It's My Party Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America FROM THE PUBLISHER
"A heated and high-stakes battle is raging within the Republican Party between its far-right faction and its moderate wing, and the outcome will be momentous for both the party and the country as a whole. Will the party interpret President Bush's reelection victory as a requirement to cater to the demands of the far-right base? If so, it will only fuel the flames of the overheated polarization that has gripped the country." "Or, as Christine Todd Whitman advocates in It's My Party Too, will the party seize this opportunity to return to a focus on the core Republican principles - those that propelled the "Reagan revolution" and that appeal to a broad base of Americans? By doing so, it can build a much stronger majority and bring the country together again. It is time, she says, for "radical moderates."" "Relentlessly pushing their rigid demands on abortion rights, stem cell research, the environment, and go-it-alone foreign policy, the far-right groups, whom Christine Whitman calls social fundamentalists, are not only violating traditional Republican principles, but are also seeking to purge the party of moderates, whom they called RINOS (Republicans in Name Only). Yet they fail to appreciate that the most popular Republicans in the country are all moderates." Whitman takes readers inside the tumultuous world of politics today to reveal how a moderate approach can work wonders, while the arrogant and unyielding bullying of the conservatives only leads to more division.
FROM THE CRITICS
New York Times - January 26, 2005
IT is one of the more fortunate footnotes of last week's inaugural
festivities: When President Bush was sworn in for his second term, Christie
Whitman, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency during his first term,
was thousands of miles away, attending a corporate board meeting.
Mrs. Whitman said she had unsuccessfully urged the company, Texas
Instruments, to reschedule, and that she nonetheless managed to attend a few
pre-inaugural soirees in Washington. But given the furor Mrs. Whitman has
ignited among some of the president's most fervent supporters, it's a wonder she
made it out of the capital without celebrating conservatives using her as
pinata....
Indianapolis Star - January 15, 2005
Christine Todd Whitman's autobiographical "It's My Party Too: The Battle for
the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America" is a reasonable,
well-thought-out prescription for the malady that ails American partisan
politics today -- immoderation and ideological intolerance.
No question that politics in America has become a sort of trench warfare
where stalemate, divisiveness, witless propaganda and constant infighting are
deepening the alienation of voters at all levels. Whitman's book is a "soft
manifesto" for returning to the core values of the Republican Party: equality of
opportunity, limited government and fiscal restraint combined with lower taxes
and a strong national defense. In short, it is an appeal for moderation in
political life.
Whitman served in George W. Bush's first Cabinet as Environmental Protection
Agency administrator until May 2003, when her strong advocacy for environmental
protection ran afoul of party extremists. She was the first woman governor of
New Jersey, serving two terms from 1993 to 2000.
Whitman's parents both were active at all levels of the party, and they
included her in all aspects of their work. She attended her first Republican
National Convention at age 9 in 1956, and has attended every convention since,
serving as a national official in many.Whitman labels the extreme right-wing
that now controls the party as "social fundamentalists whose sole mission is to
advance their narrow ideological agenda -- (They) argue that they tipped the
balance in the (2004) election and that the party can't win elections without
them." But, she notes, "while winning elections is important, it is every bit as
important to win them in ways that allow you to govern all the people once the
ballots are counted."
Moderates must aggressively reclaim their lost heritage, she argues, or the
party will continue to lose more of the broad-based center that is the core of
American politics. For evidence, she cites former Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon,
Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush as representing the "various ribs of the
Republican Party, and none of them would have tolerated purging the party of
those who didn't share their own particular brand of Republicanism."
Whitman makes a convincing argument that the Republican Party has a rich
political-historical tradition that needs to be defended. She details how the
party should return to its roots of racial and minority inclusion that date back
to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.Throughout the book, Whitman
interweaves her experience as governor of New Jersey into her philosophy of
national government. State government was for her the quintessential proving
ground for testing sound policies and demonstrating how moderates can better
accomplish the task of governing. That experience provides her with an important
frame of reference for understanding and embracing government as "the art of the
possible."
Her particular niche as a concerned environmentalist with an impressive track
record of reform in New Jersey and her later conflict with the right wing in the
Bush administration over national environmental policies are interesting reading
on consensus building and moderation in politics.
Whitman carefully articulates action steps needed for her party's path back
to moderation and future success.Farah, of
Zionsville, is a writer and researcher who teaches at Ivy
Tech.
The Washington Times
In October 1964, the year of Goldwater vs. Johnson, my wife and I visited
friends in a Connecticut suburb of New York City. One evening they
had a cocktail party, with about two dozen guests. All were
Republicans. They were congenial, but upon discovering we were voting for Barry Goldwater
when we got home to California, they were
aghast. They dismissed him as an extremist, for they were "moderates" and, therefore, would vote for Lyndon
Johnson. There was a
time when Northeastern grandees dominated the Grand Old Party.
Christie Whitman, the author of "It's My Party Too: The Battle for the Heart
of the GOP and the Future of America,"
to be published Jan. 31, seems to think of those as halcyon days. She does not see the
connection between her "traditional Republican values" ("limited
government, lower taxes, the power of the markets and a strong
national defense") and efforts to replace RINOS ("Republican in Name Only") with
ones who will push for those values...
This is a readable book by an earnest, sometimes courageous and basically
reasonable person. One comes
away thinking there should be another chance for her in the public realm. Peter Hannaford is the author
of "Recollections of Reagan: A Portrait of Ronald Reagan."
-January 25, 2005
Library Journal
Struggling to revivify the moderate; with an eight-city author tour. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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