Reflecting national trends, the news just keeps getting better for Democrats here in Arkansas.
First they won every statewide office on the ticket. Beginning next year,
Arkansas will no longer have a Republican governor - the reform-minded Mike
Huckabee is now considering a presidential campaign. (The death earlier this
year of Winthrop Rockefeller, the state's promising lieutenant governor and
one of the GOP's bright hopes, was a blow to both his party and state.)
Now the GOP's most polarizing figure - a state senator from Arkansas' hilly
Northwest who was beaten soundly in the lieutenant governor's race - has
announced he's leaving elective politics. He's Jim Holt, who ran a campaign
heavy on ideology and light on reform. He did his best to exploit fears
about illegal immigration and railed against the Republican governor's plan
to improve education. And those were Jim Holt's moderate positions.
After his second defeat in a statewide race, Mr. Holt now plans to form his
own little pressure group. That way, he can preach to the converted without
fear of contradiction - or rejection by the voters. He'll doubtless be a big
hit on the e-mail circuit, where he can rail to his heart's content against
the minimum wage, early childhood education, and other Soviet conspiracies
he mentioned during the campaign.
Talk about a twofer for the Democrats: Not only did they sweep into every
statewide office, but they'll still have Jim Holt to kick around. If he can
be portrayed as the face of the Republican Party, its chances of once again
appealing to the broad middle of the electorate will be pretty much gone.
But a petty consideration like winning elections needn't trouble the kind of
zealots who just want to hear their own views repeated and magnified. As in
an echo chamber. What fun - a lot more fun than the real world, where
political leaders are expected to enter the public arena, not withdraw from
it to organize their own little club.
After the GOP's Neanderthal right had been largely wiped out in the midterm
elections of 1958, wise old Whittaker Chambers warned his party about the
dangers of such self-indulgence. He knew that, in a practical-minded,
results-oriented, can-do society like this one, ideologues tend to wind up
sealing themselves off from public opinion instead of leading it.
Writing to a young conservative friend of his named William F. Buckley, the
always eloquent Mr. Chambers came up with the perfect metaphor for the
danger represented by the party's far-right fringe:
"If the Republican Party cannot get some grip of the actual world we live
in," he prophesied, "and from it generalize and actively promote a program
that means something to masses of people - why, somebody else will. There
will be nothing to argue. The voters will simply vote Republicans into
singularity. The Republican Party will become like one of those dark little
shops which apparently never sell anything. If, for any reason, you go in,
you find, at the back, an old man, fingering for his own pleasure, some
oddments of cloth. Š Nobody wants to buy them, which is fine because the old
man is not really interested in selling. He just likes to hold and to feel."
Whittaker Chambers' observation remains relevant every time an American
political party ties itself to its true believers - and winds up wondering
why it lost.
The moral of the story: If the Republican Party wants to become a permanent
minority, one sure way to do it is to embrace the nuttism of its Jim Holts.
Because their political fortunes aren't likely to improve as the years pass
and the country's Hispanic population grows.
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