Tough times in center field

“It’s not … alarm but it’s genuine political concern,” Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) told The Hill’s reporter, Alexander Bolton, on Tuesday, explaining the motives that underpin the Tuesday Group, a new political action committee set up by centrist Republicans.

The PAC began raising money in May when it took in $48,000, and is intent on gathering funds to help centrist or liberal Republicans win election or reelection to the House. Centrist Republicans were more than decimated last year, with members such as Reps. Jim Leach (Iowa), Charlie Bass (N.H.), Nancy Johnson (Conn.), Rob Simmons (Conn.), Sue Kelly (N.Y.) and Michael Fitzpatrick (Pa.) getting knocked off in the midterm elections.

The ironic dilemma facing Republican survivors is that although voter disenchantment appears directed primarily at President Bush and to a lesser extent at the conservatism he represents, the GOP brand has become a liability mostly to those centrist or liberal Republicans elected by narrow margins in liberal northeastern states.

No politician likes to admit to fear or pessimism, but at some point it is necessary for those gripped by what Castle euphemistically calls “genuine political concern” to take action rather than sit on their hands out of fear that they might otherwise convey a sense of panic.

The Tuesday Group’s creation is a marker on the Republicans’ bumpy and anxiety-strewn road to the 2008 election. The founders know, as who cannot, that they face unhappy odds at the polls 15 months from now, and that it is now time to take remedial action rather than pretending to be sanguine about the state of their party.

GOP defections over war policy are the most prominent sign of the party’s electoral alarm, but there are signs everywhere.
When Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), another Tuesday Group founder, says, “It’s very important to our party that we hang on to those that represent a point of view that’s important to the party,” the words “hang on” evoke existential alarm rather than cool electoral strategizing.

The creation of the Tuesday Group, which is similar in its purpose to the Mainstreet Partnership, will allow donors to double up their money-giving to what is really a single cause. The cause? Nothing less than the survival of the GOP as a tent big enough to contain centrists and liberals as well as conservatives. Conservatives in safe deep-red states and districts are most closely aligned with Bush, but it is not they who face the most alarming electoral consequences.