Christine Todd Whitman has penned a new book that envisions big changes for the GOP.

09:13 AM EST on Wednesday, November 16, 2005

BY SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Christine Todd Whitman is not surprised that President Bush's approval ratings are anemic, or that U.S. citizens increasingly question the military intervention in Iraq and believe the Republican Party has been captured by a cabal of right-wing fundamentalist Christians.

Journal photo / Connie Grosch

Former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman visits Brown University yesterday as part of the John Hazen White Lecture Series. At left is Darrell West, of Brown's Taubman Center.

"I am surprised it all happened so fast," said Whitman, standing in the Brown Bookstore yesterday afternoon, shortly before a speech on campus. "But there is no satisfaction in saying 'I told you so' because things aren't working so well for the country."

Whitman, a lifelong Republican, is the former New Jersey governor and Bush Administration Environmental Protection Agency administrator whose latest crusade is to try to rescue her party from what she calls its "fundamentalist" and "hard-right" drift.

In a book published last winter called It's My Party Too, the Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America, Whitman argued that the Republican Party was becoming too extreme for most Americans. At the time, in the aftermath of Mr. Bush's reelection victory, she was mocked by more than one conservative Republican and many book reviewers.

After all, the conservative side of the GOP was triumphant: Republicans won not only the White House a year ago but had also taken control of both the House and Senate. "One finishes the book uncertain whether to call it a work of insufferable snobbery or complete cluelessness," wrote Matthew Scully, a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush, in a review for the Los Angeles Times.

Now, with quagmire in Iraq, the slow-footed White House response to Hurricane Katrina, the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide and the president's approval rating hovering in the mid 30s, Whitman doesn't appear so out of touch.

In a brief interview and in her speech at Brown, which was part of the university's John Hazen White Lecture Series, Whitman pointed to several other problems that have ensnared Mr. Bush since his reelection, including the crashing of the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination and the White House and congressional intervention into the Terry Schiavo case.

And she pointed to last week's Democratic victories in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey as evidence that the Bush administration's brand of conservative Republicanism has lost its electoral lure.

"A lot of this is of his own making,' said Whitman of the president. "These elections weren't held in a vacuum."

She noted that the president's job disapproval rate was 66 percent in New Jersey and that the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia lost despite an eleventh-hour campaign stop in the state by Mr. Bush.

Whitman hails from a moderate Republican tradition that was once dominant in the Northeast -- especially New England -- and parts of the Midwest. Both of her parents and their parents were Republican Party activists, and she is proud of being a Rockefeller Republican, the term applied a generation or two ago to GOP stalwarts who were in the mold of Nelson Rockefeller, the relatively liberal GOP New York governor and U.S. vice president under President Gerald Ford, another moderate.

Rockefeller moderates believe in smaller government than Democrats, pay-as-you-go government, support of abortion rights, civil rights for minorities and women, and environmental protection. This strain of Republicanism supported the international institutions erected to keep the peace in the aftermath of World War II, such as NATO and the United Nations, which draw contempt from the neoconservative architects of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

Culturally, moderate Republicans tend to be mainline Protestants or Jews, suspicious of fundamental Christians or anyone who wore religion on his or her sleeve.

In New England, this vein of Republican thought was best represented by members of families with such names as Lodge and Saltonstall in Massachusetts, Aiken and Jeffords in Vermont, Bridges in New Hampshire, and Chafee in Rhode Island. Sen. Lincoln Chafee is one of the last of this breed in a U.S. Senate whose GOP leadership is dominated by Republicans from the states of the Old Confederacy.

Of Mr. Bush's victory last November, Whitman said that his allies misinterpreted the size of his mandate. She noted that Bush won reelection by 2.5 percent over John Kerry, far less than the 18-percent reelection plurality Ronald Reagan rolled up in 1984 or Bill Clinton's comfortable 8-percent margin in 1996.

"It was clearly not a mandate to take the country hard in either direction," said Whitman. "We have a very evenly divided country."

"The Republican Party has got to stop this push to the extremes," said Whitman.

Most U.S. voters are centrists, turned off by harsh rhetoric of either the right or the left, Whitman said.

Her goal, she says, is by 2008 to create a movement of moderates that would make it possible for Arizona Sen. John McCain or former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge to be nominated as a GOP presidential candidate.

One decision she refused to discuss yesterday was whom she supported for president last year. "I'm not going to tell. That's a private decision."