Ramstad Retirement Leaves Partisan Gulf Wider than Ever

It will come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever read anything I’ve written that I’m a liberal. As such, I generally vote DFL when given the opportunity.  But when I lived in the third district, I always voted for Jim Ramstad.

It wasn’t difficult, of course; Ramstad was the model of a liberal Republican, the sort of socially tolerant, fiscally moderate politician who used to define the old Independent-Republican party. And despite the fact that his party has long since dropped the “I” from “IR,” and traded Arne Carlson for Tim Pawlenty, Ramstad continued to move stubbornly ahead, a moderate, pragmatic representative in a Congress that was increasingly neither.

The 2006 mid-term elections stripped Ramstad of many of his ideological soul-mates, the Rockefeller Republicans from New England who were tossed out in last year’s realignment. This session, Ramstad has gamely crossed the aisle, supporting Democratic initiatives often, and voting against the war. For that, he gained the enmity of the right, who saw him as a “RINO,” a Republican in Name Only.

Well, come 2008, Republicans will have a second-district candidate more to their liking. Ramstad is going to announce his retirement today, giving Republicans the opportunity to select a good old-fashioned fire-breather to succeed him. Meanwhile, Democrats should be lining up to challenge in what should be a very competitive, if not tilt-left district, and one suspects that their candidates for the seat should run from pretty liberal to extremely liberal.

Read moreIn short, it’s a virtual certainty that Ramstad will be replaced by someone more philosophically rigid than himself. A Democratic win will likely give us a liberal, a GOP win a conservative, but neither is likely to give us someone as truly independent-minded as Ramstad.

There are limits to moderation, of course, and moderation for moderation’s sake is not always a good thing. On issues of same-sex marriage, abortion, or the Iraq war there may be no real point of compromise, and that’s fine. And it’s also good for parties to stand for something, to have a consistent message and common goals. That said, it is also good to have a few moderates in both parties, to help bridge the huge divide that separates Republicans and Democrats today.

Ramstad’s retirement will leave Minnesota with only one member of its House delegation that isn’t a fairly strong ideologue. Oh, Bachmann may be pretty far right, and Ellison pretty far left, but Walz is not really a moderate and Kline certainly isn’t.

No, with Ramstad’s retirement, only Colin Peterson will be left as a bridge between Minnesota’s members in the House, and as we know, those bridges can be tricky things. When Peterson retires, doubtless the seventh will elect a conservative Republican, and our delegation will be neatly split into conservatives and liberals. Maybe it’s just sentimentalism, but I think we’re going to miss the days when we had a Congressman or two whose vote we couldn’t predict in advance.