Helms

I struggle to describe the radical North Carolina branch of the Republican Party. As I tell my Republican friends, this is not the Republican Party I grew up with in Minnesota.

The message that drew my mother to the "Party of Lincoln" 50 years ago: fiscal efficiency, individual responsibility, equality of opportunity, and protecting rights and civil liberties, is now completely lost. The NC GOP of 2008 has abdicated those mainstream American values in favor of anti-government rhetoric, rigid and dangerous fiscal policy, social intolerance, and divisiveness.

Remember the new conservative coalition that was to provide a "permanent Republican majority?" Today that pipe dream is mostly associated with Karl Rove, but originally it was envisioned by Richard Nixon as the fruit of his Southern Strategy. This strategy was supposed to retain the party's traditional Northeastern and Midwestern conservative base while reaching out to Southerners disaffected by civil rights and the role of Democrats in the demise of Jim Crow. It was designed to meld the Puritan tradition of small government and individual responsibility with the historical sense of loss and grievance that infected the South.