, it's true that President Bush won more votes in 2004 than any other president, and that evangelical voters contributed to that victory. A less publicized fact is that the president's 3-­percentage-­point popular vote margin was the smallest margin of any incumbent president ever to win reelection. Bill Clinton won his reelection battle by more than 8 points, Ronald Reagan won his by 18 points, and Richard Nixon was reelected by 23 points. Even Harry Truman, whom everyone had written off by the time the polls closed on Election Day 1948, ended up beating his opponent by nearly 5 points.

Even in the 2004 presidential election, of the ­fifty-­nine million people who cast their ballots for President Bush, only twenty million identified moral values as their most important issue. That's not even a majority of the votes the president received—it's only a third. Given those numbers, and the fact that evangelicals represented the same proportion of voters in 2004 as they did in 2000, the party has to ask itself if the evangelicals' claim for making the president's victory possible ­aren't possibly overblown. We must also consider whether or not a little more outreach to moderates might not have brought the party an even greater victory. After all, while moderate voters ranked the economy and the war on terror as higher priorities, they too are concerned about America's moral values.

In New Jersey, where I was the cochair of the reelection campaign, President Bush cut the Democrats' margin of victory in 2000 by more than half. He achieved similar inroads in such blue states as Washington and Hawaii. These numbers indicate that states such as these might have been winnable if the party had worked harder at attracting moderates. If they had, he might now have a much stronger mandate.

The numbers show that while the president certainly did energize his political base, the red state/blue state map changed barely at all—suggesting that he had missed an opportunity to significantly broaden his support in the most populous areas of the country. The Karl Rove strategy to focus so rigorously on the narrow conservative base won the day, but we must ask at what price to governing and at what risk to the future of the party. When fully a quarter of the public told the Gallup Poll immediately after the election that they were afraid of a second Bush term, we have to be concerned.

One of the most important truths in the 2004 campaign—one that has been overlooked by the mainstream media for years—is that in the post–Clinton era, the Democratic Party largely abandoned the center it occupied for a brief time in the 1990s. That leftward shift played right into Rove's hands. Many Americans came to believe that the Democrat leadership simply ­didn't care about the traditional American values of integrity, fidelity, ­self-­discipline, and faith. There's no doubt that most Americans found the overall Republican message more in tune with their values. Never­theless, many in the huge center of the American electorate are also put off by the more extreme positions of the ­far-­right groups.

A clear and present danger Republicans face today is that the party will now move so far to the right that it ends up alienating centrist voters and marginalizing itself. It's naïve, after all, to presume that the Democrats ­won't learn from their mistakes and move closer to the center for the next round. The president was right when he said in his victory statement “when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America.” Unfortunately, after this most recent campaign, realizing that dream will be extremely difficult. By focusing so much on the demands of the social fundamentalists and their allies on the far right during the first term, the White House created a high level of expectations in that wing of the party that will be hard to resist.

In moving forward, it is important to remember that the president ­didn't win reelection with the social fundamentalists alone. The special importance of the moderates to the president's reelection was proven time and again during the campaign. The social fundamentalists forget that in the closing days of the 2004 campaign, when President Bush was fighting hard to secure a victory in Ohio, he ­didn't ask Jerry Falwell, or Pat Robertson, or James Dobson to campaign with him; he brought Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani along, and their efforts also helped him win.

Then there is the lesson of the Republican National Convention. The Bush team spent more than two hundred million dollars in the months running up to the 2004 Republican National Convention, seeking both to shore up the president's political base and break the seemingly unbreakable deadlock in the polls between the president and Senator Kerry. For months, virtually every poll in America showed the president's support stuck somewhere in the ­mid-­40s. The race was considered a dead heat, with neither candidate's gaining any ground on his own or taking any away from his opponent. Senator Kerry was unable to get any bounce from his convention in Boston; for the first time since 1972, a party convention failed to give its candidate a positive bump in the polls. That seemed to reinforce the view that the electorate was split right down the middle, with very little opportunity for either candidate to break the deadlock.

