Five or six years ago, when I was teaching at what for now at least is still known as Metro State, there was a campus dust-up involving a student election. One of the candidates, a fiery lady of decidedly liberal persuasion, objected to some arrangement that had been made for a debate, or balloting or whatever.
The issue was entirely forgettable, but her position was not. In a democracy, she said, a person shouldn’t have to compromise.
Wrong, fiery liberal lady! In a democracy, or a constitutional republic, or however it is we are governing ourselves, nothing gets accomplished without compromise. Nobody can reasonably expect to get everything he or she wants. Both sides deserve to be listened to.
As the fiery campus liberal lady illustrates, the scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners approach happens on the left as well as the right side of the political spectrum. But the right has better slogans — and acronyms, too.
House Speaker Frank McNulty and Majority Leader Amy Stephens are being called RINOs by critics, apparently because they’re working with Democrats on issues such as health care and not doing enough to repeal bills the Democrats passed when they were in power.
RINO is an acronym for Republican in Name Only, and fringe- dwellers use it as an insult against those who prefer to stay more to the middle of the road rather than run off into a ditch on the right-hand side.
Left-wing Democrats don’t appear to have a comparable acronym for their insufficiently rabid party members. DINO might work — it has the added implication that the person is hopelessly outdated — except that the Republicans had that particular idea first, and nobody likes a copycat.
There are “yellow-dog Democrats” and “blue-dog Democrats,” but it’s difficult to remember which color of dog always votes the party line, no matter what, and which one occasionally wanders over to the other side of the aisle, wagging its tail.
What reasonable Republicans need is an acronym of their own to counter the people who splutter “RINO” anytime someone smiles at a Democrat. Republicans, after all, have long used an acronym to describe themselves: GOP, for Grand Old Party. It dates back to a time when everyone was more or less on the same page, not RINOs against GRRRs (an acronym I just invented for Grumpy, Radically Reactionary Republicans, and which RINOs may feel free to use in self-defense, if they wish).
But back to what the moderates might call themselves. Something that’s as easy to pronounce as RINO, and that has a strong, respectable, even patriotic aura about it; an acronym that, if you ran it up the proverbial flagpole, people would salute.
Perhaps TRUE would do, for “True Republicans, Unlike Extremists.” Or ROMR might work as an acronym, for “Reasonable, Open-Minded Republican.” The problem with that, though, is that it sounds exactly like Romer, a family hereabouts that has the potential to become a Democratic dynasty.
It’s worth noting that Gov. Roy Romer often was criticized by some in his party for being too chummy with Republicans and big business. But he was re-elected twice, another in the long string of examples that moderation and bipartisanship are popular with voters.
To some government critics, this is just “politics as usual.” It’s “do this for me, and I’ll do this for you,” said one of the radically conservative people who find the McNulty-Stephens agreeableness to be disagreeable. Actually, that sort of give-and-take is also called “negotiation,” or possibly even “good manners,” and civilization couldn’t function without it.
So here’s one more possible acronym for the RINO Republicans to use in fighting back: RARE, for “Reasonable, Astute Republican. Electable.”
Freelance columnist Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
