Arnold Schwarzenegger -- the smartest guy in their room

By Richard K. Barry 

When Arnold Schwarzenegger is starting to sound like the smartest guy in the Republican Party, it might be time for Republicans to regroup and rethink where they are going.

Much to his credit, Arnold put it out there in a recent op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times. He's taking his own party to task for requiring litmus tests that close off practical discussion, or, as he put it:

It's time to stop thinking of the Republican Party as an exclusive club where your ideological card is checked at the door, and start thinking about how we can attract more solution-based leaders like Nathan Fletcher and Anthony Adams. 

Nathan Fletcher is a San Diego mayoral candidate and Anthony Adams is a current Congressional candidate. They both left the Republican Party to run as independents

As Schwarzenegger wrote:

I'm sure they would have preferred to remain Republicans, but in the current climate, the extreme right wing of the party is targeting anyone who doesn't meet its strict criteria. Its new and narrow litmus test for party membership doesn't allow compromise.

Schwarzenegger presents himself as a devoted free market, small government, guy. Okay, we know where he stands and we can talk about that. But he also discusses Ronald Reagan's willingness to raise taxes, Eisenhower's interest in infrastructure expenditures, and Nixon's work on health care and environmental issues, ideas he knows are not supposed to be on the table for Republicans.

People can claim that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is really a moderate at heart and, if elected, will govern as a pragmatist. Maybe that's true, but he's running to placate the radical right wing of his party and, if elected, he will have a hard time working with what he has wrought.

But, if he loses, and if the Democrats do well in House and Senate races, the GOP may wake to discover that they are eating their own young and not doing a very good job of presenting the kinds of ideas that can actually be useful in winning elections or governing the country.

One theory of electoral politics is that, since most voters sit comfortably in the middle of the ideological spectrum, national elections are really about courting the centre. There are differences between left and right, important differences, but both sides need to temper all of that to win elections. The act of governing can take on much the same dynamic. To win passage of legislation, one has to take some of the sharp edges off. That's politics.

As someone on the left, that frustrates me because change never comes fast enough, but it does come.

What the GOP is doing now is to dig in their heels, make compromise impossible, and make the realization of practical solutions a cruel joke. Given where we are, campaigning and governing from the "vital center," as historian Arthur Schlesinger once dubbed it in a different context, would be a marked improvement.

I'm shocked to hear myself say this, but it seems that I do long for the days when politics really was about the "art of the deal."

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)