By early July, however, the Bush campaign decided it needed to make a course correction. When the ­prime-­time speaking schedule for the Republican National Convention in New York was announced, the program featured one prominent moderate Republican after another: Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Pataki.

The social fundamentalist leadership was not pleased. One veteran Christian conservative operative wrote in his regular ­e-­mail newsletter, “I hate to say it, but the conservatives, for the most part, are not excited about ­re-­electing the president. If the president is embarrassed to be seen with conservatives at the convention, maybe conservatives will be embarrassed to be seen with the president on Election Day.” The Washington editor of the National Review, Kate O'Beirne, wrote, “If the lineup is intended to make an overwhelmingly conservative party attractive to swing voters, it does so by pretending to be something it's not.”

O'Beirne, however, could not have been more wrong. Those speakers at the convention, far from representing something the party is not, are, in fact, among the most popular politicians in the country. By the time the convention was over, America had seen a different face of the GOP, and it apparently liked what it saw. President Bush received an 11-point bounce, giving him his first real lead in the polls all year. It ­wasn't until the GOP showcased its moderate side—emphasizing its bedrock principles—that the people responded positively in the polls.

The social conservatives and their allies will probably never acknowledge the impact those four days of the convention had on voters' perceptions of the president and the party. The day after the convention closed, Rush Limbaugh argued in the Wall Street Journal that because Schwarzenegger, Giuliani, and McCain ­hadn't talked about abortion or gay marriage, they were hiding their moderate views from the American people—as if the people watching ­didn't know that these leaders were moderates. Limbaugh missed the point. The moderates who spoke at the convention succeeded in driving up support for the president precisely because they focused on the core issues that unite all Republicans: less government, lower taxes, and strong national security. Clearly many voters who were not sure prior to the convention about President Bush and the Republicans were convinced by what they heard from the convention that the party was not only willing to make room for moderate voices; it was willing to embrace them.

I liked what Peggy Noonan, the most articulate voice of the conservatives in the Republican Party, had to say about Schwarzenegger's speech, in which he clearly and unambiguously articulated the core principles of the Republican Party when he said: “If you believe that government should be accountable to the people, not the people to the government . . . if you believe a person should be treated as an individual, not as a member of an interest group . . . if you believe your family knows how to spend your money better than the government does . . . then you are a Republican.” As Noonan said, “I think Arnold's speech was historic—redefining Republicanism in a way that all of us on the floor could agree with, and people at home could think about and ponder.” My sentiments exactly.

From where I sat, the 2004 convention was the best since 1988. For the first time in sixteen years, I felt at home among, not estranged from, my fellow Republicans from all over the country and all up and down the political spectrum. There was far less anger and far more unity than I had seen or experienced in years. I had a palpable sense that perhaps the party was beginning to regain its moorings, starting to recognize the need to gather all those who share a firm commitment to traditional Republican principles under the big umbrella my father told me about almost fifty years ago. When a Republican national convention is brought to its feet by an Austrian immigrant, former bodybuilder, and ­one-­time action movie star who just happens to also be the ­pro-­choice, ­pro-­environment, ­anti-­gay–marriage amendment Republican governor of the largest state in America, that's a sign that things could change. It also suggests how much more decisive a victory the president could have achieved if he had campaigned on the values and messages of those moderates.

The fact is that moderate Republican candidates have won elections in America's largest and third largest states and its largest city, California, New York, and New Your City—places, incidentally, that Republican presidential candidates ­haven't carried in years. Between them, Schwarzenegger and Pataki represent nearly one of every five Americans. Showcasing them and their brand of moderate Republicanism ­isn't pretending to be something the party ­isn't. It's showcasing a vital, and substantial, element of the party without which Republicans would quickly become a marginalized force in American politics. The popularity of these moderate leaders points the way to what more the party can become if it will only commit to making room—real room—in the leadership for moderates.

