Michelle Dubert | An honest push to the extremes

When I read and think about some of the primary elections that have come and gone this year, I am immediately reminded of everything that's right and everything that's wrong with American politics today.

On Aug. 8, when much of the country was fixated on the all-consuming contest between embattled Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and challenger Ned Lamont in Connecticut, there was a different political story slinking under the radar. Not wholly unlike the histrionics in Connecticut, it was another example of a party's fringes engulfing its center base, only this time from the right, not the left.

The same night Lieberman bid adieu to the Democratic Party, a Republican House incumbent in Michigan was upset in his primary. In a similar fashion, it almost happened again in the much-publicized Senate primary in Rhode Island just last week.

The stimulus behind these latter races is the Club For Growth, an anti-tax political action committee that endorses anti-tax candidates. In Michigan, first-term moderate Rep. Joe Schwarz fell to the more fiscally conservative Tim Walberg, a former state representative. In Rhode Island, the Club for Growth bundled hundreds of thousands of dollars for Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey in his challenge against Sen. Lincoln Chafee, considered by many in the party to be a RINO - Republican in Name Only. The club has its hand in other races in Idaho, Colorado, Arizona, Washington and Indiana, to name a few, and is currently endorsing some 20 candidates thus far in the election season.

I say the best in politics and the worst in politics for good reason. On the one hand, the conservative group is not choking itself to fit the constraints of the Republican Party. In the case of Rhode Island, a loss for Chafee would have surely signaled defeat for the GOP, as Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic nominee, boasted a nearly 30 percentage point lead over Laffey.

Executive Director David Keating insists the Club for Growth is not a Republican Party advocacy group. Still, all its endorsed candidates are Republicans. "The Democrats in Congress today seem to have abandoned [their] position on free trade and have abandoned JFK's policy on lower income rates," he said.

In a year when the GOP is clinging to a tenuous hold of the majority in both the House and Senate, the club's decision to endorse and fund candidates who might have dimmer prospects against a "pro-tax" Democrat is commendable. We need more of that in politics today.

Which brings us to the worst in politics.

The club's striving for an ideal rather than strategizing and conspiring for political gain is indeed a good thing. But in so doing, this private organization is successfully extracting moderates from within the party and replacing them with hard-liners. Just like in Connecticut.

The problem comes from the top, and it brings us right back to Pennsylvania. The Club for Growth's president and CEO is Pat Toomey, who took the helm last year; it was Toomey, who challenged Sen. Arlen Specter from the right in the 2004 senatorial primary. And, I might add, almost beat him.

Toomey, a former congressman from Pennsylvania's 15th district, enjoyed tremendous support from the Club for Growth in his race against Specter. According to Keating, the club collected close to $1 million in member donations and spent an additional $400,000 in independent expenditures.

Defeating Specter might have yielded short-term gain for conservatives but provided an enormous setback for Republicans and Democrats long-term. Specter won the race by a slim 16,000 votes, prompting then-club chief Stephen Moore to caution that the closeness of the race should serve as a warning to other heretical Republicans.

"They're looking for ideological conformity," Specter told a reporter earlier this month. "They can't tolerate somebody who is independent. They're determined to rule or ruin." Specter also said he'd given Chafee advice on how to ward off the threat posed by the club.

Toomey was unavailable for comment.

This year, the Club For Growth seems to be on pace for a self-defeating prophecy, as they design a path that could easily allow more liberal candidates to be elected over the moderates already there or moderates more likely to win. "There is no evidence that anything Club for Growth has done would damage Republicans' keeping control of Congress," Keating insists.

That theory won't be proved or disproved until Nov. 7. But their reigning philosophy that a Republican will be punished if he or she doesn't embrace party orthodoxy is an unhealthy way to move forward, particularly at a time when the parties seem crippled by their own extremes.

Michelle Dubert is a College senior from Closter, N.J. Department of Strategery appears on Thursdays.

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