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Why RI Republicans fail

Republicans, heal thyselves
As the news broke in Saturday’s ProJo that Rhode Island’s deficit for the next fiscal year has more than doubled — from $200 million to between $400 million and $450 million — this ritualized criticism of Democrats was already well under way.
 
A case in point was the November 1 broadcast of RI-PBS’ A Lively Experiment. WPRO-AM talk-show host John DePetro found a largely sympathetic reception among his fellow panelists when he blamed the nexus of organized labor and legislative Democrats for the state’s most serious problems.
 
In a subsequent interview, DePetro says he doesn’t hold Republicans responsible for the party’s meager presence in the legislature. He likens the GOP to a Pop Warner team taking on the New England Patriots, or a mom-and-pop store competing against Wal-Mart. “They’re up against too much of a well-organized, well-financed team,” says DePetro, who sees Operation Dollar Bill, US Attorney Robert Clark Corrente’s ongoing probe of legislative influence-peddling, as the best hope for remaking the partisan equation.
 
The only dissenting voice during the Lively Experiment broadcast came from Keith Stokes, executive director of the Greater Newport Chamber of Commerce, who suggests that continually slamming Democrats is counter-productive, in part since harsh rhetoric discourages people from getting involved in politics.
 
Stokes, whose ancestors include the first blacks elected (as Republicans) to the General Assembly and to the city council in Richmond, Virginia — the former capital of the Confederacy — calls himself “very sensitive to the importance of having a strong Republican Party.”
 
But when he thinks of philosophical descendants of Abraham Lincoln, he names one person who is deceased (John Chafee) one who recently lost office (Lincoln Chafee), and two others long since departed from the political scene (former US Representatives Claudine Schneider and Ron Machtley). Stokes certainly doesn’t include Richard Nixon, whose “Southern strategy” used white discomfort with growing voting participation by blacks to seek advantages for the GOP.
 
In the 30-plus years since Nixon left office, the national Republican Party has moved to the right, and moderates — like Lincoln Chafee, who lost his US Senate seat last year because of George W. Bush’s unpopularity in Rhode Island — are a dying species. Rhode Island’s tiny GOP, meanwhile, which once operated as the state’s good-government party, is weakened by the divisions between its moderate and conservative elements.
 
State Republican Party chairman Giovanni Cicione, who started in his volunteer post about seven months ago, was reluctant to discuss the party’s responsibility for its current place, although he talks a good game about efforts to ramp up a competitive slate of legislative candidates for 2008 (more about this later).
 
Cicione says he is spending most of his time as chair “working in minority communities, immigrant communities, to let people know there’s an option,” to run as a Republican. “I think that’s going to be an appealing message for a lot of people” who wouldn’t normally consider themselves part of the GOP.
 
But it remains an open question if Cicione’s embrace of the rhetorical battle — referring to Democrat-aligned anti-poverty advocates as “poverty pimps,” for example, and calling unions “the last vestige of institutional racism in this country” — does more to help or hurt the party.
 
Cicione is unapologetic. After labor interests called for his ouster, he used an op-ed in Saturday’s ProJo to push the envelope, asserting, “The labor movement has become the most offensive special interest in Rhode Island history.”
 
But Brown University’s Darrell West thinks that similar remarks “hurt Republicans, because they associate the party with an extreme message and they distract from efforts to close the budget gap. I think the Republicans need to stay focused on the budget.”

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