But will the party make the right choice? Because the president cannot run again—and Vice President Cheney will not—the party has no heir (or heiress) apparent for the 2008 presidential election. Yet if the social fundamentalists prevail, Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, Tom Ridge, and Colin Powell—all outstanding leaders with broad national appeal—­won't even have a chance of winning the party's nomination because of their ­pro-­choice principles. The GOP cannot afford to eliminate its most popular potential candidates from contention because they ­don't pass the favorite litmus test of the far right.

The problem, of course, with the party's making a course correction toward moderation is that the ­far-­right groups, which have so powerfully consolidated their power within the party, have no interest in doing so. Not only do they have no interest in moving the party closer to the center, but they are outright hostile toward the moderate ranks. More than ever before in modern times, the Republican Party at the national level is allowing itself to be dictated to by a coalition of these small but fervid groups that have claimed the mantle of conservatism, and the leadership of these groups shows no inclination to seek bipartisan consensus on anything. The Democrats are facing the same challenge from union leadership and trial lawyers. My concern, however, is with Republicans.

I remember a group of western Republican congressmen telling me early in my tenure at the Environmental Protection Agency that if they ever read a favorable editorial in the New York Times about the Bush administration's environmental policy, “we might as well still have a Democrat president.” What the leaders of this coalition forget is that not every question of governing hinges on a question of rigid principle, and on most questions there is ample room to find productive middle ground. Indeed, from my experience in politics, on most questions the middle ground is the only productive ground.

The leaders of these groups seek to impose rigid litmus tests on Republican candidates and appear determined to drive out of the party anyone who ­doesn't subscribe to their beliefs in their entirety. Organizations like the Club for Growth see no inconsistency in their pursuit of electing a Republican majority in Congress and their efforts to defeat Republican incumbents in divisive and costly primaries. Another influential group is Americans for Tax Reform, whose idea of politically sophisticated thinking is to “oppose all tax increases as a matter of principle” and to refuse to support any Republican candidate who ­doesn't sign the group's ­no-­tax pledge. These and other social fundamentalist groups share an apparent desire to purge the party of “nonbelievers.” They would dispute my assertion that there's room in the party for all those who share basic Republican principles but might disagree on particular issues (such as whether there might, at some point, actually be the need for a tax increase of some sort, perhaps like the one Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1986). As far as ­they're concerned, the Republican Party ­isn't my party too; it's their party period.

They call us moderates RINOs—Republicans in Name Only. But they fail to acknowledge that without RINOs like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Nancy Johnson of Connecticut, Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, Jerry Lewis of California, Jim McCrery of Louisiana, Jim Leach of Iowa, and many others the GOP would never have won the majority in Congress in 1994 and still ­wouldn't have it today. The social fundamentalists see RINOs as apostates who are not true to the Republican cause. But the fact is that the RINOs have also not turned away from the party, much as some people—both Democrats and Republicans—might wish they would. On the contrary, they strongly supported President Bush's reelection.

Moderates have an indispensable role to play: We must bring the Republican Party, and American politics generally, back toward the productive center. But that ­won't happen easily. It is time for Republican moderates to assert forcefully and plainly that this is our party too, that we not only have a place, but a voice—and not just a voice, but a vision—a vision that is true to the historic principles of our party and our nation, not one tied to an extremist agenda.

If we believe the government has a responsibility to be prudent in its use of taxpayer dollars and not to run up huge deficits that will ultimately tax our children and grandchildren, we must push for fiscal responsibility and should seek to couple tax cuts with restraint on spending.

It we believe that every woman has the right to make choices about her pregnancy, without interference from the government, we must not support the appointment of judges who vow to overturn Roe v. Wade.

If we believe that the Constitution protects individual freedom from an intrusive central government, then we must oppose a constitutional amendment to regulate or define marriage, and leave the matter where it belongs—with the states.

If we believe that protecting the environment is essential and is a public responsibility and a Republican issue, we must insist on advancing a ­pro-­active agenda that actually results in cleaner air, purer water, and ­better-­protected land.

