All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

On the heels of an interview with a North Dakota radio station this week in which he advised it would be a mistake for the Republican Party to seek broader appeal by moderating its stance on issues, former vice president Dick Cheney today said there is room in the GOP for moderates.

"I think partly it's a semantic problem," he told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer on Face The Nation. "I don't think the party ought to move dramatically to the left, for example, in order to try to redefine its base.

"We are what we are. We're Republicans. We have certain things we believe in. And maintaining our loyalty and commitment to those principles is vital to our success."

And when it came to "loyalty," Cheney offered that he believes former Secretary of State Colin Powell abandoned the party.

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By now, Maine Senator Olympia Snowe may be wondering whether she is destined to wind up as a disappearing political curiosity: The "moderate" Republican.

Following the decision by Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter to become a Democrat, Snowe's frustration with her party's rightward shift bubbled over in the form of a blistering public critique of fellow Republicans. In a 747 word "J'accuse" published in Wednesday's New York Times, Snowe blamed the party for ignoring "the iceberg under the surface" and for "failing to undertake the re-evaluation of our inclusiveness as a party that could have forestalled many of the losses we have suffer."

"It is true that being a Republican moderate sometimes feels like being a cast member of "Survivor" — you are presented with multiple challenges, and you often get the distinct feeling that you’re no longer welcome in the tribe. But it is truly a dangerous signal that a Republican senator of nearly three decades no longer felt able to remain in the party."

Her op-ed reverberated through the blogosphere as hard-line Democrats and Republicans staked out expected positions. But a more interesting debate also accompanied the predictable polemics, with some commentators suggesting that the real dynamic at play had less to do with inner-Republican strife than with broader societal shifts.

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