Annette Meeks: Still Not in the Reasonable Middle

It was odd to read today's Star Tribune, which had a front-page story with this headline: Small town enlisted in abortion fight, and an op-ed by former Republican Party candidate and apparatchik Annette Meeks titled Why Minn. Republicans can't win the big ones.

Meeks tried to brush off the idea that the party's anti-abortion extremism is the reason they can't win statewide (particularly in the populous suburbs), while in the front-page story, people in a town with 500 people are planning to pass an ordinance allowing their residents to sue abortion providers, including anyone who sends medications through the mail.

The small-town men working for the ordinance aren't out to get the pregnant women... oh no, of course not, they say. They know those women are "suffering" and aren't responsible for their own actions. (Women aren't rational actors, of course not!) These good men just want to stop "the animals who tell her that's OK and profit from it...." "We want the Christian community to wrap their arms around them."

Yeah, sure. Wrap their arms around them and choke them into submission.

Meanwhile, Annette Meeks takes her party to task for losing touch with reality, which is...good, as far as it goes. Except she's pretending the party doesn't have a vision for the future, when they do have a vision: it's white nationalist theocracy. The party just doesn't want to write that out as their platform. They want to dog-whistle it and telegraph it and only say it behind closed doors.

It's good that Meeks openly declares in her op-ed that the election system isn't corrupt, that the public schools are not a black hole, and that the party's narrowly based caucus system for choosing candidates is resulting in unelectable candidates. 

But she doesn't admit that the party (nationally as well as locally) has been hell-bent on limiting how many people can vote. She brushes the abortion issue under the rug completely. And she writes that she sees Newt Gingrich as an exemplar of a good leader among Republicans. Newt Gingrich!

So I think Annette Meeks has a way to go before we can trust what she has to say as a partner in good governance, even though she's trying to sound like someone in the reasonable middle.