Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum has an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in which he challenges the media meme that the GOP is too narrow and intolerant of diverse views to be a national party. Santorum points out some inconvenient truths:
According to the American Conservative Union, in 2008, only two of the 51 Senate Democrats had conservative ratings above 25 percent. But 21 of the 49 Republican senators had conservative ratings of 75 percent or less.
This means that the senate Republicans are much closer to the ideological center than are the Democrats. Here's further confirmation that the most ideologically rigid party is the Democrat party:
Furthermore, 12 Democrats had a conservative rating of zero, while an additional 25 scored under 10 percent. By contrast, only one Republican scored a perfect 100, and a scant seven others scored above 90 percent. (Note that Pennsylvania's other "moderate" senator has a conservative rating of 8 percent.)
I spent 12 years in the Senate. It has one doctrinaire, narrow, intolerant caucus, and Specter just joined it.
In fact, Specter's ACU rating of 44% makes him the most conservative Democrat in the senate. It's amazing that despite the obvious ideological imbalance in the Democratic party the media and others are insisting that it's the Republicans who need to become more diverse. It'd be nice if they'd check the relevant facts and figures once in a while before they write their stories.
RLC