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Where’s my party?

Well, time moves quickly. Last Spring I was trying desperately to get attention from the local political blogs. Now I’m writing for one.

Some of you may remember me from that race. I had the crazy idea that someone might actually pay attention to a moderate Republican running in the fourth most Democratic district in the country. They didn’t, and I dropped out in the summer. The incumbent, Congressman Chaka Fattah (D-2), didn’t bother campaigning against my replacement.

All of that seems like a long time ago. Now I’m writing a blog whose main question is simple: Is there intelligent life in the Republican Party, and among moderates-to-conservatives generally, in Pennsylvania? Is our state destined to become bluer and bluer, or will it remain the purple state—not quite one way, not quite the other—that it has usually been? Or, to put it in slightly different terms . . . will the GOP’s seemingly all-out effort to make itself irrelevant finally succeed?

As my title suggests, I’m something of a moderate. At Rutgers University, teaching tax and comparative law as I do makes me a wild-eyed conservative. In the national Republican Party, that makes me something of a liberal weirdo. In Cheltenham, Montgomery County, where I live with my wife and two children . . . well, it isn’t entirely clear that the MontCo Republicans have much of an ideology, and as we’ll see, that’s part of the problem.

I’ll be writing about the 2010 races, but also about the political and cultural background in which they transpire. What do the demographic trends in Pennsylvania—its becoming more New Jersey and less Ohio, as The Inquirer put it—mean for our future politics? Can the city of Philadelphia have a serious Republican Party, and can it escape the pay-to-play culture that it always takes about overcoming but never quite does? Will the suburbs continue their red-to-purple tradition, or will the line between the parties move to, say, somewhere between York and Harrisburg?

Over the next 18 months, we’ll find out. Maybe.

April 19, 2009 at 7:00 pm

--Michael Livingston

Tags: Chaka Fattah, Cheltenham, Moderate Republicans, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania Politics

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