Some fear GOP is being carried to the extreme

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Mon Sep-14-09 01:46 PM
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Some fear GOP is being carried to the extreme

Some fear GOP is being carried to the extreme
The Republican establishment hopes cooler heads will prevail over strongly anti-Obama parts of the conservative base.

By Peter Wallsten
September 14, 2009

Reporting from Washington - Amid a rebirth of conservative activism that could help Republicans win elections next year, some party insiders now fear that extreme rhetoric and conspiracy theories coming from the angry reaches of the conservative base are undermining the GOP's broader credibility and casting it as the party of the paranoid.

Such insiders point to theories running rampant on the Internet, such as the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is thus ineligible to be president, or that he is a communist, or that his allies want to set up Nazi-like detention camps for political opponents. Those theories, the insiders say, have stoked the GOP base and have created a "purist" climate in which a figure such as Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) is lionized for his "You lie!" outburst last week when Obama addressed Congress.

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In one symbolic development, organizers of next year's Conservative Political Action Conference -- the country's biggest annual meeting of activists on the right -- said last week that they had rejected a request to schedule a panel on whether Obama was a native-born U.S. citizen.

"It would fill a room," said event director Lisa De Pasquale. "But so would a two-headed monkey. There really are so many more important issues, and it's only a three-day conference."

CPAC officials said WorldNetDaily's Farah asked the group to hold the panel.

The CPAC decision came after Washington GOP strategist Jon Henke began a campaign against WorldNetDaily, which has published numerous articles giving credence to the birthplace issue and other allegations against the Obama administration.

WorldNetDaily is also soliciting signatures and e-mail addresses for a petition calling on "any and all controlling legal authorities in this matter" to examine Obama's birth certificate.

One WorldNetDaily article, which Henke called “hideously embarrassing” to conservatives, said that a Democratic proposal to create civilian emergency centers at military installations "appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany."

Henke said, "There is a substantial discomfort among the people who want to make intellectual arguments and want to have a substantive role in the debate." He compared the Obama birth theorists to those who said Obama's healthcare overhaul would create "death panels."

" 'Death panels' is not a substantive contribution to the discussion. It's a cartoon," he said.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gop-fringe14-2009sep14,0,5000500,full.story