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Once upon a time, a liberal Republican was a star

by Michael Wolraich 9/22/2011 - 11:30 am   |

If presidential hopeful Rick Perry should awaken one night in a cold sweat with the Ghost of Republican Past hovering by his bedside, the apparition will likely take the form of Sen. Charles Percy, who passed away on Saturday after a long struggle with Alzheimer's disease.

Percy's political career ended when he lost his Illinois Senate seat in 1984, the same year that future Texas Gov. Rick Perry won his first election to the Texas House of Representatives as a Democrat. Charles Percy's fall from GOP wunderkind to party outcast offers a vivid illustration of the Republican Party's mutation from a vibrant and diverse coalition to the dogmatic cult of conservative ideology that it has become today.

Read the full article at CNN.com

I thought you might mention Senator Lamar Alexander's recent announcement that he's stepping down from the GOP leadership team so he can feel at greater liberty to pursue bipartisan agreements on some issues (!). 

That announcement, and the reactions to it, should have drawn a chorus of commentary on what it says about today's GOP, but didn't.  Alexander was quoted as saying he's very much a "Republican Republican", not a party-switcher or anything like that.  And the announcement was greeted with public approval from his GOP peers in the Senate, which I thought was, perhaps unintentionally, quite revealing, but also did not seem to draw much comment.

by AmericanDreamer 9/22/2011 - 1:09 pm

I missed the news. It would have been a great point.

by Michael Wolraich 9/22/2011 - 1:28 pm (re: AmericanDreamer)

I was impressed by this and immediately I drop my guard or my dem garb.

It takes sooooo very much courage to even say the things he has recently.

And normally I do not trust people called Lamar or Alexander. hahahah

by Richard Day 9/23/2011 - 12:14 am (re: AmericanDreamer)

A brilliant piece. And maybe Perry is a "bridge" too far. Let's hope he's too far out of the spectrum and it will be a bridge back to sanity in the Republican party.

I watched the first Contender series on C-Span, Henry Clay of Kentucky. He tried and failed in three Presidential elections.

During the program there were snippets of Ron Paul and McConnell making Senate speeches referencing Henry Clay. I felt the bile rise up in the back of my throat. The juxtaposition of these small minded hacks compared to Clay was almost unbearable.  

 

by Oxy Mora 9/22/2011 - 2:01 pm
Your piece makes a very good point about Percy's passing that some in Illinois are making. My father and I had a conversation along the primary theme of your piece, and he is a Republican from Illinois. Your linking it back to your book's theme, though, having lived through and participated a bit in the Simon-Percy campaign, is incorrect, respectfully. Simon won because he rolled his native southern Illinois, and did pretty well with urban Dems, which is a winning coalition in Illinois whenever it holds. It's how Illinois went so heavily for Clinton in 1992, why it elected Paul Simon and Alan Dixon as Senators, and why conversely, though Illinois is almost the only state to elect a black US Senator, it took three-way races (no pun intended, Jack Ryan) to do so. Illinois' Republican governors, Edgar, Ryan, and Thompson, were more liberal than national GOPers. Ryan put a moratorium on the death penalty, shortly before his own incarceration. Indeed, I declined to vote for the southernmost Illinoisian, Glenn Poshard, against Ryan, because Ryan was more liberal. And Peter Fitzgerald, an Illinois GOPer in the Senate, was a moderate. But good piece, to be sure.
by Articleman 9/22/2011 - 5:56 pm

There is rarely any one reason why a given race goes one way or the other. Other reasons cited by the papers include the power of the Chicago political machines and a $1.1 million negative ad campaign by a pro-Israeli Californian who despised Percy for his criticism of Israel. I was therefore careful in my language not to suggest that the right-wing endorsement of Simon was the primary factor in his victory.

That said, the bitter primary against Tom Corcoran, who was backed by the New Right, did take a toll on Percy. And it never helps when prominent leaders from your own political base endorse your opponent in the general election.

So given that Percy lost by less than two percentage points, there is enough evidence to suggest that the New Right's efforts to purge Percy was a factor in his loss, even if it was not the factor or even the biggest factor.

by Michael Wolraich 9/22/2011 - 9:33 pm (re: Articleman)

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