Republicans' Strategy May Backfire
2006-09-14
Source: Wall Street Journal
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rss feedThe Republican Party leadership won the primary battle in Rhode Island, getting their preferred candidate, incumbent Sen. Lincoln Chafee, past a conservative challenger. But at what cost?
To boost prospects of holding the Republican seat, the party backed the moderate Mr. Chafee and spent nearly a million dollars on direct-mail and television advertising against Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey, who ran as the kind of conservative the White House usually likes and who pledged to support the very Bush tax cuts Mr. Chafee opposed. That tactic angered Laffey supporters and could deter them from voting in November when Mr. Chafee squares off with Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, a former attorney general whose campaign is flush with cash.
"When you aggressively attack a candidate who stands for the ideas shared by the vast majority of Republicans, that's demoralizing," says Pat Toomey, a former congressman who heads Club for Growth, an antitax group that backed Mr. Laffey.
Just as trends may be turning slightly more favorable for Republicans, Tuesday's back-to-back clashes between the Republican Party machine and its base in Rhode Island as well as in Arizona could diminish turnout among conservative voters in November. Turnout by that voting bloc carried the president in 2000 and 2004.
But frustration among those voters has been mounting for years and covers issues such as government spending, the Iraq war and illegal immigration. "Conservatism traditionally was a philosophy of smaller government. In the Bush years, it appears it isn't," says David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Washington Monthly this month published a collection of essays, titled "Time For Us To Go," by conservatives on the theme that Republicans have so lost their way they would be better off losing their majorities as well.
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