Last days for the 'Rockefellers'

Moderate GOP tradition fades

(AP) Above, US Representative Christoper Shays of Connecticut.

Tuesday's election will not only decide the presidency, it may also determine the future of the New England brand of moderate Republicanism, which is facing extinction.

The Northeast moderates, often called the Rockefeller Republicans after the former New York governor, were once as much a New England tradition as traffic jams on the Kancamagus Highway in leaf-peeping season. Their ranks included James Jeffords in Vermont, Lowell Weicker in Connecticut, Edward Brooke and William Weld in Massachusetts, and two generations of Chafees in Rhode Island.

But the rightward tug of Southern conservatives on the national Republican Party for the past 40 years has left the Northeast moderates in a bind - Democrats are taking their voters, and hard-line conservative policies in Washington are scaring off their campaign contributors, said former Rhode Island US Senator Lincoln Chafee.

"I just saw a bunch of Rockefeller Republicans camped out under an underpass," Chafee deadpanned in an interview. "They're all homeless, pushing shopping carts."

In 1973, 10 of 25 US House members from New England were Republicans.

There's one left - Christopher Shays of Connecticut, who calls himself an "endangered species." Shays faces another tough race this year, against Democrat Jim Himes.

Maine has two moderate Republicans in the US Senate, Olympia Snowe, reelected in 2006, and Susan Collins, who is fighting a challenge this year from US Representative Tom Allen, a Democrat. Polls lean in Collins's direction.

Count Chafee among the politicians without a party. After losing reelection in 2006, Chafee concluded that the Republican Party had gone too far to the right. He disaffiliated to become independent, following the example of other moderates, such as Jeffords, the former US senator, and Weicker, a former US senator and governor.

Last week Weld, the former Massachusetts governor, axed whatever future he might have had as a Republican candidate, by crossing party lines to endorse Democrat Barack Obama for president.

To become the majority party again, Weld said, the Republican Party needs a bigger tent. Paraphrasing Bill Parcells, a former New England Patriots coach, Weld told Republicans in an MSNBC interview: "Let's elongate the field, and we'll put more points on the board."

His comments were similar to those of another moderate Republican who is supporting Obama, former secretary of state Colin Powell, who served under President George W. Bush.

"I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years," Powell said on "Meet the Press."

"It has moved more to the right than I would like to see it."

Before the party began moving right, with the nomination of conservative Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, New England was reliable Republican territory. Defying Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 Democratic landslide, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut supported Republican Herbert Hoover. In the late 1940s, Republicans held 21 of 28 House seats in New England.

This year, Obama leads polls in all six New England states, including the former Republican stronghold of New Hampshire, which George W. Bush won in 2000. On Tuesday, US Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican, may lose his seat to former governor Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat. Shaheen led 52 percent to 44 percent in a poll released yesterday by Rasmussen Reports. The poll's margin of error was 4 percent.

The last best hope for the moderate Republicans may have passed in August, said Chafee, when John McCain picked conservative Sarah Palin to be his running mate, over more moderate Republicans such as former governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania.

The cheers and applause from religious conservatives over Palin's selection drowned out the sound of the door slamming on the "Rockefellers."

"The Palin pick was very big," said Chafee. "It was a huge signal as to the future of the party."

University of Vermont political science professor Garrison Nelson put it more bluntly, "The Rockefeller Republicans? They're dead. These guys have been so banished. Chris Shays is walking around as a caucus of one."

Rockefeller Republicans are named for Nelson Rockefeller, the former New York governor whose political resume as a diplomat, presidential adviser, and national candidate was so vast, his two years as Gerald Ford's vice president are almost an afterthought. A leader of the more liberal wing of the Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s, he died in 1979.

The "Rockefellers" are generally known for being tight-fisted with the public's money, for strong environmental policies, and for holding liberal views on social issues. They generally favor abortion rights and keeping religion out of politics, two points of disagreement with the GOPs religious right.

"Once the Republican Party moved south and west, that was it," said Nelson, the University of Vermont professor. The GOP "found Jesus" with the rise of the religious right, he said, which "left no room for the New England Republicans."

Weicker, who formed his own independent party to run for governor of Connecticut in 1990, said the GOP's intolerance for liberal social views has shrunk the tent so much that New England no longer fits.

"Social issues can't be the raison d'etre of the Republican Party," said Weicker, who also has endorsed Obama.

Conservatives sometimes call the Rockefellers "RINOs," for Republicans In Name Only, and blame them for colluding with ideological enemies from across the aisle.

Moderate Republicans "give Democrats cover by supporting their bills, to allow them to be called bipartisan," said Chuck Muth, a Nevada-based writer and blogger who heads the conservative networking organization, Citizen Outreach. "It hurts the GOP when you have people in the party who don't agree with the philosophy. It confuses the brand."

The split between the Republican Party and its Rockefeller wing began when the namesake was hooted down at the party convention in 1964, and continued when he was squeezed off the Republican ticket in favor of the more conservative Bob Dole when President Gerald Ford sought reelection in 1976.

The decline of the moderate Republicans accelerated under the presidency of George W. Bush, said Chafee. Moderate political donors who supported Chafee when he ran for US Senate in 2000 were reluctant to give to his reelection campaign in 2006, when party control of the Senate was a key issue. "These people didn't want [a conservative Republican] controlling the Senate Judiciary Committee," said Chafee.

State Representative Elizabeth Hager, a pro-choice Republican from Concord, N.H., has served 13 terms in the State House since 1972 but was defeated in the September primary by a slate of newcomers in the state's multi-candidate House election system who teamed up to beat her with a more conservative message on taxes. She predicts her constituents will vote Democratic on Tuesday. Her loss, she said, was a defeat for Rockefeller Republicans, and she's discouraged.

"I don't see any groundswell to get the moderates back into the Republican Party," she said. "What I've been thinking is that the Republican Party will go away around here and another party will emerge in the middle."

The national Republican Party is bracing for a harsh day on Tuesday. Presidential polls in a number of battleground states favor Obama, and Republicans are almost sure to lose seats in the House and Senate. But political observers don't expect the national party will turn to moderates for help. They don't see a reversal in moderates' fortunes.

"Unless they can self-finance, it's going to be very tough for a moderate Republican to raise money," Muth said.

The New England "Rockefellers" will run as Democrats, Muth predicted, or they'll try what Weicker successfully did in Connecticut and run as independents.

For Chafee, running as a Democrat would be "difficult" after a career serving as the "loyal opposition," he said. If he runs for Rhode Island governor in 2010, for instance, he would run as an independent.