President Reagan's chief of protocol Selwa Roosevelt took to the op-ed page of the Sunday Washington Post a week ago in despair over the valedictory op-ed written by outgoing Republican party chairman Haley Barbour. He had urged the party to "act boldly, but speak temperately" and to "stand up for what you believe is right, but tolerate those who disagree with you on this or that issue." But she was having none of that.
Roosevelt is what is commonly referred to as a "moderate" Republican, which is to say that her heroes are pro-choice Republicans Christie Whitman, William Weld, and Colin Powell. And unlike those notoriously intolerant and dogmatic right-wingers who apply "litmus tests" on the abortion issue, the moderate Republican Roosevelt offers . . . a nine-point bulleted list of items on which the party has failed her (and that's just on abortion). The points include such purported fiascoes as "the veto by Bush of the District of Columbia's legislation to pay for abortions for poor women" and "the inability of the Bush administration for months to find a suitable candidate to head the National Institutes of Health" because they wanted a pro-lifer. Talk about litmus tests. Talk about a long memory.
Roosevelt, by the way, is sure that she holds the key to electoral success for Republicans. In an analysis reminiscent of Pauline Kael's famous befuddlement over the 1972 Nixon landslide -- since absolutely everyone Kael knew in her neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side had gone for McGovern -- Roosevelt writes that just as she couldn't bring herself to vote for Bush in 1992 and Dole in '96, "almost every Republican woman I know also defected in both elections. We are the gender gap."