Political purity

A couple of months ago former Republican Governor Marc Racicot was labelled a RINO and formally drummed out of the Montana Republican

Party, this in the face of the fact that he was responsible for the election of President George W. Bush and was also a former Chair of the national Republican Party. Where had he gone wrong? (For those who still don’t know, RINO means Republican In Name Only and the Democratic equivalent is DINO.) In the mid-1990s I organized a small, politically diverse group of Democrats who examined the loss of Democratic control of the Legislature by numbers similar to today’s lopsided margin. Our finding was that intolerance of those whose political beliefs were not totally matched to the most passionate of the Party’s political activists contributed to Democratic losses. The same would apply to any party where political impurity is not tolerated.