If we believe the United States has a vital role to play as the world's only superpower in leading the world both with strength and wisdom, then we must push for a foreign policy premised on the understanding that the rest of the world matters to us. We must advocate against becoming ensnared in ­nation-­building enterprises and push for policies that engage us with the world community and show, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

If moderates ­don't rally around the core principles that have long defined Republicanism, the extreme right will run away with the party. Preventing that troubling fate will take the emergence of “radical moderates.”

The moderates in the Republican Party today face a momentous choice. We can decide to continue to “go along to get along,” to yield when push comes to shove to preserve the unity of the party and our place in it. Or we can elect to draw a line in the sand, to decide that the future of Republicanism is too important to allow those who seek to purge the party of anyone who is “ideologically impure” to take over. This is, as Ronald Reagan once said, a time for choosing.

The battle, of course, will not be easy, as I learned all too clearly from my time serving as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. ­I've been around politics long enough to know that it's not for the faint of heart. After all, ­I've spent most of my career in New Jersey politics, where extreme partisanship is an official state sport. Yet nothing I saw in more than fifteen years as an elected official, or in a lifetime as a participant around politics at the local, state, and national levels, prepared me for what I witnessed in Washington in early 2001.

I joined the administration cautiously optimistic that the extreme bitterness of the Florida recount—in which actual fights had broken out at one polling place—and the Supreme Court decision on the election could be put behind us. I was eager to start work at the EPA and, given the environmental improvements ­we'd been able to achieve in New Jersey when I was governor, I felt reasonably confident my time at the agency would be productive. President Bush had pledged to bring a spirit of bipartisanship to his administration, and hard as it is to recall now, in those first days there was at least one glimmer of hope. The Senate was divided 50–50 between the parties for the first time in history. Yet after just two weeks of negotiation in the first week of January 2001, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate, Trent Lott and Tom Daschle, reached a ­power-­sharing agreement aimed at avoiding partisan gridlock. I thought that if Lott and Daschle, who had just traded places as Senate majority leader, could agree on how to divide power, perhaps the rest of the government really could move forward in the same manner.

After all, as governor of Texas, George W. Bush had developed a reputation for effectively reaching across party lines to find common ground. He had forged such a close working relationship with the ­top-­ranking Democrat in Texas that the then lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock, supported Bush for reelection as governor in 1998, even though Bullock was a close friend of Bush's Democratic opponent, Garry Mauro. Bullock was even godfather to one of Mauro's daughters. Given that impressive Texas track record, I sincerely believed that President Bush hoped to be able to replicate that success in Washington.

I'm sometimes asked these days why I took the EPA position—­didn't I realize ­I'd walked into a ­no-­win situation? Hard as it is to believe now, the fact is that heading into the inauguration, many of us accepting appointments believed we had the opportunity to work with Democrats to create an effective administration that could unite rather than divide the country. Unfortunately, the Democrats showed only a limited interest in working cooperatively.

Before accepting the position at EPA, I met with the ­president-­elect, the vice ­president-­elect, and a few members of the new senior White House staff, including Andy Card and Karl Rove, at the transition headquarters in a hotel suite in Washington. I had known George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for a long time, so the meeting itself was comfortable and straightforward.

I first met President Bush when he was elected governor of Texas in 1994. Through the National Governors Association, I had had numerous opportunities to see him in action. We had also served as cochairs of the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego. He and I and our staffs had shared the same trailer behind the platform, so we got the chance to know each other a little better during the convention's four days. Although nothing was said explicitly, I got the impression Governor Bush was definitely eyeing the presidency himself. Members of my staff said they came away with the same impression from their interactions with his staff.

Dick Cheney and I went way back—back to my first job in Washington in 1969, when he was a close colleague of my boss, Don Rumsfeld, at the Office of Equal Opportunity and I was an executive assistant. I have always found Dick to be intelligent, insightful, and understated. He did far more listening than talking, which is a rare trait in Washington. Even at the age of thirty, he seemed like an elder statesman. He never impressed me as a conservative ideologue; over the years, I always thought his wife, Lynne, a distinguished scholar in her own right, was the more conservative. When Dick called to offer me the job at EPA, he did so in his usual cordial, straightforward, businesslike fashion. I was struck at the time by how far we both had come—from my days at a small government agency, which President Nixon had hoped to abolish, to his becoming vice ­president-­elect and calling to offer me a job in the new president's cabinet.

