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April 29, 2004
The Melancholia of the Slightly Right
Just the other day I took one of those marginally useful political spectrometer tests. This is a few weeks after accepting a leadership appointment in the California College of Republicans, and just before I've been up for a third contract in as many weeks.
Since I value work more than political accolades, and I'm a family man, the choices I have to make with regards to my schedule are clear. I'm going to work hard for my family and not so hard for the Party. But my moderately Authoritarian Right score gives me comfort and unease.
Over the past year it is clear to me that I am a strong right centrist who is attracted to the liberality of Christianity in moderation of my nationalist militancy. I am a conservative attracted to unchanging principles in defiance of perpetual progressivism and indeed social innovation led by consumption of technological increments. I seek reform of capitalism only to the extent that it become more attuned to all sustainable economies, which it should promptly exploit. Since I am scientific, rational and skeptical I am by nature a problem solver and an explorer. I change according to what's provable, but only on the margins.
Today, I'm reading this little bit of sad news for moderate Republicans.
Amo Houghton is a throwback: an unassuming, old-money multimillionaire known around Congress for being a very nice guy. Just as unusual, he's a Republican moderate. And now he's leaving office.Fellow moderates were dismayed by the decision of the 77-year-old not to seek re-election to the upstate New York seat he has held since 1986. Houghton is the former CEO of Corning Inc., the glassware company founded by his family in 1851.
``We feel the loss greatly,'' said Rep. Michael Castle, R-Del., president of Republican Main Street Partnership, a centrist group that Houghton founded in 1998. ``There are not that many of us.''
Castle said there are 40 to 45 GOP House members, out of 228 Republicans, who identify themselves as moderates and ``we're constantly scrambling to find others who believe in our viewpoints.''
Into this gap, I expect my cohort of blackfolks to waltz in. Easier said than done, of course. But it's good to know about the Mainstreet Republicans. I never heard of them - shows what I know. Moderates in retreat doesn't sound hopeful, but I know better than to quit. In my way is a boulder, I've got to push it along.
Posted by mbowen at April 29, 2004 04:38 PM
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