Republicans for Kerry?

Those places where old-school Republicans are concentrated, on the East Coast and in California, are largely not in play in the 2004 election. Because they carry so little electoral weight, the national party has little incentive to cater to them.

The Republican Party has been moving away from its East Coast roots since the 1960s, when there was a split in the party between its liberal establishment wing -- so-called Rockefeller Republicans -- and the insurgent followers of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, who lost the 1964 election in a landslide, but whose conservative movement went on to take over the party.

During the 1980s, as Southern conservatives flowed into the Republican Party, coastal sophisticates were again pushed out, and in the last two decades the Southern right has continued to consolidate its power. In a 1998 essay called "The Southern Captivity of the GOP," Weekly Standard editor Christopher Caldwell wrote of how even non-Southern conservatives were "put off to see that 'traditional' values are now defined by the majority party as the values of the U-Haul-renting denizens of two-year-old churches and three-year-old shopping malls."

Even Goldwater's widow, Susan Goldwater Levine, recently told Salon that he "hated it that the right-wing zealots took over the party."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, right-wing populist rhetoric, with its attacks on cosmopolitans and urbanites, has alienated those who don't like to think of themselves as Bible-thumping rubes. "I don't like the polarization, the idea that people who don't live on the coasts are morons who watch NASCAR and drink Budweiser all day," says Fasciani. "It's posturing. When it comes down to it, do they really care about Joe six-pack? I don't buy that populist notion that they espouse." Nor does he relate to it.

Fasciani, a native of Westchester, N.Y., is a Republican of the old school who counts Abraham Lincoln and Roosevelt among his heroes. He's proud of the party's tradition of environmental stewardship -- it was Richard Nixon, after all, who established the Environmental Protection Agency -- and the military valor shown by people like Eisenhower and McCain. The party he loves is one where strength and erudition aren't mutually exclusive.

"Teddy Roosevelt, this man read more books than Bush could name," says Fasciani. "He wrote 50 or a hundred books in his lifetime." (Fasciani is being hyperbolic -- Roosevelt authored a mere 36). "Then you've got a guy in the White House now who's probably read one book in the last 15 years and maybe didn't even finish it."

But unapologetic philistinism is considered an electoral virtue in many parts of the country, and it's practically a first principle of the contemporary right. "Every Republican candidate now has to 'make his bones,' to prove his good faith by declaring his unequivocal willingness to alienate the 'elites' of the country," wrote Caldwell in 1998.

Bush, of course, has been superbly willing to alienate such elites -- a term that, when used by the right, seems to encompass most educated people who live in coastal cities. "My values are not Mr. Bush's," says Susan Cosgrove, a 59-year-old lifelong Republican who owns a communications firm in Pittsburgh. "The Republican Party as I think of it -- the party of Rockefeller -- had a profound respect for character, and I don't think Mr. Bush is a man of character. I think his presidency is one of cronyism and pandering to the most radical wing of the party."

"What I see happening is a split among Republicans I know," she says. "A lot of them are becoming as alienated as I am, and a lot of them are moving in the same direction that the president is going. It makes for interesting dinner-table discussions."

Cosgrove isn't ready to leave the party yet. "There's something to be said for trying to change things from inside," she explains. Still, she's getting close.

"Maybe this is a lost cause. You try to change things from the inside and if you can't, it's time to step outside."

Meanwhile, she plans to volunteer for Kerry in the upcoming election. "I am in ABB mode," she says. "Anybody but Bush."

There's a group for people like her, though Cosgrove hadn't heard of it. Republicans for Kerry was founded on Jan. 16 and now has about 100 members who plan to do outreach to fellow moderate Republicans during the campaign. (At least, it had 100 members until recently, when it moved to a new Web site and started its membership roster from scratch.) Among them is Peter McLaughlin, a former McCain intern in Brookfield, Conn.

A volunteer firefighter who owns a security business with 35 employees, McLaughlin has seen the administration's failures close-up. "First responders are being underfunded at the same time that we're promoting the importance of the war on terror," he says. "I can tell in my town that if something happens here, we're going to be the first ones sent and as of today we don't have any particularly specialized equipment."

McLaughlin's problems with Bush are ideological as well as practical. "A conservative conserves," he says. "Blowing out the deficit by having these ill-advised tax cuts while conducting a war is not conservative. I'm a Teddy Roosevelt conservative, which means conserving the environment. Certainly, if you look back in history that was a Republican issue, and the Bush administration is trampling all over it. I think that's terrible for the world and for our country."

Bush's record has been so terrible, he says, that another term might drive him out of the party altogether.

"It would be very difficult to go through another four years of what we've seen in the last three-and-a-half years," says McLaughlin. "Certainly if there were another four years beyond that, I don't think there's any way that I can stay in the party. But I feel like this is my home too, and I want to fight for it. I don't want it to be taken over by this extreme group, and to feel like I have to leave my home."

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