Political campaigns, like college admission applications, are processes that start earlier and earlier every year. In the race for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, there are already at least a half-dozen names being floated, among them Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. One name I haven't come across thus far, however, is that of Arnie Vinick.
For those of you not in the know, California Republican Sen. Arnold Vinick, the alter-ego of former \M*A*S*H"" star Alan Alda, is the Republican nominee for president on ""The West Wing."" He is an honest, straight-talking deficit hawk who supports balanced budgets, limited government, abortion rights and tough crackdowns on corporate crime. He managed to win the Republican primary despite telling Iowans that ethanol subsidies to their state were wasteful and unnecessary, and he overcame a challenge by a Jerry Falwell-like evangelical preacher who siphoned off support from the Religious Right. Barring a spectacular recovery by the befuddled Democrats, Vinick is being set up to succeed Martin Sheen's Jed Bartlet as our parallel-universe commander in chief, perhaps sweeping all 50 states in the process.
Is it realistic or just fanciful to imagine a moderate, common-sense Republican like Vinick winning the real-life nomination, garnering the presidency, and reuniting our divided nation?
It is interesting to note that some of the Republican Party's most successful years came under the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, a centrist whose middle-of-the-road administration represented the last time Republicans would control the White House and both bodies of Congress until 2001.
Mainstream Republican voters may be tired of the false piety of right-wing leaders who rail against gays and feminists while they deregulate corporations, send away jobs, rack up massive budget deficits, create more government bureaucracy, interfere with state issues and personal choices and threaten to throw out 200 years of Senate tradition by ""nuking"" the filibuster.
Furthermore, as the drip-drip-drip of ethical misconduct wears away the political career of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, congressional Republicans may find themselves in the same position as Democrats were in 1994, when Republicans successfully made the case that the Democratic majority had grown corrupt and too comfortable in the company of corporate lobbyists at cocktail parties and golf tournaments. A reform candidate in the Vinick model, such as McCain or Giuliani, may be able to pull enough base voters away from a weak right-wing standard-bearer like Frist to capture the nomination and then sweep the independent swing vote in the general election.
On the other hand, it is possible that the Vinick character represents an all-but-extinct breed of ""Rockefeller Republican"" without a real constituency anywhere, save in a few independent-minded regions of the Northeast. Remember, the Republican Revolution that began with Ronald Reagan and culminated with Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush became a revolution not by appealing to moderate voters but by converting and turning out huge numbers of right-wingers. According to an analysis by UW-Madison Professor Charles Franklin, who gave each member of Congress from 1981-2004 a score between 1 for solidly conservative and -1 for solidly liberal, the number of Republican members of Congress close to zero, indicating a centrist voting record, decreased in number from roughly 50 in 1981 (even after the Reagan Revolution) to less than 10 in 2001. These trends would seem to indicate that a pro-choice candidate like Vinick or Giuliani would, in real life, have a brutally hard time convincing pro-life Republican voters to cross over. As Vinick's ""West Wing"" nemesis Rev. Don Butler puts it, ""Abortion is not [just] a political issue with me.""
Does this mean there will never be a real-life Vinick? Not necessarily. If more members of the Religious Right like DeLay, GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed get outed as the ethically-barren corporate hacks they are, some of the GOP's reluctance to take on its right-wing may disappear. Candidates with personal star power such as McCain, Giuliani or New York Gov. George Pataki may find that primary voters in 2008 are a bit more willing to trade ideological purity for basic honesty. But despite the early beginning of campaign season, 2008 is still a long way away and it will take much more than exists currently for an Arnie Vinick to pull the real Republican Party away from the grassroots base that has put it in power.