The icebreaker at that meeting at transition headquarters was the dog the ­president-­elect had recently purchased from me as a present for the first lady. Just days before the election, during a campaign stop in New Jersey as he lamented not having a birthday present for Laura, I told the ­soon-­to-­be ­president-­elect about my dog's new puppies, and he immediately asked me about getting one for Mrs. Bush. Although I offered to give the puppy to the Bushes, he insisted on paying for him—he ­didn't want any appearance of impropriety (although I ­can't imagine that anyone would think he traded the job of EPA administrator for a dog). The puppy, a cute Scottish terrier the Bushes named Barney, had been delivered to the ­president-­elect's suite earlier that day, and he was making himself right at home. Although Dick Cheney ­didn't seem to care much for the new dog—especially after Barney christened the carpet in all the excitement—the Bushes certainly did, as the many photo ops that Barney has been a part of over the years have shown. In fact, in keeping with what was becoming an ­election-­year tradition, two weeks before the election in 2004, we found another New Jersey scottie puppy for the president to give the first lady.

I came away from our meeting optimistic that the ­president-­elect and I were in accord when it came to national environmental policy. As governors, we had each butted up against environmental regulations written in Washington that ­didn't work well in our own states. We also agreed that the states are often far ahead of Washington in developing innovative solutions to environmental challenges. We both believed that the time had come to strike a balance, that environmental policy had become too heavily weighted toward the “command and control” mode of operation—with everything being directed from Washington, micromanaged to an unreasonable and unproductive degree.

I also had no doubt that President Bush wanted a strong environmental record to be part of both his agenda and his legacy. That belief was reinforced when Karl Rove told me after that meeting that I would be one of just three cabinet officers who would help determine whether the president would be reelected. At the time, I took Rove to mean that the work I would do in building a strong record on the environment would help the president build on his base by attracting moderate swing voters. As it turned out, I ­don't seem to have understood Karl correctly.

My confirmation hearing, though ­nerve-­racking, was similarly uneventful. I benefited, in part, from the Democrats' decision to make John Ashcroft the focus of their wrath in the first round of confirmation battles. Because I had a strong record on environmental issues as governor of New Jersey, I expected to have solid support, and I believed that I truly had a chance to build a consensus on how to move forward to achieve the next generation of environmental progress. I knew there would be partisan wrangling over exactly how to proceed. My experience in New Jersey had taught me plenty about just how bitterly partisan the battle over environmental policy has become. I nonetheless thought that we had an opportunity really to accomplish something: to leave America's air cleaner, its water purer, and its land better protected than we had found it. That belief was ­short-­lived.

Once I arrived in Washington, it became abundantly clear that the consequences of the Florida recount were far more traumatic, and ran far deeper, than I had expected. The Democrats were bitter, both from the Clinton impeachment and the recount. Although the courtesy meetings with various senators prior to my confirmation hearings were cordial, it was nevertheless obvious that lines already were being drawn. Members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which had primary jurisdiction over the EPA, made sure I knew they would be watching very closely for any missteps. One leading Democrat told me ­point-­blank that although he had no problem with me, he ­didn't trust the president. His meaning was clear: ­Don't expect a honeymoon.

As for the Republicans, too many in my own party so relished the victories we had won—which put the party in control of the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time in almost fifty years—that they saw little reason to reach out to build a bipartisan consensus on much of anything. Their hubris was inflated when word came out, right after President Clinton left Washington, that he had issued a ­last-­minute flurry of 140 pardons, including several to people closely connected to the Democratic Party and its ­fund-­raising operations. Many Republicans thought that with all the resulting bad press, Bill Clinton's legacy would continue to be an albatross around the Democrats' necks, and Republicans would have that weakness to exploit as the Bush administration took charge. That attitude contributed its fair share to the overheated partisanship that subsequently gripped not only Washington, but also the whole country.

