Peter Laffin is a senior editor at the Washington Examiner.
Barack Obama has a diagnosis for what ails American politics.
“I’d love a loyal opposition,” Obama said recently in an interview with Stephen Colbert. “I’d love a Republican Party that was conservative in some ways — that didn’t agree with me on a whole bunch of stuff — but believed in rule of law, and judicial independence, and empirical evidence, and science, and wasn’t constantly tapping into our worst impulses.”
Obama’s framing is, as ever, masterfully expedient. In his telling, the GOP has drifted from the political mainstream, while Democrats have remained pragmatic institutionalists, perfectly positioned on the long moral arc as it bends toward justice — neither too far ahead nor too far behind the evolving consensus but just right.
It’s a pleasant fiction, and one that would present a simple solution. For our politics to regain function, Republicans would just need to nominate pragmatic institutionalists of their own. Democrats would be waiting to join hands and do the people’s business once more. Problem solved.
A quick glance at the US Senate races in New England reveals how warped this view is. Democrats here are the most educated, prosperous, and institutionally connected in the nation — it is the region where Democrats are their truest selves.
So who have they chosen to represent them in Washington?
In Maine, Graham Platner remains a runaway favorite for the nomination even as his campaign fends off personal controversies. He is, in some ways, a conventional New England Democrat: the grandson of a renowned architect, the product of an elite prep school (before getting expelled for bad behavior), and the son of a successful restaurateur and a Dartmouth-educated lawyer. His oyster farm, which supplies his mother’s restaurant, sits on an island owned by his Dartmouth-educated business partner’s family.
Today, Platner promotes radical progressive policies. In now-deleted posts, he described himself as a communist and a socialist online. But scrubbing those labels hasn’t moderated his agenda. He’s in favor of packing the Supreme Court, enshrining the “right to a useful job that earns a living wage” into the Constitution, and universal Medicare. He has also called for violent political revolution, writing in a post that has since been deleted that an “armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.”
Meanwhile, Republican Senator Susan Collins, Platner’s opponent, has built a career on embodying the John McCain-Mitt Romney Republican that Democrats get misty-eyed recalling. She has broken with her party on abortion, impeachment, and judicial nominees, and has joined bipartisan bills more often than any other senator. Collins spearheaded the Electoral Count Reform Act — legislation designed to close the loopholes that Trump and his allies tried to exploit on Jan. 6, 2021.
More recently, she has introduced legislation to reassert congressional control over presidential tariff authority and voted to invoke the War Powers Act to limit Trump’s military operations in Iran. Both acts drew public rebukes from the president.
Collins is, in other words, exactly what Obama says he wants.
In New Hampshire, presumed Democratic nominee Representative Chris Pappas has successfully branded himself a moderate. But that branding is only defensible if you go by current Democratic Party standards. Measured against the Obama-era Democratic mold — which was only a decade ago — “moderate” starts to look like a stretch for Pappas.
Pappas has supported stripping police officers of qualified immunity protections — a position so extreme his own New Hampshire Democratic colleagues refused to back it — called for a Green New Deal, voted to protect sanctuary cities, and backed legislation to cap prices on businesses. Transforming the entire economy through sweeping energy regulations and suspending the fundamental laws of supply and demand by capping prices are proposals far out of step with the American mainstream. Obama himself — a prolific deporter who explicitly rejected price controls on businesses — would be a stranger in Pappas’s Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, Pappas’s presumptive opponent, former Senator John Sununu, embodies the “loyal opposition” Obama longs for. A principled conservative, Sununu holds conventional Republican positions on taxes, spending, and the Second Amendment. But he’s also an institutionalist willing to work across the aisle. He voted against a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and since leaving the Senate, he’s served as a founding board member for the Democracy Defense Project, a bipartisan initiative to restore public confidence in US elections.
Oh, and he’s also publicly called Trump “a loser.”
Many Democrats will argue that any cooperation with Trump on any issue is tantamount to supporting fascism. And indeed, both Collins and Sununu have joined cause with the president on occasion, and Trump has endorsed Sununu.
But it would be difficult to find two more independent institutionalists in all of America — Republicans willing to break with their party on principle, defend the Constitution, and prioritize congressional oversight and the rule of law over partisan loyalty. Obama’s “loyal opposition” isn’t missing in New England.
But neither is radicalism. It’s just running on the Democratic ticket instead.