The Lesser Heralded Defeat of the Right from Last Week

Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine, has a good op-ed at the NYTimes this Sunday about the fracturing of the increasingly tenuous factions within the Republican party (A Tent Divided; available to all NYTimes.com members, not just the Times Select). There's been a lot of talk in the last week about Tim Kaine's gubanatorial win in Virgina and the Governator's referundum defeats in Caul-ee-fohr-neeaah, but there was also a significant rollback of a specious anti-tax state constitutional amendment from 1992 in Colorado:

But perhaps the most striking exhibit is Colorado, which passed Referendum C, a ballot proposition that suspends one of the Republican anti-tax movement's proudest national achievements: the 1992 state constitutional amendment forcing Colorado to return budget surpluses to the voters regardless of the fiscal climate or any perceived need for public investment.

Referendum C is the product of an alliance between the state's Republican governor (long a supporter of the amendment) and the Democratic House speaker. That partnership brought together organized education, Chambers of Commerce, suburban mayors, real estate developers and conventional labor Democrats, all of whom believed that the state couldn't meet its education and transportation needs while systematically emptying its treasury every year.

Left on the other side were a Christian right that didn't particularly care about the issue, some urban blue-collar populists and an anti-tax militia that lacked sufficient strength to be competitive.

Perhaps no one looked sillier in the aftermath of the Colorado vote than Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, who barnstormed against Referendum C and declared after the vote that Gov. Bill Owens, the referendum's chief supporter, had forfeited his future in national politics. Mr. Owens responded that he didn't want a career in national politics.

Indeed, it is Mr. Norquist's informal political alliance, what he calls the "Leave Us Alone" coalition, that points up the most serious rents in the 21st-century Republican fabric. Over the past decade, the coalition has grown from its original libertarian base to include Christian Right activists whose agenda of moral regulation represents a flat rejection of libertarian values. It is the modern-day equivalent of Bella Abzug, the New York feminist, and James Eastland, the Mississippi segregationist, attending Democratic conventions together in the 1960's. It is too ridiculous to last, and it won't.

He ends with this caution:

None of this means that the Democratic Party will return to majority status any time soon. What it does suggest is that running against Republicans, in much of the country, is no longer the political equivalent of rocket science. It requires candidates who can find the torn places in the tent and then push through them. Bill Clinton knew how to do that; incumbent governor Mark Warner and his successor Tim Kaine learned how to do it in Virginia. John Kerry never quite figured it out and didn't become president.

It remains to be seen whether the next Democratic applicant for the job will grasp the opportunity. But it is there for the taking.

That's the trick. And the big work we've got ahead of us to let a majority of the American people know that the Republican party does not speak for the country as a whole, and that it is dominated by smaller, splintered groups who have some worthwhile ideas to bring to the conversation (and some definitely not so worthwhile) who have loud voices. As Howard Dean noted, Democrats don't have to define the whole party and platform today. But 2006 is coming up quickly, and it's soon going to be time to debate the finer points of policy and then come to a consensus on reality-based answers to the issues that currently define this nation (Iraq, trustworthiness in governance, terrorism, energy alternatives, and poverty, and education) and act as a unified party that will make a stand.