Maine is known for GOP moderates, but over the weekend, conservative activists succeeded in passing a platform that’s backed by tea party groups.
By Colin Woodard, Correspondent / May 10, 2010
Portland, Maine
Conservative activists backed by “tea party” groups have rejected the Maine Republican Party’s proposed platform, replacing it with a document praising the tea-party movement and calling for a number of potentially radical changes, such as the sealing of borders.
An overwhelming majority of the 1,800 delegates at the party’s state convention passed the conservative platform Saturday. The move surprised many in the Maine GOP, which has a half-century reputation for moderation. The state’s two Republican US senators – Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins – are both considered moderates, as is their predecessor, Bill Cohen, who served in Bill Clinton’s cabinet.
“If you’re not a moderate, you don’t get elected in Maine,” says political consultant Chris Potholm, a professor of government at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. “Any candidate who gets nominated is going to ignore that platform, or he or she is going to lose.”
snip* In Maine, the newly adopted GOP platform outlines various changes, although its ambiguous language leaves the meaning of many sections open to interpretation. There’s a call to restore “Constitutional Law as the basis for the judiciary,” to “reassert the principle that ‘Freedom of Religion’ does not mean ‘Freedom from Religion,’ ” to “return to the principles of Austrian Economics,” and to remove “obstacles created by government” to the private development of natural gas, oil, coal, and nuclear power.
Other parts are clearer: a rejection of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, elimination of the US Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, and a freeze and prohibition on stimulus spending. Healthcare is “not a right” but “a service” that can be addressed only by using “market based solutions.”
The wide acceptance of the platform at the convention surprised even its co-authors. “I had no inkling this would pass, and frankly we’d been told as much by people running the convention,” says co-author Steven Dyer, an evangelical youth pastor and vice chair of the Knox County Republican Committee, which sponsored the document. “They didn’t even make copies of it for the delegates. They just read it to them from the podium.”
in full:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0510/Tea-party-backed-platform-sails-through-Maine-GOP-convention
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