Another Republican Crosses the Line
Last night, during a live radio interview on The Bernie Ward Program in San Francisco, Pete McCloskey, former moderate Republican representative from Northern California, said he had officially severed his ties to the party by registering as a Democrat for the first time in his adult life. McCloskey joined Congress in 1967 along with Bush I and a few other Republican moderates. He was an important voice of moderation in the party until he left office in 1982.
In a wide-ranging interview McCloskey spoke of the similarities that led to our involvement in both the Vietnam War and the War in Iraq – the lies and general lack of congressional oversight to name just two. And just like Vietnam he called the Iraqi occupation “impossible”, and that the current occupation, “…creates more terrorists than we kill.” He added that the Bush II administration’s foreign policy, “has been a disaster.”
McCloskey then spoke about his early years as a Republican. He joined the party at age 21 in 1948. He said. “ We were the party of the environment, the party of civil rights, the party of a woman’s right of choice… We believed in small government and a balanced budget. And not one of those things is the tenet of the current Republican Party. The party that came in with Newt Gingrich in 1994 completely changed the principles that were followed from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford and to Ronald Reagan.”
He then when on to present a laundry list of policy changes from government intrusion into private lives of women, to renunciation of international treaties that “are repugnant to this administration, and have “hamstrung the concept of international cooperation… all these things caused me to cross the line", he remarked.
When the Republican Party starts losing life-long moderates like McCloskey, they also have lost their identity as a party that can represent significant parts of the population. Regardless of the name, it is now the Conservative Party. And its future is in peril.
The question now is: How will the Democratic Party act over the next few years, if and when it becomes the only domestic superpower on the nation’s political landscape?
Anyway, for now welcome to the party, Pete.