Vote Republican

A GOP proposal to reach out to independent votersAs a two-time Republican nominee for governor, I thought it important to share my views on a proposal that would allow independent voters to participate in Maryland's Republican presidential primary next March.If adopted by the State Central Committee at the party's May convention, this proposal would be implemented on a trial basis for the March 2000 primary. Its goal is to expand the party and broaden our appeal to the growing number of Marylanders who are unwilling to affiliate with a political party.

One reader's ponderings on '98 electionNow that the election is over, a few random thoughts come to mind. Maybe I'm the only one, but I wonder:Did voters in Carroll County actually consider the issues or just decide to vote Republican? Would it really have mattered if the Democrats had run a full slate?Is the slow growth movement dead? Despite Carolyn Fairbank's remarkable effort, two growth advocates were elected to the county board of commissioners.And speaking of that outcome, will Julia Gouge have any say in policy in the next four years, or will the "soul mates" run the show?

SAN FRANCISCO -- The decay of liberalism into a synonym for cynicism is writ large in the frantic dishonesty of the campaign against Proposition 226, the ballot initiative that would bar California unions from spending a member's dues for political purposes without the member's written permission, renewed annually. The opponents' mendacity is a measure of the intellectual poverty of their arguments, but also a natural byproduct of an anti-deliberative process for making laws.California unions spend $40 million a year on politics, 90 percent on Democratic candidates and causes.

WASHINGTON -- I find Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah dandy, a tough one to figure out. Is he some kind of selective and sanctimonious right-wing zealot? Or is he a mole, planted in the Republican leadership in Congress by Democrats smarter than they look?As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Hatch, a Republican, has declared that Bill Lann Lee, the son of Chinese immigrants, who made it to Yale Law School and went on to work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, is not fit to serve the United States as a second-level official of the Justice Department.

NEW YORK -- Sen. Bob Dole surged on in his drive for the Republican presidential nomination here yesterday, routing his remaining rivals, Steve Forbes and Patrick J. Buchanan, with a possible sweep of all 93 delegates at stake in New York's primary.In the year's first contest with only three candidates competing, delegates pledged to Mr. Dole were winning 63 percent of the vote, compared with 24 percent for Mr. Forbes' slates and 13 percent for Mr. Buchanan's, according to exit polls of 1,000 voters by Voter News Service, a cooperative of the Associated Press and the television networks.

Patients losing right to privacyI was appalled to learn (Dec. 9, "State collects files on medical patients") that the Maryland Health Care Access and Cost Commission is contemplating a requirement that physicians include in their data collection a record of self-pay patients who opted to bypass insurance and pay out-of-pocket in order to ensure absolute confidentiality .I lived in Belgium under German occupation. World War II was fought to free Europe of the Nazi tyranny and promote democracy.

GOP's AllureTwo thumbs up to Peter Jay for his perceptive and thought-provoking June 26 commentary on "The Idea of Being a Republican."He described in a nutshell why voting Republican has become so appealing to so many disaffected Democrats, who feel that their party has long since abandoned them and taken their concerns and principles for granted.Although honesty, constancy, fiscal integrity, free enterprise, self-reliance, individual initiative and individual responsibility are hardly the exclusive domain of Republicans, I think that most voters correctly perceive that Republican candidates and officeholders are more likely to defend these core values and act as if they believe in them than Democrats.

CENTREVILLE, Va. -- For Marva Williams, voting the incumbents out and the challengers in wasn't a bold enough act of protest.The AT&T project manager, a Democrat and mother of a 7-year-old, was so sick of the mudslinging, so angry at the gridlock, so dissatisfied with her choices that she went behind the curtain yesterday and, voting to fill a U.S. Senate seat, wrote in the name of the only person she felt had her best interests in mind: Marva Williams."

Havre de Grace. -- Tom Horton is not only one of my favorite columnists and book-writers, but a good friend, too.We have crawled through winter marshes together, been out in each other's boats in all kinds of weathers and waters, shared newspaper gossip, and helped each other off and on in various ways.He's a good shipmate who knows the Bay and steers a straight course, although he's been known to turn a little green in a heavy sea, and he sometimes snores.So it's with reluctance that I take issue with some of Cap'n Horton's recently published political views.