As I witnessed—and experienced—the escalating partisan warfare firsthand in Washington, I asked myself, Where has the process broken down? When had the Senate been transformed from the world's greatest deliberative body into an arena for childish name calling? When had House members morphed from generally respectful colleagues—people who knew how to conduct passionate debates during the day while still maintaining the basic civility to meet one another for friendly dinners at night—into such ­close-­minded and defiant adversaries that they barely spoke to one another in the halls? Why was this same bitterness infecting state houses around the country, and what does it mean for our country and its future?

As we have seen in recent years, most acutely during the 2004 campaign, the harsh tenor of our politics today is infecting the entire body politic, making it increasingly difficult to hold rational discussions about the most important issues facing the country. We spend more time trying to demonize our opponents than we do trying to discuss issues. The challenges we face are simply too important to allow this to continue.

Ever since our founding, Americans have believed that every person has the unlimited possibility to achieve success, based on their abilities and desires. Implicit in that approach is the recognition that not everyone will take the same path, want the same thing, or find themselves in the same place at any point in time. A political party that does not recognize this fundamental precept of American life will not only overlook the wonderful strength that our diversity has long brought us, but will also end up being rejected by the very people it seeks to attract.

These various ­far-­right constituencies of the GOP are, in reality, nothing more than narrow interest groups, and they have not only been demanding that the party leadership kowtow to them; they have actually been seeking to take over the broader party and push the moderates out. In recent years, moderate Republicans who have strayed from this ­hard-­line orthodoxy have been targeted by activists seeking to purge them from the party using primary ballots instead of bullets. The 2004 Pennsylvania Republican primary for the Senate perfectly illustrates the intensity of their vitriol and the counterproductiveness of their zealotry.

Arlen Specter, a ­four-­team moderate Republican senator in a swing state, was challenged in the primary by Patrick Toomey, an archconservative Republican congressman who could be a poster child for the ideological zealots who are trying to exclude from the party those who ­don't share their views. Toomey justified his challenge by saying, “The problem ­we've got is a handful of Republican senators who never really bought into the idea of the Republican Party in the first place. I represent the Republican wing of the Republican Party.” As one of Toomey's most prominent supporters put it, “If we beat Specter, we ­won't have any trouble with wayward Republicans anymore.” Specter won (with the support of President Bush and his fellow Pennsylvania senator, Rick Santorum, himself a much more conservative Republican than Specter), but as far as the ideological zealots were concerned, their candidate's defeat still served an important purpose. Stephen Moore, the head of the Club for Growth and a significant supporter of Toomey, claimed that the challenge to Specter also “serve[d] notice to Chafee, Snowe, Voinovich [all moderate Republican senators] and others who have been problem children that they will be next.” Specter, incidentally, went on to win reelection by 700,000 votes, even as the president was losing Pennsylvania by 100,000.

Specter was hardly alone. Other congressional moderates have had to weather similar assaults, including a longtime friend of mine, former representative Marge Roukema. New Jersey's only woman in Congress for almost twenty years, Marge twice fought off ­well-­financed ­far-­right challenges, only to eventually decide to retire rather than battle in a primary for a third time. Last year, as the Washington Post reported, “In New York state alone, Amo Houghton and Jack Quinn, two House members representing the face of Republican moderation, have announced their retirements.” As Houghton said after making known his plans, “I would like to make sure the Republican Party is centered. We veered too much to the right.” Unfortunately, many Republican moderates have grown weary of the battle and are retreating to the sidelines. We need them to stay engaged.

For a long time now, we moderates have given too much ground to those whose agenda is not to build the party but rather to advance their own narrow ideology. We know that good policy makes for good politics, but we have been too willing to appease those on the extreme, even as they pursue an agenda that's ultimately neither good policy nor good politics. It's time for moderates to accommodate less and demand more.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the social fundamentalists' consolidation of power is the increased movement toward restricting choices. Like fundamentalist movements around the world, the concept of choice—of there being a legitimate range of options and outcomes—is anathema to extreme social fundamentalists.

