LOVE THY ENEMY

It's clear that the kind of hard right politics practiced by Bush no longer enjoy the wide support we saw after 9/11. No longer able to wrap the flag around issues such as the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind, and after suffering several major legislative defeats (though one of them, immigration, was distinctly not a part of the typical right agenda), Bush's influence, his neocon foreign policy, and his domestic usurping of legislative and judicial power are on the wane. Bush's poll numbers are a joke and, according to many the president has officially entered the lame-duck phase of his tenure in office. Whither the future of the Republican Party?

It's clear that the GOP, at least for this election cycle, is coalescing around centrist candidates like Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. On the state level, we see policy and attitudinal similarities with the enormously popular 'progressive' Republicans like governor Schwarzenegger who, like Giuliani at least, support the environment, gay rights, the right to abortion, etc. These issues, of course, would normally have been toxic to a conservative electorate, but not so much anymore. Schwarzenegger's popularity has been mentioned, Giuliani is the current front runner for the Republican nomination, and in 2004 these 'centrist' politicians were trotted out as the new face of the GOP at the Republican convention in New York, which suggests that senior Republican leadership realizes an essential move to the left is necessary to maintain conservative relevancy.

Here's my thought experiment/question: Should democrats who have an interest in 'reforming the enemy' support these centrist candidates in an effort to change the Republican party? Wouldn't it be important for the Republican leadership to have their tack to the left reinforced and supported by another term in the White House? Wouldn't this permanently transform the Republican Party, reform them, and put them on a course to eventually accept the permanency of Roe v Wade, the essential moral justness of gay marriage, and a humbler (and more traditional) foreign policy? It's conceivable that if the Republican party doesn't win this cycle they will return to the bosom and succor of typical right wing ideology and an important opportunity will have been missed. Would a vote for Giuliani be a vote for a larger kind of electoral liberalism where future debates between liberals and conservatives wouldn't be about Creationism vs. Evolution, or Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice, but instead about Civic Unions vs. Full Marriage for gay people, or Comprehensive Immigration vs. Limited Immigration Reform, or Privatized Health Care Reform vs. a Single Payer System. Wouldn't the possibility for these dramatically less polarizing national arguments represent a massive ideological shift to the left we liberals would love to see and wouldn't it be great for the overall welfare of the country? Would a true liberal vote for the GOP in '08?