URL: http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/guest_columns/546430opinion03-15-07.htm

Thursday, March 15, 2007
GOP Losing Battle for West
Ned Farquhar / For the Journal
    For western Democrats, the scariest Republican isn't the fire-breathing right-winger who scorns moderation and hews rigidly to think-tank ideology. Instead, the scariest Republican is the centrist who appeals to voters by being reasonable, collaborative, and non-partisan.
    Voters in most western states cross over party lines. That's why centrist western Democrats support gun rights and tax cuts, and smart western Republicans want to address global warming and land conservation.
    Western Republicans have hurt themselves in the last couple of decades by interpreting the Reagan revolution as a free pass to all-conservative, all-the-time politics. They went around the bend, got lost in the sun. As a result, in the past five years alone, Democrats have taken five of eight Mountain West governors' seats.
    All eight of those states were led by Republican governors five years ago. Similarly, before the 2004 elections, the only Mountain West Senate Democrats were Montana's Max Baucus and New Mexico's Jeff Bingaman, who have been joined by Jon Tester from Montana (2006) and Ken Salazar from Colorado (2004). No wonder the national Democratic party is bringing its national presidential nominating convention to Denver in 2008. The Democrats see there's big opportunity here in the West.
    Colorado is an interesting example.
    Suddenly that state, for the first time since JFK was in the White House, has a Democratic governor and Democratic legislative majorities. In 2006, the Democrats snagged two more of the state's congressional seats. It isn't only because Colorado Democrats came back to the center, represented by the '06 election of crime-fighting former prosecutor Bill Ritter as governor. It's also because Colorado Republicans painted themselves into an ideological corner during the past 20 years.
    They hurt themselves by becoming too right-wing for their own good. For instance, it felt great in the 1990s when they successfully pushed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR. But fast population growth, combined with unexpected cuts in federal funding to states under GOP leadership in Congress, forced the state to recognize that it was starving itself. The tax limits were just too tight, and voters relaxed them late last year.
    Another example of Republican overreach in Colorado: GOP then-Gov. Bill Owens' repeated vetoes of Colorado energy efficiency legislation, destined to become law, at last, this year. Even with consumers and businesses suffering from exorbitant natural gas prices, Owens supported the status quo. Ideologically, he couldn't embrace cost-effective energy efficiency and opposed renewable energy bills, leading to the only voter-passed renewable energy requirement in the country.
    Republicans would be smart to watch their most prominent western leaders, who are ideological chameleons.
    California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tried out the GOP think-tank agenda in several labor-busting, anti-government referenda in late 2005. Every single one of his proposals went down, most of them decisively. Within 24 hours, Schwarzenegger pulled a 180 and started to climb out of the political basement.
    The Terminator terminated his relationship with the right wing, humbly saying he should have listened to his (Democratic) wife, who had counseled against the referenda. His new agenda— the pre-election 2006 agenda— was laden with infrastructure spending, financial support for education, California's world-leading global warming policy, and cooperation with Democrats. Arnold got re-elected in a landslide.
    In Arizona, John McCain defined himself as a maverick and gained credibility as a strong presidential contender because of it. He went up against evangelical powers in the 2000 presidential campaign, co-sponsored global warming legislation in Congress, and led centrist senators against the White House and GOP leadership when they tried to permanently change Senate voting rules to weaken the opposition in 2005.
    The Republicans have real strengths in the West, particularly in several Mountain West states that are not going to turn blue, such as Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho. And inertia in the Senate protects more than a dozen western GOP Senate seats.
    Still, western Republicans would be wise to take note of how partisan ideology hurts in most of the West.
    This region is unlike the South and the Northeast. It's a battleground region— arguably the battleground region— in a nation that has been separated into two camps by recent politics and policy. Western Democrats, including Gov. Bill Richardson, have been faster to recognize that the first one to the center is likely to make the most voters happy.
    Can Republicans learn from that kind of leadership?
    E-mail to inthewest@comcast.net