The Billings Gazette has been running profiles of the Republican candidates for Montana's US House seat. The latest was of A.J. Otjen:
Otjen is a Republican who doesn't talk about tax cuts. In fact, she said tax cuts don't work to jump-start the economy and increase revenues in the long term.
"We've got the data that proves that," she said.
She doesn't talk about abortion, except to say she doesn't think it should be illegal. She thinks the words like "faith and family" that many Republicans use to describe themselves ignore the fact that Democrats love their families, too, and they go to church.
She is running to give voice to those traditional Republicans who do not define themselves by wedge social issues, which might rally the party base but, she says, do little to take on the nation's larger problems.
"I would like to go back to the days when social issues did not dominate the Republican Party," she said.
Likewise on Otjen's website (subtitled, "A Teddy Roosevelt Republican"), her issues page demonstrates how she's different than your typical contemporary Montana Republican: Pro-education. An opponent of "the War on Terror." A fierce advocate of privacy, from the bedroom to boardroom. Against across-the-board tax cuts. A supporter of a Green Economy, but through tax credits and incentives. She supports a tax on high fructose corn syrup. And so on.
A Republican friend noted on Facebook the other day that "Otjen diverges from the GOP on more than social issues - she's for higher taxes, she voted for Obama (and is still a supporter) and supports the recent healthcare bill that passed."
But that's ignoring Otjen's real conservative values. She's a true deficit hawk - you can't erase a deficit by cutting taxes. She favors market solutions to problems - tax incentives and credits to businesses who embrace green tech and reduce carbon, as opposed to a carbon tax. On social issues, it's more accurate to classify her as libertarian than liberal. And supporting the recent health care bill hardly makes you a liberal - the bill, after all, was pretty much written by the Heritage Foundation. Open the insurance market to competition and provide subsidies to those that can't afford premiums. Even the individual mandate is a conservative invention. And if you've been reading this blog and its comments for any length of time, you'll know that supporting Obama doesn't necessarily tarnish your conservative credentials.
In short, Otjen's is what a Republican would look like if a Republican laid aside partisanship and applied pragmatic, conservative values to the very real problems afflicting the nation. The opposite of, say, Dennis Rehberg, who's achieved next to nothing in Congress other than riding along on the wave of GOP support for the worst excesses of the Bush administration: deficit, economic collapse, war, torture.
Otjen is a moderate. And if you think there really is such a thing as the "radical center" just waiting to burst out and shuck off the manacles of party politics, then she should be the leading candidate in this race. But that she's an afterthought in this race, no more highly regarded than, say, Mark French (who wants the US government to run on "Biblical principles" as defined by Mark French), tells us a lot about the current state of Republican politics, which not only lacks for real solutions to global warming, joblessness, and the health care crisis, but fails to even acknowledge those problems exist.
The Republican party has devolved from a political party with policy goals to a group of people clinging onto echo-chamber sound bites, like Titanic survivors to a life raft. And Otjen, who doesn't kow-tow to the rhetoric, will be tossed off into the sea. |
