Gilchrest Unloads on Know-Nothing Pols and the Rest of Us

Long-serving members of Congress and the state legislatures are not only leaving office but also blasting their party on the way out. Just a few years after running his party's national congressional campaign effort, Rep. Tom Davis of Fairfax County is leaving Congress embittered by the Republicans' hard-right positions and frustrated that there appears to be no home for moderates who might appeal to suburban voters.

Virginia's GOP "gave me the middle finger," Davis said after party leaders maneuvered to hand its nomination for the retiring John Warner's U.S. Senate seat to former governor Jim Gilmore, rather than allow a primary between the hard-right Gilmore and the moderate Davis. "Anybody who compromises, you go back to your party base and you're an apostate. You're squishy. You're weak."

Two of Virginia's longest-serving GOP leaders, Sen. John Chichester of Stafford County and Del. Vince Callahan of Fairfax, left the legislature this year with harsh words for their party -- and both have endorsed Democrat Mark Warner in this fall's Senate race.

"I'm extremely distressed by the path it's taking," Callahan told me of the GOP in Virginia. "It could end up being a minority debating society. We can't be a party about immigrant-bashing or gay-bashing or any other bashing. We should be a party of fiscal responsibility, which is how I got into it."

This is more than the usual bitterness of politicians who have lost a race for office or been displaced by a new generation. This is a collective cry for help.

"I haven't stepped away from my party," Gilchrest says. "The party has stepped away from Eisenhower and Goldwater and Nixon and Ford and even Ronald Reagan. It's been driven away by this anti-government combination of Milton Friedman and Jerry Falwell."

In a republic, leaders must occasionally tell the people that they are wrong, just as the people sometimes have to throw the bums out. Last week, we watched as two presidential candidates danced away from any serious discussion about pain or responsibility in this financial crisis. We have no Lincoln, no FDR. But at least we have a few smaller voices on their way out the door, liberated to tell some truths.

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