Word: republicanized
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Certainly Crist isn't happy about John McCain's loss in Florida, especially since he endorsed McCain in the state's primary. But when Crist convenes the Republican Governors Association conference on Wednesday, which is being held in Miami this year, he won't be quite the damaged political goods that many McCain supporters are trying to paint him as. In fact, Crist and other bipartisan Republican governors may well be the model for how the GOP should rebuild itself after the crippling losses of both 2006 and 2008. (See pictures of John McCain's campaign farewell...
Just as more centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton emerged in the wake of Ronald Reagan's triumphs, more pragmatic Republicans like Crist, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and even conservative Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal will likely be the phoenixes that rise from the GOP ashes of 2008. (None, however, will yet say if they plan to mount their own presidential bids in 2012.) As a result, says Leslie Lenkowsky, a public affairs professor at Indiana University who served with Daniels in the Bush Administration, "the future of the Republican Party is going...
Many McCain backers like to say that the Republican nominee underperformed in Florida not because his message was off but because Crist didn't support him enough. But the evidence doesn't point to that. After all, Crist refused to campaign for an anti-gay-marriage amendment to Florida's constitution, yet it passed by a wide margin last week. So was it really Crist's lack of enthusiasm for the McCain campaign that sank the Arizona Senator in Florida - or was it the fact that the peninsula's conservative Republican base spent so much time, money and effort...
Which isn't to say that these Republican governors aren't Republicans. True, neo-GOP guvs like Schwarzenegger aren't shy about embracing traditionally liberal causes like environmentalism and, in the Governator's case, gay marriage. But Lenkowsky, who headed the Corporation for National and Community Service partnership under President Bush, says it would be wrong to assume that chief execs like Daniels aren't acting "from the standpoint of conservative principles." For Daniels, who was President Bush's budget director before becoming Indiana's governor in 2005 - and who erroneously argued that the Iraq war wouldn't become...
...Crist and his fellow Republican governors really can instill or revive a less-dogmatic culture inside the GOP, then an equally important question is whether that will in turn influence a now dominant Democratic Party in Washington. Central to Obama's cross-party appeal was his clarion call to end America's corrosive red-blue polarization. Republican pols like Crist may take that ideal even more seriously than the hyperpartisan likes of Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. It's a long shot, but a more centrist-minded GOP could be the country's best guarantor against the Democrats...