For the range of Republicans falling into the moderate spectrum of the party, recent times can be like living in colonial Boston under Cotton Mather, instigator of the Salem Witch trials.
Speaking to that humid feeling, in “It’s My Party, Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America,” former EPA director and two-term New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman narrates how the GOP was python-swallowed by the far right.
She is weaker on presenting strategies for moderates trying to fight their way back out alive and in one piece.
Whitman’s book is one in a range of post-Inauguration releases that take on Bush’s second term like the broadsides printed by James and Ben Franklin against the Mather tyranny in the 1700s but with language using fewer filigreed flowers disguising thorns.
Why mention colonial Boston and the Franklins? Because America’s tradition of political oratory is important to bear in mind while considering the effectiveness of Whitman’s book as a political argument.
Whitman builds her case through composing a parallel: First, she writes a memoir of a GOP insider watching the rise of conservative revolution (she calls them “social fundamentalists”), drawing a mindful line between the ascent of Barry Goldwater and, later, Dr. James Dobson and the Moral Majority. Alongside memoir, she argues that just as the far left has taken over the Democrats since the Clinton years, a far right minority has monopolized Republican politics.
Between the two, her personal story is the more convincing long trope toward what she calls “A Call for Radical Moderates.” “My Party” is positioned as a GOP companion to Zell Miller’s “A National Party No More” but is more a sequel to former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean’s “Politics of Inclusion,” a book many consider to be Bible for Republican “Big Tent” politics.
When she left the EPA post in 2003, Whitman was the first and most vocal high-profile member of the president’s team who exited the White House out of frustration with policy turns “pandering” to the far right.
Her most publicized disagreements have been in the area of environmental protection. “This Land is Your Land” is the chapter recounting Whitman’s tense showdown with the administration over the Kyoto Treaty. In popular Jersey lore, Whitman was responsible for cleaning up The Shore and thus bringing back dolphins to Cape May. Whitman does well in revealing why real-life battles politicians win aren’t always as Disney-esque as the legends following their oft-compromised successes.
Invoking Kean, it must first be clarified that moderate is not really the right word for Whitman. She is, like Kean, a Rockefeller Republican, a strain of GOP delegate one might say went the way of the mid-afternoon martini right after the Goldwater campaign. Shunning the title as “pejorative,” Whitman skirts around a larger examination of what being a Rockefeller Republican means.
Both Kean and Whitman come from wealthy New Jersey families. Nelson Rockefeller himself was a figure in Whitman’s life growing up. Her grandfather’s contracting company built Rockefeller Center and she discusses the influence the once-wealthiest man in the world had on her thoughts about the role of government in social programs.
From a strictly liberalist (not liberal, to mince bow-tie terms) point-of-view, her aversion deprives the reader of engaging the great American debate of privilege and social responsibility as it has been defined through the platforms of the two parties. It’s an unfortunate aversion because it’s a debate that has influenced strategies of social uplift from compassionate conservatism to the Cool Rich Kids movement on the social left.
Whether one digs or despises John McWhorter, political discourse at the front of Borders has to be viewed from the lens of his book, “Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why we Should, like, Care.” In it, McWhorter bemoans everyday English dumbing-down American political rhetoric. McWhorter capitulates that Bush goes down as the first American president who has never used oratory to sway public opinion.
The value of oratory, McWhorter says, is selling citizens on participating in a national direction through compelling stories told in emotional tones and employing a brand of bold public language unique to democracies.
Applying this viewpoint, “My Party” echoes Kean’s “Inclusion” but lacks its visionary fervor. This is especially true in her discussion about Democrats’ monopoly over the modern civil rights discussion. Ann Coulter in a lucid moment away from her acidic “I hate my ex-Democrat-student-government-boyfriend-for-life” humor, discusses this dicey issue with more bite in “How to Talk to a Liberal.” Whitman needs a little Coulter rant to make us feel moved to move.
Often, meekness can be a sign of omitting wrongdoing vis-?-vis true leadership. Whitman was once accused of voter suppression, while Kean marched with Dr. King.
Time in Wisconsin has made this reviewer realize moderate Republicans are a foreign beast that rarely crosses through Pennsylvania woods or over the Illinois border.
As Whitman acknowledges in “My Party,” many on the right and left believe her brand of Republican is as fictional as the Jersey Devil. Her story gives evidence to a rare bird that is active, meaningful bi-partisan policy making. She also does well in showing Republicans can have a social conscience.
Yet, for all the alarm-ringing over ‘social fundamentalist” takeover, there seems to be a lot of backing down along the way. While criticizing Reagan’s 11th Commandment, “thou shalt not speak ill of thy fellow Republicans,” she also adheres to it. This question sums up a public perception about the center Whitman doesn’t fully address — moderates or milquetoast?
As a self-portrait, “My Party” doesn’t lose the Christine Whitman her home-state fans, (and this reviewer) have come to adore. As Jersey Italians would say, a leader with ugatz.
More than any policy accomplishment, Whitman forged the way for women to take true power in the Republican Party and helped reverse its progression into a single-issue pro-life face during the ’90s. Nothing small. Yet Whitman falls short, for the unconvinced and unconverted, in using her achievements to execute her own mandate.
Grade: BC
