Lindsey Graham Doesn’t Get It

There’s a growing notion that fiscal conservatives are somehow to blame for the collapse of the Republican Party – that we have created a “small tent” that is pushing voters away.

Funny, we thought people of all genders, colors and sexual orientations liked personal freedom and being able to keep more of their money – at least that’s what several civil rights movements and “the money we could be saving with Geico” told us.

Yet in spite of those fundamental truths, another myth is beginning to form – and certain Republicans are helping form it.

Their latest opportunity to propagate the fiction? The decision of Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter to bolt from the GOP.

From The Politico:

Two leading Republicans say Sen. Arlen Specter’s decision to become a Democrat highlights the hostility moderates feel from an increasingly conservative GOP.

“You haven’t certainly heard warm encouraging words about how [the GOP] views moderates,” said Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, one of the few remaining moderate Republicans in the Senate.

Snowe said the party’s message has been, “Either you’re with us or you’re against us.”

Her frustration was shared by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), who slammed right-wing interest groups for pushing moderates out of the party.

Specter switched parties Tuesday after a recent poll showed him badly losing a Pennsylvania Republican primary next year to Club for Growth founder Pat Toomey. Toomey’s staunchly fiscally conservative political action committee backs only those Republicans who support a low-tax, limited-government agenda and comes down hard on those who break with party orthodoxy.

“I don’t want to be a member of the Club for Growth,” said Graham. “I want to be a member of a vibrant national Republican party that can attract people from all corners of the country — and we can govern the country from a center-right perspective.”

“As Republicans, we got a problem,” he said.

Are you effing kidding us? The party of George Bush, Trent Lott and Ted Stevens was the most flamingly liberal (fiscally speaking, anyway) in American history – until their excesses ushered in the era of the smooth-talking commies.

Seriously, Democrats are only in power today because Republicans spent too much money- and in the process were shown to be hypocritical, lying, corrupt and out-of-touch with the people they should have been hooking up with real tax cuts, not Dubya’s laughable excuse for them.

The fact that the party is 99% comprised of crotchety old white men obviously doesn’t help matters, but most people still vote according to pocketbook, not pigmentation.

In fact, when exit polls were parsed from the first round of GOP bloodletting three years ago, Republicans were shown to have been beaten because they were the big spenders. In fact, one poll in Ohio showed that a majority of young voters identified Republicans as “the party of big government.”

And what of last year’s electoral debacle?

Well, the last time we checked, Obama won (and carried Democrats across the country with him) because his otherwise generic vision of change was accompanied by a “middle class tax cut” – a variation of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s classic cavalry maxim “get there firtsus with the mostus.”

What we mean is that Obama told a majority of voters he was going to give them money – and make somebody else pay for it.

Republicans had no answer to that because, for whatever reason, they were unwilling to promote truly conservative fiscal policy that would have given every American a sizable tax cut.

Why didn’t they do that? We’ll never know. Obama could have been easily outflanked on pocketbook issues – but Republicans apparently couldn’t stomach giving up their entitlement culture.

And what of the oft-repeated mandate for “change?”

Well, “change”could have been fixing Social Security, privatizing health care, ending welfare and enacting school choice nationwide.

It also could have been implementing a federal spending cap and coming up with a plan to get rid of our crippling national debt.

It could have been sweeping ethics reform that would truly – once and for all – clean up the culture of DC corruption.

But Republicans had no appetite for any of that … and so the Democrats emerged as the only party offering something different, even if the promises of “change” turned out to be vastly different than what anyone ever imagined.

Oh, and Lindsey, the GOP could have stood up for all of those things while pursuing pro-black, pro-gay and pro-female positions.

Like we said, last time we checked – everybody likes getting more of their money back.

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