There hasn’t been much on the radar since Olympia Snowe retired and Dick Lugar lost, but today had a double-dose of centrist Republican angst that would make Jeff Daniels’s character from The Newsroom go weak in the knees. Steve B. is unimpressed with Rep. Hanna’s complaints about Republican extremism:

Where were the Republican moderates during the debt-ceiling crisis, when their party threatened to crash the economy on purpose unless Democrats accepted non-negotiable demands? They were silent. Not one was willing to step up and say, “What we’re doing is wrong.”

Where were the Republican moderates during the repeated threats of government shutdowns? Where were the Republican moderates when the House voted 32 times to destroy a moderate health care reform law?

Where were the Republican moderates when President Obama pleaded with Congress to engage in some bipartisan policymaking? Where were the Republican moderates when GOP leaders prioritized abortion over job creation? Where were the Republican moderates when the GOP decided it was against its own proposals on immigration, energy, health care, and the economy?

These centrists have been a non-entity because they’ve chosen to go along with an extremist agenda, sitting on the sidelines and voting how they’re told to vote.

If they’re frustrated about the radicalization of their party, maybe they should have spoken up sooner.

And Steve K. is somewhat kinder toward retiring Rep. LaTourette.

I think there are two components to this, one of which I’m a bit skeptical of, one of which I’m not. On the one hand, defying the leadership and the bulk of the party would require real courage, especially considering that primary challenges from the right remain a significant threat. And you know what Sir Humphrey Appleby would say about political courage:

The other angle to this is that, ultimately, moderate Republicans often decline to behave in their own best interest. If ever there was an issue for moderate Republicans to be vocal on, it would be on the fraudulence of “voter fraud” arguments as a way of disenfranchising people. The more that moderates and Democrats vote, the more essential the moderate wing becomes to the GOP. And with a legitimately bipartisan opposition and a fractured GOP, the optics of the issue would be very different. It’s absolutely insane to me that moderate Republicans aren’t united and loud in their denunciations of this issue, but so far only Michigan Governor Snyder has spoken out against them. While it’s likely that a Republican crossing party lines on high-priority issues to the base (climate, taxes, etc.) would be ending his career, I doubt that would be true of lower-priority issues. But one sees no signs of assertiveness there.

What strikes me about these two guys’ complaints (and the complaints of Lugar and Snowe) is that Republican moderates seem to share one quality in particular with Democratic moderates (e.g. the Blue Dogs): entitlement. It hasn’t occurred to any of these four that power is built, not given, and that holding moderate views does not entitle you to wield decisive control over your party. I blame this trait on the centrist Washington culture, which assumes that moderate voices are inherently more reasonable and deserve more attention. Moderates who live in this world seem to be unable to bear the realities of political party life, in which on-the-one-hand reasoning and careful hedging to ensure both sides are at fault doesn’t take you quite as far. I suppose it’s no shock that the lazy centrism of D.C. culture encourages similarly lazy centrist politics, and subsequently frustration when they don’t get what they think they deserve. It amuses me because, well, gaining power involves the same process regardless of your politics, and remaking a party in a centrist fashion is an achievable goal. Just ask Nelson Rockefeller, or Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But these guys never give me a sense of that, it’s just more in sorrow than in anger complaining about how the rest of the party isn’t like them.

Also, I guess I don’t really buy LaTourette’s excuse that he’s leaving because of extremism–his departure will inevitably result in a more conservative Republican taking his place. He’s probably more angry about getting shut out of a committee slot. At least Snowe got another lame, publicity-hungry moderate to pick up her mantle after she’s gone.