Geoffrey Kabaservice Quotes
A Republican Party without moderates was like a heavily muscled body without a head.
Geoffrey Kabaservice, American Historian, quoted in Reihan Salam's, "The Missing Middle in American Politics, How Moderate Republicans Became Extinct", Foreign Affairs, March/April 2012
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The Repubican primary contest weakened Mitt Romney, the eventual primary winner and Presidential Candidate, by forcing him to the right to satisfy the conservative Republicans. This made him very unappealing not only to some moderate republicans but also to independents and especially to minorities and women who very much resented the conservative Republican culture clash which they saw as attacks on them. Democrat Barack Obama won the General Election handily.
He had invited Ted Kennedy to also give a presentation at the library, and this was part of the introduction. The President rarely “jumped” on anyone, but he was referring to the common practice of his fellow Republicans of using Kennedy as the villain in fundraising and partisan attacks.
Actually, it was the Tea Party members of the Republican Party whose unprecedented willingness to risk the full faith and credit of the United States when the majority of the Republican legislators and almost all the Democrats were not, who held the required Debt Ceiling Increase hostage to getting their legislative way. But in this particular debate and legislation the Democrats gained nothing except that the anger of the American People was much greater against the Republicans than the Democrats, many of whose usual supporters thought that the Democrats had been totally intimidated by the Tea Party.
So far as he was concerned, Republican moderates—his own party members—were liberals. Anyone who did not support the extreme Conservative agenda, was an enemy and a liberal. He and the Tea Party drove almost all the moderate Republicans out of the party.
