Republican Party Identity Crisis

May 1, 2009— -- The defection of Arlen Specter from the GOP to the Democratic Party this week has revived a simmering debate inside the party about the best way forward in the Obama era.

At issue is whether a demoralized Republican Party should be emphasizing breadth or depth in terms of ideology, messaging and geography.

On one side stand the fiscally and socially conservative purists -- party activists and elected officials who maintain that Republicans need to adhere to strict principles to emerge as a strong opposition party.

Their reaction to the Specter move was summed up by conservative blogger Michelle Malkin: "Don't let the door hit you on the way out."

On the other side stand the beleaguered Republican moderates, the dwindling number of blue-state GOPers and -- less quietly -- key members of party leadership on Capitol Hill.

They maintain that the party can't afford to cut itself off from any blocs of voters, not with a popular Democratic president in office. They warn that the wrong moves now will consign the Republican Party to a prolonged minority status, chasing a shrinking base in ever-smaller portions of the country.

"There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party," Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine -- now one of only three Republican senators from the Northeast -- wrote in the New York Times on Wednesday.

Specter's situation, of course, is unique. He was a moderate senator whose state has grown increasingly Democratic over his three decades in the Senate.

A conservative challenger seemed almost certain to defeat him in next year's Republican primary -- leaving a party switch his only real hope of retaining office.

Specter acknowledged as much in his decision to become a Democrat. But in leaving the GOP, he bemoaned what he described as the party's conservative shift: "Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan big tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right."