Putting it bluntly, former Florida Congressman Joe Scarborough isn’t conservatives’ favorite pundit. Hosting his news and opinion show “Morning Joe” on left-wing television channel MSNBC hasn’t endeared him to Tea Partiers and hardliners — as they see it, Scarborough is sleeping with the enemy. And his opposition to right-wing tactics like the recent government shutdown hasn’t helped.
Once a hardline conservative himself, Scarborough’s embrace of moderate Republican politicians like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J) and disdain for uncompromising ones like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has garnered him that dreaded nickname for Republicans conservatives think are too soft: a RINO.
Scarborough recently told Red Alert Politics he thinks conservatives’ perception of him is unfair. While he’s personally become more moderate “temperamentally” since leaving office and says he thinks the Republican Party fares better under temperamentally moderate leaders like Ronald Reagan, he does not believe the party should become more moderate ideologically.
“People muddle my message all the time. I say ‘people,’ I’m talking about extremists in the blogosphere sometimes will – or on Twitter will – misread my message, and they’ll think that I’m saying, ‘Republicans need to nominate more moderates, ideological moderate candidates for president.’ That’s the exact opposite of what I’m saying,” Scarborough explained during a recent phone interview with Red Alert to discuss his new book “The Right Path.”
In “The Right Path,” Scarborough chronicles the history of the Republican Party and what he sees as the path forward if the GOP wants to win back the executive branch. Part of the GOP’s strategy in the future, Scarborough argues, has to include running candidates who are able to differentiate themselves from big-government liberals but also know which battles not to fight.
Scarborough explained to Red Alert that he actually doesn’t think the Republican Party’s last two presidential nominees – Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney – were conservative enough. This gave key demographic groups that voted for Obama, like young Americans, few reasons to vote for the GOP.
“When you have a clear ideological difference, like, for instance Ronald Reagan versus Jimmy Carter, who represented the excesses of the Great Society, you know, 20 years of Great Society excess, then you see young voters move overwhelming toward the conservative, “ he said, noting that Reagan won the youth vote by a large margin.
He pointed to former Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli’s success with young people (he won the 18-24 year old demographic, according to exit polls) as evidence conservatives can win on social issues, regardless of what “people in Manhattan or Washington in the national media say.”
“I don’t think that is a great formula – being too strident on those issues – but you can be pro-life and still win the majority of young voters,” he said. (Cuccinelli won young voters, but ultimately fell short of winning the governorship because Democrats successfully portrayed him as too socially conservative.)
The “genius” of Reagan, Scarborough said, is that he was “conservative ideologically, but he was moderate temperamentally.”
“That is a secret to Ike and Reagan’s success that we have forgotten in the Republican Party and more specifically the conservative movement over the past 20 years, and I will be the first to take my share of the blame,” he said.
In the book, Scarborough discusses his own involvement in the failure of the Republican Party to regain control over the executive branch in the ‘90s. The former congressman admitted over the phone that he now regrets his behavior back then as a freshman member.
“You know, I came in 1994 as a red-hot conservative that pushed for a government shutdown, that pushed for one confrontation after another against Bill Clinton that first scored a lot of things and pushed so quickly that we ended up helping reelecting Bill Clinton,” he said, chuckling as he remembered the political indiscretions of his youth. “You could make the argument that the same thing happened in 2012. That we helped reelect Barack Obama by losing the middle of the American electorate that we had won just two years earlier.”
Scarborough maintains that he’s still “a conservative guy,” it’s just that he no longer believes conservatives are likely to get the best electoral outcomes by going balls to the wall and refusing to compromise on every single issue, great or small. He name-checked pro football Hall of Famer and former Oklahoma Rep. Steve Largent as a peer who did “a much better job of keeping their emotions in check and staying connected with the electorate.”
“I was younger, and we were impatient and I made the same mistakes that some guys and some women on the Hill made over the past couple months,” he admitted.
However, Scarborough noted in his defense that in the mid-nineties, conservatives had no idea they would retain control of the House of Representatives for a large part of the next 20 years. To them, it was then or never to get conservative legislation passed.
“It was a lesson learned. A lesson that I learned 20 years ago, and a lesson a lot of conservatives have learned over the past couple months,” he reflected. “And I’m confident that they will not repeat the same mistakes that, again, I made 20 years ago.”