The party leadership's insistence on meeting the demands of the extreme social fundamentalists has overshadowed its broader commitment to cutting taxes, containing the growth of government, reducing welfare, fighting crime, and helping the private sector create jobs. Those are the issues ­I've focused on as a Republican. During the seven years I was governor of New Jersey we achieved a strong record of Republican success: Taxes were cut more than fifty times, saving the taxpayers more than fifteen billion dollars; the growth of government spending was held to its lowest average in forty years, less than the rate of inflation; the welfare rolls were cut in half; crime was reduced to a ­thirty-­year low; and unemployment was reduced by half, with more people working than ever in the history of the state. That's a good conservative record. Yet I took a great deal of heat from ideological extremists when I was governor because I support a woman's right to choose.

In 1997, when I ran for reelection, a group of lawmakers within my own party who disagreed with me on choice refused to support me, even going so far as to encourage someone named Murray Sabrin, a college teacher with no political experience or credentials, to run against me as a Libertarian in the general election. In doing so, they nearly turned over the governor's office to my Democratic opponent. If I had received even half of the 114,000 votes Sabrin garnered in that election, I would have won by about 100,000 votes in a state that had elected only one other Republican to statewide office in the previous ­twenty-­five years. What's more, the closeness of that election set the stage for Democrat Jim McGreevey's gubernatorial victory in 2001 and a Democratic sweep of both houses of the legislature in 2003. That's no way for Republicans to consolidate a majority or to ensure political relevancy. Unfortunately, the new breed of Republican ideological extremists seems to forget that in order to be able to implement its party agenda, the first goal of any political party is to win elections. Too many of them would rather be “right” than be in power.

There's no doubt party leadership has allowed a few ­hot-­button issues—on which this “new conservative coalition” has taken ­hard-­line positions—to steer it off course, and the extremism on those issues has helped drive the overheated polarization of the American public. On the social issues, on race, and on the environment, extremists within the Republican Party are pushing views that are alienating many of those in the mainstream and holding the party back from attaining true majority leadership in the country.

What, then, will happen to the party if this trend continues? Will more and more Americans become more and more conservative? Or will the party end up marginalizing itself? Throughout the course of America's history, whichever party most closely identifies with the mainstream of political thought—which in the United States has always run down the middle of the road—tends to have been most successful. When either party comes to be dominated by political forces that fall too much outside the mainstream of political thinking, that party becomes increasingly unable to win elections, and thus pursue its policy goals, until it rights itself and moves back to the center. That's why for most of the modern political era, the parties have sought to win elections by appealing to the broadest number of voters. Although each party has had its core constituency, moderates have usually held the key to victory.

When the Democratic Party was taken over by the far left in the late 1960s, it lost five out of the next six presidential elections. Americans ­didn't trust the Democrats with the White House because they ­didn't trust the ability of their presidential candidates to manage the extreme ­left-­wing faction of their party and resist their influence on policy. Only when Bill Clinton was able to assure Americans that he was a “New Democrat” who would govern from the center were the Democrats able to capture the White House for two consecutive elections for the first time since 1964. Clinton was calculating about demonstrating his moderation, in part, by making some very clear moves designed to show his independence from the Democratic left wing. The most notable, perhaps, was when he repudiated an outrageous statement made by a black rapper, Sister Souljah, even while prominent black activists were defending her. Today, the Republican Party, in catering to the right wing, may well be in the process of repeating the mistake the Democrats made in the sixties with the left.

Richard Nixon's famous advice to Republicans was to run to the right in the primary and then move back to the center for the general election. This calculation worked for Republican candidates from Eisenhower through George H. W. Bush's first election, largely because they never had to go so far to the right that they ­couldn't come back to the center. Until the social fundamentalists cut the first President Bush adrift in his reelection campaign in 1992, Republicans had won seven of the previous ten presidential elections. (They thought he had squandered the Reagan legacy and withheld their support, helping make possible eight years of Bill Clinton. Did they really prefer that?) The record since has been somewhat more mixed.

