Republican moderates look to chart new course in Iowa

12.26.07 -- 3:06 PM

By Chicago Tribune

On a recent ice-swept morning, a group of self-described moderate Republicans met in a hotel convention room, looking to find a way to break the chill of a presidential season that has found many of them left out in the cold.

"Our goal is to get traditional centrist moderate Republicans to get to the caucus and make their voices heard," said former Iowa Lt. Gov. Joy Corning.

"The moderates who are out there, they've been rather quiet for a few years. Many of them have dropped out of the party or become independents, and so this is an effort to regroup and encourage people to be active," she said.

Rising concerns

About 60 people attended the meeting called by Corning, who served eight years under Gov. Terry Branstad until Democrats took over the governor's office in 1999. The discussion focused on looking for common ground -- largely on fiscal, education and environmental issues -- with a conservative wing that is a strong influence on the state's GOP social agenda.

But the comments that day echoed a concern voiced nationally by prominent Republican moderates -- that the party's rightward tilt, and the heavy spending by what had been a GOP-controlled Washington until the 2006 midterm congressional elections, has left them little more than an afterthought in the party.

Those concerns have been heightened by a Republican presidential primary campaign that finds most of the leading candidates advocating a conservative social agenda as they try to win the nomination by appealing to a GOP base on the right that dominates turnout in many early caucus and primary states.

"It means building the farm team and taking back the word 'Republican' to say we don't have to be the way we are perceived now at the national level, as a mean-spirited narrow-minded litmus-test party," said Christine Todd Whitman, a former New Jersey governor and former Bush Cabinet member who now leads the Republican Leadership Council.

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