“The idea of a big tent means different things to different people,” Sutton told MinnPost. “I believe we are a big tent, filled with right-of-center folks. We have social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, people who believe in a strong national defense. There’s a business wing, and we have those people who have a libertarian\/populist streak. \u2026 But the unifier is the economy. People are anxious about the economy, about their jobs. That makes people more conservative. Business. Jobs. That’s our brand.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Sutton, as should be expected, gets it right; the GOP should be open to everyone <\/em>who believes in small government, prosperity for the individual, security and family.<\/p>\nAnd who better to ask about our tent size than someone who got kicked out of it for supporting bigger government and higher taxes?<\/p>\n
But former Rep. Neil Peterson, who was drummed out of his party and office by conservative forces in Bloomington after joining five other House Republicans in overriding Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of a gasoline tax, has a different view. He says the delegates gathering for this convention are not even close to the party regulars who supported him.<\/p>\n
“When I was in office, we still had a fairly big tent in my district,” Peterson said. “But those people [the party activists] have all been replaced by much more conservative people. The party has moved from being a big tent to a pup tent.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And Grow, like much of the Twin Cities media, audibly pines for the days when the GOP was basically nothing more than the DFL with better suits – a half-hearted speed bump to complete DFL domination.<\/p>\n
The real<\/em> answer is “the tent is as big as it needs to be; all who support prosperity, limited government, security and the family are welcome.”<\/p>\nIt’s really pretty simple.\u00a0 If you’re not a reporter with decades of experience covering Minnesota politics, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Is the GOP a “big tent?”\u00a0 Or is it a “pup tent?” The real answer is below. But for the biennial pundit palaver on the subject, who better to ask than Doug Grow, who spent decades carrying water for the DFL at the Strib before decamping to the MinnPost? “The idea of a big tent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[326,72,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-alt-media","category-mngop","category-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10397"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10403,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10397\/revisions\/10403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}