The sidelined wing of the Republican Party, the old-style fiscal conservatives derisively called RINO (Republican in Name Only) by the new-style social conservatives, hopes to rise from the ruins of this year’s election.
The party’s most fervent conservatives have been saying post-election that John McCain, who always carried a whiff of the RINO about him, was not conservative enough. The path to victory, they argue, lies further right — not just fiscal conservatism, but an aggressive social agenda, too.
Other Republicans think that attitude points the party in exactly the wrong direction, toward a reinforcement of the policies that led to the 2008 comeuppance. For them, the repudiation of the right was long overdue. They believe McCain’s gracious concession speech showed the way their party should go. And Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama laid out very clearly his — and their — disappointment with what has happened to the GOP.
They hope the party’s next set of leaders emerges from the middle, not from the fringe, although they’re not sure who would best make that case. It isn’t Sarah Palin; maybe someone more along the lines of Newt Gingrich.
Two of this breed are related to each other. Robert and Dottie Wham, husband and wife, are Republicans who represented southeast Denver and Arapahoe County in the legislature. They are fiscally conservative, but they also favor abortion rights, which puts them at odds with the newer crowd.
“The people considered as possible leaders are all on the very right in terms of the social agenda,” said Dottie Wham. “That’s part of what’s driven the party down.”
“Where the Republican Party went, it left me behind,” said Bob Wham, who served in the Senate from 1977 through 1980. It’s not just the social agenda for him; it’s also “the additional emphasis on ‘no tax is a good tax’; that government is the enemy to be destroyed.”
“I wish we could go back to what the Republicans used to be,” said Dottie Wham, a senator from 1985 through 2000. “We used to value the intellectual.”
Norma Anderson, a former Republican majority leader of both the House and Senate, also comes from the party’s political center. McCain reminds her, she said, of Bob Dole. “He was a funny, interesting man, but he got on the campaign trail and he was a disaster.”
Anderson hopes fear-based campaigning has had its day, although she’s quick to point out that both parties do it. “We have to move into a new way to run campaigns,” she said. She thinks the political pendulum will continue to swing, but she expects Colorado will “remain a purple state” for a while yet.
The Senators Wham think McCain could have been a good president. But he “jumped all over the place, never settled on anything,” said Bob Wham. His campaign was “disappointing,” said Dottie Wham. “He’s a better guy than that campaign was.”
“Social issues are still important to people, but the pocketbook is more important,” said Anderson. Until the economy “took a nosedive,” she said, Obama and McCain were even in the polls. “McCain panicked,” she said.
And the choice of Palin as his running mate added to a sense that he was rash and unpredictable. “No. Sorry. That’s not the direction this country is headed.”
The Whams agree. They voted for Obama, hoping he’s the strong leader the country needs right now, but they’re still cautious about what Bob Wham calls Obama’s “Pied Piper” potential.
They’d love to see a strong Republican leader, someone from “that group of people who were the party in a different time,” said Dottie Wham. “We were both born Republican,” she said. “Let us back in again.”
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
