RINOs, DINOs and Other Rare Species

The News & Advance
Published: May 12, 2008

We’ve had presidents caricatured as baboons (Abraham Lincoln), bigamists (Andrew Jackson), B-class actors (Ronald Reagan) and country hicks (Harry Truman). You get the picture, and it’s not a pretty one.
So when a politician is called a modern-day Benedict Arnold (the infamous traitor during the American Revolution), it’s hardly anything new.
Still, it’s grating on the nerves.
Bitter partisans claim their vision of one or another political party’s mission as the gospel, and woe to anyone who deviates from the straight and narrow.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were many moderate and conservative Democrats across the nation who felt dissaffected and snubbed by their party. So when Ronald Reagan burst onto the scene, sweeping away the national malaise of Jimmy Carter’s administration, they believed they had found an intellectual comrade.
Several U.S. senators and representatives in Congress renounced their membership in the Democratic party, joining up with Reagan’s GOP. Across the nation, hundreds of local and state Democratic officials switched sides.
And they were welcomed by the GOP as long-lost brethren who’d finally seen the light.
Today in Virginia, there are many in the GOP ranks who are disaffected by the direction of the state party, and it’s showing in election results. Republicans haven’t won the governor’s mansion in 11 years; they lost the state Senate in 2007 and have seen their double-digit margin in the House of Delegates crumble and they’re facing the strong possibility of the state electing a second Democrat to the U.S. Senate in November.
So it’s no wonder that partisans, instead of conducting a little intellectual soul-searching, turn on their own with a vengeance.
Such is the case with Preston Bryant, former Lynchburg representative in the House of Delegates and now secretary of natural resources for Gov. Timothy M. Kaine.
Bryant’s Republican roots run deep: He was a longtime aide to former Del. Vance Wilkins of Amherst, the architect of the GOP’s capture of the General Assembly in the 1990s; he served on Lynchburg City Council and then in the House of Delegates.
But he didn’t check his brain at the door when he entered the Republican caucus. Over the years, he (1) voted for tax hikes to fund essential government services, (2) worked to support public schools in Lynchburg and across the state and (3) broke a budget logjam back in 2004 that threatened to shut down state government.
Now, in the U.S. Senate race, he’s announced he’s supporting the likely Democratic nominee, former Gov. Mark Warner, over the likely Republican nominee, former Gov. Jim Gilmore.
And for that, he has quickly become the target of the far-right, anti-tax, “government is the satanic beast” wing of the state party. He’s committed the ultimate sin, in their eyes, of actually thinking and analyzing the likely candidates’ positions to decide who would better represent the state in Washington, rather than blindly declaring allegiance to whoever the party nominates.
For that sin, he’s a traitor, a Benedict Arnold, a RINO (Republican In Name Only) to be taken out and shot.
Please.
Twenty-five years ago, the Republican Party welcomed scores of DINOs (Democrats In Name Only) who saw Ronald Reagan as the best hope for the nation, much to the consternation of the left-wing, true believers in the Democratic Party. And they were lauded as patriots who put the interests of the nation above the interests of party.
Forgive us then, when we say that the GOP’s flaying of Preston Bryant — and any other party member who doesn’t toe the party’s line 100 percent of the time — rings a bit hollow.