MODERATES FOR ALL SEASONS

“Connie, I pray for you daily. You are such a gift to the women’s movement,” Johnson began. But then, whatever train of thought she may have had slipped off the rails, and she started free associating like some country club Kerouac. After a few minutes, she wandered onto forbidden ground, “I am dedicated to the defeat of that group on the right I term the Irreligious Wrong. There is nothing religious about them. Certainly nothing Christian.”

It’s hard to know how many in that room of moderate Republicans agreed with the sentiment, but in any case you’re not supposed to say it in public. A frozen smile hung across the face of ex-representative Susan Molinari. Meanwhile Morella darted up from her table and headed for the microphone, where she interrupted Johnson mid-introduction and began her acceptance talk. The whole point of the Ripon Society is that it stands for big tent Republicanism. You’re not supposed to do anything that might make anyone feel excluded — even those right-wing zealots with the fetus posters. The essence of Ripon is that you’re supposed to be nice.

This year’s Ripon dinner was twice as large as last, a sign of the recent ascendance of the moderate wing of the GOP. “I’m a moderate and I’m proud of it!” Senator Jim Jeffords exclaimed, before neatly summarizing the recent history of his party. “We’re pushed back in the background when things are going well for the party. But when things are going rough it’s, ‘Bring on the moderates.'”

And so this year’s affair was packed with congressmen, and clouds and clouds of lobbyists. The honorees included Senator Chuck Hagel, Ways and Means Committee chairman Bill Archer, and speaker Dennis Hastert. “I want to thank Jim Jeffords for exposing me as a moderate. Now I’ll never get elected speaker again ever,” Hastert joked, probably knowing that moderates are precisely what the congressional party now longs for in its leaders, so long as they are moderates who call themselves conservatives.

Ripon dinners certainly look different from conservative gatherings. At the Heritage Foundation’s annual dinners there are squads of young true believers, gaggles of donor dowagers, and, alongside the appetizer tables, rows of conservative-leaning writers, academics, and policy activists. Similarly, the American Enterprise Institute’s annual dinner teems with economists, journalists, sociologists, and future and past assistant secretaries of state. But the Ripon Society, which is also ostensibly an advocacy organization, is practically a wonk-free zone.

And a journalist-free zone. While reporters flock to the annual confabs of the picturesque Republican groups, such as the Christian Coalition, I was the only reporter here.

Without any word-people around, the money crowd takes center stage. At the registration desk there was a little sign that read, “Please provide your individual and corporate name.” Corporate officials from places like Ameritech actually gave speeches (normally at such affairs, business donors are billed but not heard). And the air during the cocktail hour was filled with lobbyist bonhomie. Even the Teddy Roosevelt impersonator turned out to be a lobbyist.

The event was called the Rough Rider Award Dinner, and each honoree was given a very cool cavalry saber to hang on the wall. Strolling around the room there was a guy dressed up as TR ready to storm San Juan Hill, and a bunch of young men in full leather regalia were dressed up as Rough Riders. The TR lookalike turned out to be Billy Pitts, former top aide to Bob Michel and now a lobbyist for Disney, and when I got to chatting with one of the Rough Riders he handed me a card that indicated he was a government affairs assistant with a law firm.

Which is really the problem with the moderate wing of the Republican party, and the reason why, despite all the failures of the Right, the moderates never really take control of the GOP. Theirs is a movement with plenty of financial capital, and its leaders project a more appealing personality than many conservatives do, but moderate Republicans lack intellectual heft. That means the moderates end up thinking tactically — like lobbyists — but rarely strategically — like idea-mavens. They don’t articulate distinctive principles that might inspire followers and attract media attention. They tend not to come up with big policy proposals, but are more likely to adapt the ideas that come from right or left. Rather than being a driving force in Republican politics, the moderates are the pause button in between conservative screw-ups.

Their weakness makes the success of moderate Democrats look all the more impressive. The Democratic Leadership Council didn’t just define itself negatively against the excesses of the liberal wing of its party. The Democratic moderates actually created a grandiose governing philosophy, the Third Way, which fires up people like Al Gore and Tony Blair and crowds out competing liberal visions. The DLC magazine, the New Democrat, is substantive and crunchy. The DLC now occupies the political ground moderate Republicans should have made their own.

One suspects in the end the Ripon Society’s geniality is part of its problem. It embraces Teddy Roosevelt in theory, but temperamentally, Republican moderates are everything TR detested. He was confrontational. He was bellicose. He ascribed bad motives to anyone who dared disagree with him. And above all, he despised corporate pragmatists — while the moderates, for better or worse, are mostly that.