the rix mix

In another dimension of space & time, where the past, present & future are a coexistant continuum, I could almost feel bad for soon-to-be-former Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee. Here's a politician bearing the name of the president who for over 100 years made the Republican Party tolerable. The only Republican senator to have voted against the war, & did not even vote for George W. Bush in 2004. Like GWB he was a child of privilege, but much more his father's son. Chafee was on the wrong side on Tuesday. He should have switched sides two years ago.

Before Nixon's "Southern Strategy," before "Reagan Democrats" (a new label for an old breed), the Republican Party could, if sometimes by a stretch, call itself "The Party of Lincoln." Oh, they were always corporate shills. Even Abe the rube lawyer from downstate Illinois wanted to go to Chicago & work for the big railroads & banks. It was fitting that one of the most successful corporate lawyers of that day, a man who had been contemptous of Lincoln before the Civil War, was also the man who uttered,"Now he belongs to the ages" over Lincoln's corpse in the bedroom across from Ford's Theater. At the end, acceptance.

When I was growing up, Democrats were a crazy alliance of aging New Dealers, labor unionists, rusting urban machine parts, Jim Crow southerners of both the red neck & country lawyer varieties, & genuinely progressive reformers. Republicans were for the most part what Republicans had always been; they represented midwestern farmers & northern Chamber of Commerce types, overwhelmingly protestant, & controled, as was frequently said, by New York banks & Wall Street. Both parties were aggressively anti-communist. The Republicans also had Jacob Javits, the Rockefeller family, Clifford Case, Everett Dirksen, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, & in the Sixties even a light-skinned moderately liberal negro senator from Massachusetts named Edward William Brooke III, who is still alive. But Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond switched parties in 1964, making the Republicans officially racist. Choosing a party included choosing a poison: Either way, you were going to have to drink it & pass out in bed with people you utterly despised. For me, this was confused even more by Vietnam.

The national Republican party mullahs made it clear a long time ago that neither Lincoln Chafee nor the better angels of Abe Lincoln's time were to have any influence. Tom Kean Sr. left his ivory tower retirement for the 9/11 Commission & then had most of his conclusions ignored. Bamboozled Christine Whitman could have run for the senate this year if she hadn't announced 5 years ago that New York City's air quality was fine. While Chafee was cut loose, Republican money poured into Lieberman's "unaffiliated" campaign next door. I can't feel sorry for Chafee, but I can feel nostalgic for what he represented; a Republican Party that wasn't a very "big tent" but certainly wasn't the total freak & geek show it is now. He was probably sick of it all anyway.

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BBC online coverage of the elections was succinct, dispassionate, & accurate.