Remember the mid-summer of 2009?  When people first started talking seriously about the gubernatorial campaign?  When Republicans just started talking about the race, and when Mark Dayton started pawning his Renoirs?

You remember the phalanx of moderate candidates who came out to the various party get-togethers, like the SD54 picnic in August of 2009, and who tried to give their stump speeches, calling for the return of the policies of Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger, poo-poohing the Reagan legacy and demanding we balance the budget through “responsible” tax hikes?

And the way that they  were rudely booed from the stage by the small conservative minority?  And their supporters, 3/4 of the audience, who stalked away after their candidates were snubbed, leaving the events looking like the after-party at a Vanilla Ice gig?

And the way those same moderates took their campaigns to the State Convention, and fought it out to eight ballots to get on the ticket, flaunting their platform of “Responsible Revenues” and “Getting On Board With Hope And Change”, only getting beaten after a tiny minority of conservatives jiggered the rules to exclude them from the votes?

Of course you don’t.

Because there was no such movement.

And yet to hear the media discussing it, there’s a huge mass of “moderate Republicans” floating around out there, feeling all “disenfranchised” by Tom Emmer, caterwauling about how far the party has fallen, pining for the glory days of Al Quie and Arne Carlson.

But if there were any such movement actually within the party, you might think the would show some sign of, I dunno, existing in the party.  By fielding candidates and making their presence known.

And yet look at the field of serious, and even not-so-serious, candidates that started out the campaign back in the late summer of 2009.  I met them all at the aforementioned SD54 Picnic; all nine of them spoke!  There were…:

1. Tim Utz – who is from the libertarian side of “conservative”.  Not a “moderate” at all.
2. Phil Herwig – who makes Tom Emmer look like Christopher Dodd.
3. Paul Kolls, a thoroughgoing conservative
4. Dave Hann, a solid conservative
5. Pat Anderson, who may have been the closest thing to “moderate” in the field, and I mean that only in the most hair-splitting sense of the term
6. Leslie Davis, who may be a lot of things, but isn’t “moderate”. Or Republican.  Or the leader of a movement.
7. Dave Haas, a former legislator from Bemidji with a strongly-conservative pro-business platform
8. Marty Seifert, who has been a conservative throughout his career, and reiterated that pretty sharply during the campaign
9. Emmer.

That was it!  Among the nine of them, Emmer, Seifert and Anderson may have been the closest to the “Center!”

There was no “moderate conservative” movement in the MNGOP, begging to be heard.

None.

“Well, that’s because the conservative drove them out and marginalized the party!”

Er, did you take a look at caucuses this year?  Or looked at the enthusiasm numbers?  The GOP is blowing the records off the stops.  Congressional races that never raise over $30,000 – the 7th and 8th Districts – are raising ten to fifteen times the usual amounts, with no end in sight.  Even in the DFL gulag, the 4th and 5th, there are active State House camapaigns in districts that have had “warm bodies” (inactive place-holder campaigns) or nobody at all on the ballot for a generation.

So if there was a big mass of “Moderate Republicans” out there that are sitting out this election because Tom Emmer is too conservative, they’ve been concealing themselves for a long, long time.

Oh, there are “moderate Republicans” who are disenfranchised and angry about it, all right.  Arne Carlson.  Dave Durenberger.  Tom Horner.  People who committed themselves to the pre-1980 version of the GOP (that held sway in Minnesota Republican circles well into the nineties), the “moderate”, pro-choice, anti-gun, pro-tax-and-spending “GOP” that gave us the biggest tax and spending hikes in Minnesota history.   People who got left behind when the party moved to the right, and are endlessly bitter about it.  People who are taking out their anger by stabbing the new GOP – the one that had done with them – in the back, condemning their candidates, assaulting conservatism, voting for Barack Obama, making a public spectacle of breaking with the current GOP.

They are a non-factor in the GOP.  If they were not, they would make some kind of showing someplace other than as part of the anti-conservative chanting points of the in-the-bag-for-the-DFL mainstream media.

They don’t.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, October 8th, 2010 at 6:14 am and is filed under Campaign '10, Chanting Points Memo, Conservatism, MNGOP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.