Quick Hit

I've been trying to figure out what I can add about the very public spatting that is going on inside the Republican Party, most recently between John McCain and Dennis Hastert. [link] I think it is this: the public feuding is distracting us because it's good theater.

By this, I mean that the public spectacle is obscuring a larger split among prominent Republicans, and a reawakening of a more moderate element within the party. As evidence, look at the recent Senate vote in which four moderate Republicans (Senators Snowe, Collins, Chafee and McCain) blocked a deal that would extend the Bush tax cuts. Or consider Senators John Warner and Lindsey Graham's dogged inquiries into abuses at Abu Ghraib. Or look at the commencement speech by Senator Richard Lugar, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he said, among other things, "National security decision-making can rarely be separated from the constraints of the international community, if only because our resources and influence are finite. Our security depends not on clever decision-making about when to go it alone, but on careful maintenance of our relations with other countries that ensures the international community will be with us in a crisis." [link]

If you ask me, these are evidence of the real fractures in the party.