David Broder meets an enraged “Republican”
David Broder’s column is called: “Simmering Rage Within the GOP”. The GOP lion Broder met with was presented as having solid Southern Republican values, but he sounded a lot like a country club type from Connecticut:
“My wife was thrilled by the veto” Bush administered last week to the bill expanding federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, because she shares the president’s belief that those clumps of cells destroyed in the research process represent human life. “I thought it was stupid,” he said. “I know too many people who are like this” — and he shook his hands like a victim of Parkinson’s disease — “and their only hope of a cure is in stem cells. Now Bush is forcing that science to move overseas.”
He went on: “How the hell long can they refuse to raise the minimum wage?” He was furious, he said, with the Republican leaders of Congress who keep blocking bills to raise the minimum wage, which has been stuck at $5.15 an hour for years. “I’m a conservative,” he said, “but they make me sound like a damned liberal the way they act. They spend like fools, they run up the deficits and they refuse to give a raise to the working people who are struggling. How the hell are you supposed to live on $5.15 an hour these days?”
“If it wasn’t for Pelosi,” he said, “I’d just as soon the Democrats take over this fall. Get some checks and balances and teach these guys a lesson.”
Three points: (a) whatever you think about the politics of the stem cell veto, it was meaningless in the sense that there are billions of dollars sloshing around private and other coffers for this research; (b) the minimum wage issue seems to be another strange obsession for this stalwart GOP lion, since almost no one makes the minimum wage — it’s 2% of the workforce, and and over half are young people in entry-level jobs; (c) finally, the fellow said that he’d vote Democratic, “if it wasn’t for Pelosi,” making the fellow seem unserious in our opinion.
Pelosi? Huh? How about Dean, Durbin, Kennedy, Feingold, Reid, and all the rest? How about national security? How about judges? How about taxes? But Broder’s friend’s complaints are really not about the GOP. They’re about the religious right. As Broder said: “Whether or not the complaints are justified, they are epidemic. They are often accompanied, as they were in the case of my weekend visitor, by the comment that everything the White House does seems to be aimed at pleasing only one section of the Republican coalition — the religious right.”
There may well be terrible discontent in the Republican Party. We have no idea if there is or is not, and whether it might have an impact on election day. But our advice to David Broder is this: talking to a guy for whom the greatest issues of the day are the minimum wage and federal funding of stem-cell research is no way to find out.