WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — On a recent ice-swept morning, a group of self-described moderate Republicans met in a hotel convention room, looking to find a way to break the chill of a presidential season that has found many of them left out in the cold.
“Our goal is to get traditional, centrist, moderate Republicans to get to the caucus and make their voices heard,” said former Iowa Lt. Gov. Joy Corning.
“The moderates who are out there, they’ve been rather quiet for a few years,” she said. “Many of them have dropped out of the party or become independents, and so this is an effort to regroup and encourage people to be active.”
About 60 people attended the meeting called by Corning, who served eight years under Gov. Terry Branstad until Democrats took over the governor’s office in 1999. Discussion focused on looking for common ground — largely on fiscal, education and environmental issues — with a conservative wing that is a strong influence on the state’s GOP social agenda.
Taking back the label
But the comments that day echoed a concern voiced nationally by prominent Republican moderates — that the party’s rightward tilt and the heavy spending by what had been a GOP-controlled Washington until the 2006 mid-term congressional elections have left them little more than an afterthought in the party.
Those concerns have been heightened by a Republican presidential primary campaign that finds most of the leading candidates advocating a conservative social agenda as they try to win the nomination by appealing to a GOP base on the right that dominates turnout in many early caucus and primary states.
“It means building the farm team and taking back the word ‘Republican’ to say we don’t have to be the way we are perceived now at the national level — as a mean-spirited, narrow-minded, litmus-test party,” said Christine Todd Whitman, a former New Jersey governor and Bush Cabinet member who now leads the Republican Leadership Council.
“We can be moderate, conservative, liberal as long as we agree on the basic fundamental principles that make us Republicans. You can disagree with someone and not hate them. That’s where we need to get, so that we can have the kind of campaigns at the federal level that actually talk about the important issues and try to solve them instead of trying to outflank the other person — ‘I’m more conservative than you are,’ ” she said.
Centrists want policy
Most Republican presidential contenders are using Iowa to drive such issues as opposition to abortion and tough stands on illegal immigration.
“Immigration is an issue that should have been solved, but it’s been held out there because each of the parties wanted it as a campaign issue,” Whitman said. “Everything is being looked at through a political prism now rather than a policy one. The centrists tend to be people who want the policy decisions, and that’s where most Americans are.”
As the nation’s first presidential contest nears with the Jan. 3 caucuses, the Republican Party in Iowa finds itself searching for ways to unify and looking to restore the power it held for 30 years until Democrats won the governor’s mansion nearly a decade ago.
During their meeting, the group of moderates passed out a sheet of nine “Republican Principles” obtained from the Republican National Committee that stressed promotion of such traditional points as fiscal responsibility, limited government, low taxes, equal rights and opportunity, entrepreneurship and national security.
“The social issues may not be the thing that determines who they go with” for president, Corning said of GOP moderates. “There may be other issues that are equally or more important to them. In fact, in the national polls, they show that those social issues are pretty much at the bottom of things that people are concerned about.”