Zell Miller, the Democratic senator from Georgia, wrote a book in 2003, A National Party No More, which talks about this trend in his party. Zell and I served as governors together for a time. He is one of those Democrats who think that their party has moved too far to the left, outside the mainstream of American political thought on such issues as national defense, tax policy, welfare reform, gun control, and abortion. I found his arguments resonating with me, from the other side of the aisle, and I know that many moderate Republicans, who have watched their party move rightward, feel the same sort of alienation.

During my years as governor of New Jersey and administrator of the EPA, I found myself in the middle of some of the most contentious, divisive issues in America today, such as race, abortion, and the environment. I have seen firsthand the damage that can be done in a political civil war, and the difficulties such battles pose to winning and then maintaining a political majority. I have also seen how well the party can do when moderates and conservatives work together in pursuit of the goals they share: the basic principles that make them Republicans.

Despite finding myself in the midst of such controversial issues, I navigated through them fairly successfully because, in no small measure, I was able to appeal to the moderate sensibilities of the electorate. Someone said to me recently, “Any one of several of the things you have gone through would have been enough to destroy most politicians' careers.” That may or may not be true. But I do know this: At a time when our country remains evenly divided between the parties and when the parties are increasingly turning to their bases to try to win elections, an enormous number of Americans find themselves in the middle of the political spectrum and feel they have no place to go. If the Republican Party would get serious about appealing to them, it could not only build a much more impressive majority but also make substantial headway in bringing the country together again.

The past fifteen years have been a fascinating ride for me. Shortly after I was elected governor in 1993, becoming the first person in modern New Jersey political history to defeat the incumbent in a general election, I was touted as the “brightest female star within the Republican Party.” More recently, one observer said of my early days at the EPA that I had “suffered the most immediate and visible loss of clout for a cabinet officer.” The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between.

There is no doubt that the moderate Republicanism I grew up with and that helped me win two statewide elections in New Jersey has been seen as being in eclipse in the national party for more than a decade. I am often asked why I am still a Republican. People who know my politics, who have seen the rightward lurch of the party and know that there are many in the GOP who have worked to exclude me wonder why I stay. I have even been approached by people who think the time has come for a third party that would unite moderates of both parties. When I get that question, I always think back to a cover story about me that ran in The New York Times Magazine in the spring of 1996. There was a picture of me on the cover accompanied by the headline it's my party too.

I liked that message so much that I had the cover framed and hung it in my offices in Trenton and then in Washington. I also decided to use it as the title of this book. To moderate Republicans, that headline proclaimed our belief that there was still room for us in the party of Lincoln. Of course, the social fundamentalists in the party had one of their own verities reinforced: Only the New York Times would think Christie Whitman was any kind of Republican.

Yet the Republican Party is not just the party of the right wing—it is my party too. The basic principles that define Republicanism have not changed. We still believe in limited government, lower taxes, the power of the markets, and a strong national defense. Those basic core beliefs are shared by millions of Americans who, although they may not be comfortable with the rightward shift in the party, are not ready to give up on it. The way to change the party is from within. That is why I stay.

The people of this country deserve better from their politics and their politicians than ­they've been getting in recent years. It ­doesn't have to be this way. You can be passionate and civil, believe deeply and yet respect the beliefs of others. That has always been my understanding of how our political system should work, and it has always informed the way I have tried to conduct my own political career. Despite what too many of today's political operatives think, politics does not have to be shrill and divisive to be effective. Too often, our politics focuses solely on winning an ideological battle without any concern for how the way the victory is achieved might affect the winner's ability to govern. If we can change that dynamic, we will change our politics, and our country, for the better.

It's My Party, Too by Christine Todd Whitman, Copyright (c) January 2005, The Penguin Press, a member of The Penguin Group, Inc., used by permission.