Moore's the Pity?

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August 01, 2005

Moore's the Pity?

Lawyer and blogger Nathan Moore, whose site feed somehow doesn't work with Bloglines and therefore causes me to miss his updates, but whose site is worth manually visiting (so I should), wrote an ambitious post that obliquely compares Senate candidate Bob Corker to President Ronald Reagan.

I've noticed before that Moore has declared his support for Mr. Corker. I have been pleased to find that not all GOP bloggers in the state are bunkered down in the radical right.

The usual suspects are, though, giving Nathan Moore the what-for over his piece. Even the very respectable Matt White takes the "what were you thinking?" side, but my favorite post on this so far has to be Rob Huddleston's. I'll just jump right to the very end, where he says

I mean, he might as well have signed off with "Roll Tide!"

Though I'm sure to be told that the remark was made with tongue firmly in cheek, this so very neatly encapsulates what is wrong with so many partisans -- Democrats and Republicans. This is why "politics" is a dirty word. ("Civics" is the clean alternative, if you ask me.) You know what? It's not football. When partisans act as "fans" of a "team," they lose sight of the goal.

The more disturbing aspect of Mr. Huddleston's post is echoed in others as well. This is straight out of evangelical Christianity:

I want to be clear that you still haven't [had your Republican credentials questioned]. I am certain that you are a Republican. After all, you are the leader of the Davidson County Young Republicans and attended a law school, George Mason, that has produced many fine conservative attorneys (an accomplishment not many institutions can claim). However, I have to question your claim of following "conservatism." I sincerely hope that you do eventually come back to our school of thought, if you have strayed from the path.

Just substitute the word "Christian" for "Republican" and replace the listed credentials with things like "you're a deacon" or whatnot, and there you have it. This "more conservative than thou" attitude, complete with its condescending "I'm praying for your return to the fold, brother" is to be the undoing of the Republican Party.

I'm not going to try and speak for Nathan Moore, but my take on his Corker-Reagan comparison was a lot simpler. Ronald Reagan won re-election to the White House by a huge landslide because he attracted voters from all parties, all philosophies. Bob Corker will win election to the US Senate by a similar aggregate of voters who "agree to agree" that his impressive personal history and his ability to get things done are what Tennessee needs.

The claims made by the far right that Bob Corker is somehow lacking in principle or conviction don't hold water; but if they really want to end up with a waffler, they'll go ahead and nominate Bryant, whom Harold Ford, Jr. will roundly defeat in the general election, and then we'll have his (Ford's) finger testing the wind from a Senate office window. If Republicans want to beat Ford, they'll nominate Bob Corker; and if Democrats want a conservative whom they can trust to be representative of all but the most "fringebound" Tennesseans (right or left), they'll vote for Bob Corker as well.

Maybe, instead of picking Reagan, Nathan Moore could have drawn his Corker comparison to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said: "The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters."

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