GOP drifting from its base

The News Virginian / News Virginian
Published: April 13, 2008

Possessed of the unaffected amiability of a man who has lived all of his 59 years in the shadows of the Blue Ridge, Sen. Emmett Hanger wears a country politician's easy smile as he muses over the turn of some corners of his political world against him. The Mount Solon Republican's prominence and influence gleam still in Richmond, where he is among the Senate's leading voices, but his conservative luster has faded in the 24th District. Hanger is perplexed by the disparity.

He is also part of a larger transformation and resulting fissures spreading across the base of the Grand Old Party. His case is a microcosm of the effects of that shift and how it might alter the cause of conservatism and its place as an alternative to the "progressive" movement to which it long has been opposed.

To understand it all requires a return to the beginning - in this instance, Hanger's.

During the course of a far-ranging, 90-minute conversation with journalists at The News Virginian, Hanger described what he refers to as the "traditional conservative" ideology that compelled his entry into politics almost three decades ago. For Hanger, the issues of primary import were then limited government, individual and fiscal responsibility and affirmation of America's Christian heritage.

Firm adherence to those principles spurred Hanger's steady political advance as the tide in Virginia and the South shifted in hue from blue to red. Hanger describes that metamorphosis in a fashion decidedly Reaganesque. Voters in the commonwealth, long of conservative mind, did not leave the Democratic Party so much as it left them. Receiving the politically displaced paid dividends.

In 1999, the GOP shattered the Byrd Democratic Machine, taking both chambers of the General Assembly after having two years earlier sent one of their own, Jim Gilmore, to the Governor's Mansion. The following year, Texas Republican George W. Bush was elected to the White House, giving the GOP full charge over the federal executive and legislative branches for the first time since 1952.

And so the troubles began for Republicans, a group cursed with a peculiar affinity for slugging gift horses in the mouth.

Casting aside ideals as burdens, the GOP with haste moved to expand government, in Washington, passing the intrusive educational reform bill known as the No Child Left Behind Act and in Richmond, bowing to a string of tax increases that eventually sent the anti-tax dogs howling after Hanger and others.

Hanger points out, correctly, that he has been a persistent lobbyist for tax reform that if enacted would reduce the overall tax load. However, he also explains that upon gaining control of the General Assembly, Republicans discovered that their approach while in the minority no longer applied. "We're not anti-government," he said. "You've got to take action."

The interpretation of action as defined largely by swelling government — and the corresponding and deeply disingenuous notion that to favor limited government is to be anti-government — is increasingly shared in the GOP.

Republicans who fall sway to such flawed thinking forget, or never minded in the first place, the first premise of a conservative forebear, Sen. Barry Goldwater: "I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size."

Those who hold alternative views on that point might find their rightful place on the left side of the aisle. Otherwise, conservative folk in Virginia might discover that they again have been abandoned by their party.