Having nominated Ollie North for the U.S. Senate from the Commonwealth of Virginia, the birthplace of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, is there any way in which the Republican Party can further disgrace itself?How about choosing Ross Perot as the GOP candidate for president in 1996?Could this really happen?Well, who could finance an entire campaign out of his own pocket other than a Texas billionaire who made his money selling electronic stuff to the government he detests?Who among the various Republican candidates has an organized band of followers (United We Stand, America)

Running for public office in a district where your party is a minority is always tough, but registered Democrats now enjoy a slight edge in Republican-dominated District 9a, covering western Howard County and Ellicott City. Republicans hold all the public offices in District 9a, but since the last state and local elections in 2006, registered Democrats have slipped past the Grand Old Party, 26,434 to 25,666 as of July 21. There are also 12,427 unaffiliated or other voters, including one registered Whig, according to election board records.

Catholics voted decisively in this month's election for Barack Obama, 54 percent to 45 percent, according to exit polls. This was a big reversal from four years ago, when Catholics favored George W. Bush by 5 percentage points. Now the debate is on. The U.S. Bishops, meeting last week in Baltimore, wrestled with the implications of election results that showed Catholics rejecting the dictates of the most conservative and outspoken bishops, who urged parishioners to vote Republican. The putative argument for these bishops was that only Republicans are sufficiently pure on the abortion question.

Given the bitterness of so many Hillary Clinton supporters that the woman they thought would be America's first female president will not be, the more they hear the suggestion that Sen. Barack Obama's win is illegitimate, the more likely they are to bolt. If Senator Clinton's voters embrace the story that "a man took it away from a woman," denying her a victory she deserved, they're at risk of staying home come November, or holding back from the volunteering and get-out-the-vote efforts necessary for the Democrats to prevail.

When I read or hear a story about the separation of church and state, it's hard for me to relate. When I was growing up in the inner city on Baltimore's west side, I saw firsthand the challenges that urban kids face: poverty, violence, promiscuity, chemical addictions and family disintegration. The government has spent trillions of dollars trying to reverse this spiral of social disintegration, yet the problems grow worse each day. The separation of church and state is a suburban, not an urban, issue.

WASHINGTON - The generation-long political retreat of Democrats across the South is disintegrating into a rout. President Bush dominated the South so completely in last month's presidential election that he carried nearly 85 percent of the counties across the region - and more than 90 percent of the counties in which whites make up a majority of the population, a Los Angeles Times analysis of the election results and census data shows. The Times analysis, which provides the most detailed picture yet of the vote in Southern communities, shows that Bush's victory was even more comprehensive than his sweep of the region's 13 states would suggest.

So what is Maryland, arguably one of the most reliable Democratic states in the union - that cast its ballots for Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan and Al Gore over George W. Bush - doing electing a Republican governor? Perhaps it was just an aberration, the standard once-in-a-generation alignment of the political stars that puts a Republican in the Governor's Mansion. It last happened in 1966 when a badly split Democratic Party nominated the conservative George P. Mahoney and the state went for Baltimore County Executive Spiro T. Agnew, considered a moderate Republican.

For a woman who could resort to profanity, yelling and even smashing things to make a point, Helen Delich Bentley was remarkably serene two days after losing what she insists will be her last run for public office. Sitting in her Timonium campaign office, the 78-year-old Bentley watched CNN with her campaign manager, Michael S. Kosmas. She munched on leftover turkey sandwiches and a cherry-topped homemade cheesecake while volunteers drove through Anne Arundel County taking down her yard signs.

There are two-thirds as many Republicans as Democrats in the new 42nd Legislative District, but for the Maryland GOP, those look like pretty good odds. Ten Republicans are running in the Sept. 10 primary in the Towson-area district, confident that more people there vote Republican than register that way. With the strong popularity in greater Towson of Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., the likely Republican nominee for governor, and Douglas B. Riley, the party's candidate for county executive, Republicans believe they can win two, if not all three, of the delegate seats there.

Fulfilling a pledge to leave no vote uncontested, Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. took his campaign for governor to Maryland's Cuban community yesterday, delivering the keynote address at a ceremony honoring 19th-century revolutionary and martyr Jose Marti. "We have brains, we have brawn, we have devotion and we have commitment," said Ehrlich, summarizing the life of Marti, a poet and intellectual who published a newspaper advocating Cuban independence from Spain and who died in battle in 1895.

TALLAHASSEE - This city used to be known for its civility. Not any more. "You can feel the tension," said 31-year-old Angela Day, the owner of Black Cat News, a Tallahassee institution two blocks away from the Capitol. "Even people who live here are on different sides, and they'll come in here and they'll start picking at each other." Most of Day's customers are regulars who buy on an old-fashioned honor system, signing for their purchases in loose-leaf notebooks next to the register.