Yesterday, we were scrambling to get a pretty big story -- the potential closing of the Springettsbury Township Harley-Davidson plant.
I was working on it, but business news isn't really my bailiwick for this blog. The reason I bring it up is because I got a call from U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr., who wanted to mention his role in getting tax breaks for motorcycle purchases added to the federal stimulus bill.
Casey's been one of the Obama administration's big boosters for the federal stimulus package. Every time I talk to him on the subject, I think about the way the national Democratic Party treated his father, what a mistake that turned out to be, and how the Republicans seem to be making the same mistake these days.
Bob Casey Sr., of course, was the governor of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1995. Like his son, he was an anti-abortion Democrat.
In 1992, the Democrats denied him a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention to address that viewpoint, even though he was in accord with the party platform on virtually every other issue.
I've always believed that was a big mistake, for both ideological and strategic reasons. There's a big difference between saying you don't agree with someone, and saying you're not even going to listen to him.
I hope you don't mind if I bring a little personal family history into this. My extended family on my father's side was originally from upstate New York. Like a lot of blue-collar Irish Catholics from a couple of generations back, my paternal grandfather was a hardcore Democrat. He instilled that in his kids, too.
These days, though, the extended Joyce clan isn't the solid Democratic voting bloc it used to be. Now there's a rift between Republicans and Democrats -- the type that leads to a chorus of awkward throat-clearing whenever somebody brings up a political topic at a family gathering.
For the record, I'm not saying which side of that rift I fall on. I've got to cover politics, so I can't afford to publicly pick a side.
I can't pinpoint the 1992 convention as the precise moment when that rift opened in my family, but at the very least it was a major symptom of what caused the rift. In fact, abortion was the issue that turned most of my Republican relatives away from the Democratic Party in the first place. Subsequent hours spent listening to Rush Limbaugh and watching Fox News sealed the deal.
Now here's Casey Jr., in the same ideological camp as his father, apparently on really friendly terms with the Democratic administration. I'm guessing that means the national Democrats learned something along the line.
Now, of course, the Republicans are the ones taking a beating. The current issue of Time magazine features a Republican elephant on the cover, along with the words "Endangered Species."
I think any talk of Republicans passing out of the picture altogether is waaaay premature. The issue features a column by Joe Scarborough, pointing out that pundits made similar predictions in 1964, 1974 and 1992.
Still, when Sen. Arlen Specter stopped by our newsroom a couple of weeks back to talk about his switch to Democrat, he described a situation where zealots in the national Republican party are systematically taking down everyone who doesn't subscribe to a very narrow political creed.
This week's Time cover story includes a quote by Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of two remaining moderate Republicans in the Senate: "Ideological purity is not the ticket to the promised land."
I'd argue that if you want to win over 51 percent of the American electorate, ideological purity isn't even possible.
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