Rep. Cao: still the future of the Republican Party
Rep. Joseph Cao
Rep. Joseph Cao, a Vietnamese-American who represents a New Orleans-area congressional district, is being called a Judas by fellow Republicans after he broke with them to vote for the Democrats’ health care bill.
But as Amanda Terkel at Think Progress notes, Cao was motivated by dollars-and-sense concerns in a troubled district still grappling with the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina and a paucity of health care options. Rep. Cao, 42, said from the outset after his upset election win last year that he would put aside questions of race (his district is heavily African-American) and partisanship (his district is historically Democratic) in order to deliver constituents solution-oriented services, programs and policy.
Instead of making implicit threats at Rep. Cao and questioning his loyalty, GOP leaders like Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele might look to him as a blueprint for the party’s future. Like Steele, who is African-American, and fellow Louisianan Gov. Bobby Jindal (who is of Indian descent), Cao adds badly needed demographic diversity to the party.
And he’s not a conservative firebrand, but a moderate who has proven he can attract Democratic and independent votes. Cao’s a former immigration lawyer and Jesuit seminarian who almost became a priest, and may be socially conservative, but he’s by no means marching in lockstep with the more radical wing of the Republican Party. Cao has praised President Obama, sought to join the left-leaning Black Caucus, and expressed concerns about global warming. He has the combination of professional and moral authority the GOP loves to see in its candidates, but fused to a very pragmatic platform focused not on culture war issues but on everyday concerns such as health care and education. As Terkel notes in her article, after Cao’s 2008 win a top House Republican sent out a memo titled: “The Future is Cao.” That’s still the case, even if he did look like an outlier when he voted with Democrats over the weekend.
Cao may have a hard time winning re-election in his heavily Democratic district (he beat incumbent last year thanks mostly to a corruption scandal) next year. But as a non-ideological Republican from a minority group he represents a plausible direction for the Republican Party to move in if it wants to keep up with the country’s fast-changing demographics. Republicans might be advised to find a few dozen other Caos to build their future election strategies on– pragmatic, solution-oriented, fiscally conservative minority candidates (Cao may have supported the health care bill but voted against the $787 billion stimulus package).
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Mr. Ballve,
No, I believe that Mr. Cao represents the past of the Republican Party, not the future. In most countries of the world there are a multitude of parties that vie for political power. It is very common after an election for none of them to have a parliamentary majority and then the various parties will try to get together and assemble a coalition government. These parties tend to have a distinct base and ideology and coalitions tended to be made up of like minded parties so there could be coalition of right wing and centrist parties or all left-wing parties, &c.
In the United States, especially since the Civil War, we have done things the other way around. We have had two large coalitions (Republicans and Democrats) each of which have contending factions within them. Each had right coalition had right, center, and left wings with different geographical and sectoral interests. Different factions within each party could often reach “across the aisle” to their ideological or geographical equivalent and create coalitions for specific projects or bills. There were also important differences, the two coalition / parties were not mirror images of each other. For example conservatives in the Republican Party were the chamber of commerce / big business / New York / Chicago variety, little interested in defending White Supremacy or advancing the cultural hegemony of particular Christian denominations. The conservatives in the Democratic Party were largely based in the South and existed entirely upon the defense of racism and had strong ties to interests invested in defending the dominance of a few types of Christian churches. The Blacks and the labor movement was entirely a Democratic coalition.
Since the 1960s this model has completely changed. Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and final George W. Bush completely transformed the Republican Party. Because of the role of the Democratic Party in ending Jim Crow and segregation in the South, the Republican Party was able win over the southern conservatives en mass. This new coalition has completely dominated US politics for the last generation. However it has resulted in the extinction of the liberal wing of the Republican Party.
This new coalition has been a huge success. Between 1968 and 2008 it has won seven of ten presidential elections and forced the Democratic party to shift its politics to the right (see Bill Clinton). It has also succeed fantastically in putting conservative judges and justices on the bench and of course for six years of the last eight it completely controlled Congress. The Republican Party has succeed by a relentless move to the right politically and by an increasingly arrogant, bullying approach to all issues. Pallin Presidential campaign of 2008 was the zenith of the Republicans conservative march.
The last two elections of course have not gone too well. Nonetheless, it is impossible for the Republicans to now reverse course after 30 years of championing attacks on immigrants, support for white supremacy, and increased ideological conformity and embrace someone like Mr. Cao, someone who would have been at home in the Republican Party in 1960. The Republican Party has crossed some threshold beyond which they cannot cross back.
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I agree with Marcelo. Moderate Republicans can do more to move the center leftward than can, say, radical leftists. I think of moderate Republicans as “true conservatives” as opposed to Bush/Cheney raw-meat Republicans. A libertarian I know calls Bush/Cheney not conservatives but “radical liberals.” Their anarchistic policies–open-borders, non-regulation and “free trade” spelled near-collapse for our nation. Let’s remember that most Dems have gone along with this idiocy, this race to the bottom.
Democrat Jimmy Carter represents some excellent “true conservative” thinking: He says that since we’re all against abortion we should do everything in our power to avoid unwanted pregnancies–promotion of safe sex, condoms, contraception. We need more of this kind of centrist practicality if we are to make progress as a nation.
Let’s put the “conservation” back into conservatism.
Hello bobshanbrom,
It may well be true that “moderate Republicans can do more to move the center leftward” but have they? What impact have they actually had in moving the even the Republican Party to the left, much less “the center”. The only way to prove “can” is to “do” and I for one have yet to see any “do” from the moderates along these lines.
I have noticed that there are now a lot “true conservatives” out there who are putting a lot distance between themselves and the Republican Party. Here at T/S Mr. Kain, the resident “American Tory” of being a detached non-Republican conservative. I can see the appeal, the Republicans spent their eight years of power on a wild spending spree with borrowed money, ran up the debt to over a trillion in no time flat, oversaw the greatest roll back in civil liberties in decades, created a deficit in the hundreds of billions, lost New Orleans, and got us into two wars, neither of which is over.
The problem I see with this, where have these moderates and non-Republican conservative been for the last eight or nine years? When the non-real conservatives were starting wars, borrowing money as fast as they could spend it, &c what were the real conservatives doing? I do no remember any demonstrations by these real conservatives opposing the invasion of Iraq or demanding that taxes be raised to pay for all of the Republican expenditures.
The proof of the pudding is, as always, in the eating. If moderates and real conservatives can in fact move the center to the left, they should have started doing that a long time ago. Let us see this happen and I will believe.
In response to another comment. See in context »Moderate Republicans, and I agree they may be more theoretical than real, did what everyone else did those 8 Bush years, duck and cover. We have a good true conservative Republican representing my Assembly district, San Luis Obispo, CA, Sam Blakeslee. He’s the Republican leader and he got us a badly-needed sewer, passed a seismic safety bill for our local nuke, opposes illegal immigration (without being a demagogue about it), gets a 60 environmental rating, is expert on transition to a low-carbon economy and on and on. Much of what us progressives argue for is conservation, not “progress”. He’s a social conservative, a fiscal conservative and and new-tech environmentalist. Not crazy about his rejection of gay people and abortion but I’ll take my allies wherever I can get them.
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