Essay: It's Your Party - 9/6/07
Traditionally, it has been seen as improper for journalists to give advice to elected officials. This is, however, a tradition which gets violated all the time, and which I intend to violate again today.
Actually, my conscience is clear on this issue, since to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever listened to me anyway.
So I would like to say to Congressman Joe Schwarz -- if you are thinking of switching parties and running for your old seat as a Democrat, don't do it. I mean it -- don't. Here's why.
First of all, you wouldn't be comfortable, by and large, as a Democrat. Yes, you are closer to Democratic positions on some issues, but by no means all. You wouldn't be fully accepted by them.
And you would be reviled by your fellow Republicans. Your enemies in the party would say this is proof they were right all along. That you were nothing but a RINO -- a Republican in Name Only.
For a politicians, changing parties is almost the emotional equivalent of a sex change. Donald Riegle, a congressman from Flint who later became a U.S. Senator, was able to make it work.
But he did it when he was 35. Though you are still healthy, vigorous and mentally agile, you turn seventy this November.
That means there is probably not enough time left for you to successfully reinvent your political identity and be effective,
If you plunge into the Seventh District primary as a Democrat, you will not only be sneered at by the Republicans.
You will be attacked and resented by supporters of the two Democratic candidates already in that race, State Senator Mark Schauer and former State Senator Jim Berryman.
Those are not, however, the main reasons you should stay in the Republican Party. It is because the genius of our political system is that our great parties have not been narrowly ideological, that they have had room for diversity of views.
We have been masters of the politics of compromise, not the politics of civil war. When our politicians or our parties have been perceived as being too narrowly ideological, the voters have tended to punish them. As witness Barry Goldwater or George McGovern.
Lately the Republican party has gotten more narrow and rigid. If it stays on that course, my guess it is cruising for a fall.
The one time the GOP has ever flirted with extinction was during the Great Depression. Narrow, bitter opposition to change had left the Republicans with only 89 seats in the entire House of Representatives in the year you, Joe Schwarz, were born.
Three years later, a charismatic new presidential candidate named Wendell Willkie helped move the party back to the center. He didn't win, but he may have saved the Republican Party.
Even if it feels like the barbarians pushed you out, it ought to be worth a wrestling match to try to take back the ring.
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