Ross Douthat is probably one of the best young conservative thinkers out there. Along with Reihan Salam, he has written a book about how the GOP could become a governing party again. I read his old blog when he was at the Atlantic and continue to read his column for the New York Times. I enjoy his writings…mostly.

I say mostly, because Mr. Douthat seems to have an extreme dislike of moderate Republicans. He is to smart to wade into some of the hard right rhetoric, but he tends to see moderates in the GOP as RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). This is how he described now former Republican candidate for Congress Dede Scozzafava:

If it weren’t for Doug Hoffmann, a Lake Placid accountant running on the Conservative Party line, the battle to represent New York’s 23rd Congressional District would have been a Tweedle-Dee-Tweedle-Dum affair, featuring a Republican, Dede Scozzafava, who’s arguably more liberal than her Democratic opponent, Bill Owens…

Hoffmann has irritated liberals. Scozzafava was their kind of Republican, and by derailing her candidacy – which she suspended over the weekend after polls showed her slipping to third place – he’s turned a sleepy contest between two left-of-center politicians into an ideologically-charged election.

But both men deserve the public’s gratitude. They’ve injected real substance into their races, and they’ve given voters a much more interesting choice than they would have otherwise enjoyed.

There are so many things wrong with the above quote, but let’s focus on just one. Douthat says that Scozzafava was “arguable more liberal” than Democrat Bill Owens in the NY-23 Congressional race. He links to a post by Markos Moulitsas where he states that Scozzafava is more liberal than Owens. Conservatives glommed on to that post as their evidence that Scozzafava would basically adhere to Nancy Pelosi’s wishes once she entered Congress. Apparently Douthat also believed this as well, since he states that liberals loved Scozzafava.

But the fact is, none of this was true. Scozzafava is “liberal” when it came to abortion rights and gay marriage, but on other issues she was a traditional conservative. The Albany Project, a liberal blog, was able to track down her voting record and to find that the liberal label was could not be thrown at Scozzafava. In August of this year, I was able to do the same thing.

All of this leads me to ask a question: why did one of the smartest and most savvy thinkers writing for one of the best publications in America, fail to look deeper into the record of a politician. How could a middle aged and not so smart guy sitting in his office in Minnesota figure out something that Douthat could not?

I could chalk it up to lazy journalism and that probably is part of it, but I think it also has to do with a Douthat’s prejudice against moderates in the GOP.

This is what he had to say about moderates back in April:

The larger species to which he belonged — Republicanus Rockefellus, the endangered Northeastern moderate — likewise has little to offer a party in distress. Indeed, if you listen carefully to high-profile Yankee moderates like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Lincoln Chafee, who fanned out across op-ed pages and TV shows last week to bemoan their marginalization, it seems as though they don’t even understand their own political situation, let alone the Republican Party’s.

The Northeastern moderates tend to style themselves as fiscal conservatives, spinning a narrative in which they’re the victims of a doctrinaire social conservatism and its litmus tests. But many of them are just instinctive liberals who happen to have ancestral ties to the Grand Old Party. Chafee fit that bill; so did former Senator James Jeffords of Vermont, who amassed a distinctly left-wing record after he bolted the Republican Party in 2001 to become an “independent.” For that matter, so does the retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a New England native and Republican appointee who often gets described as a moderate, but boasts the jurisprudence of a reliable liberal.

Others, like Collins and Snowe and (until last week) Specter, are simply horse-traders and deal-cutters, whose willingness to cross party lines last month to vote for $800 billion dollars in deficit spending tells you most of what you need to know about their supposed fiscal conservatism. They’re politically savvy but intellectually vacuous. Their highest allegiance isn’t to limited government. It’s to meeting the party in power halfway, while making sure that the dollars keep flowing to their constituents back home.

Douthat’s rebuke sounds familiar to me. I’ve heard people basically say that I’m a liberal and dismiss me, saying that I should be considered an independent or even a Democrat. But the problem with such a cursory understanding of moderate Republicans is that it misses out a lot of the story and also the importance of these “Liberals” to pass Republican success. As Patrick Edaburn noted, it was those squishy Northeastern Republicans that were crucial to the GOP winning Congress in 1994. Without the “RINOs” Newt Gingrich would have still been the minority leader in the House.

Douthat tends to believe that the future of the GOP will come from a fusion of social conservatism with a George Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” a venture that ended up getting shelved after 9/11. Douthat’s ideas are not outlandish, but unlike Gingrich, he is not pragmatic enough to see the importance of weak little moderates like me in getting his agenda to become reality. In fact, it might just be those moderates who could carry the water for the ideas Douthat proposes that would help uplift the middle class.

Douthat is as deluded as his social conservative brethren if he thinks that the party can survive without its moderate wing.

It would help if the young man actually got out of ivory tower and actually talked to a few moderates. If you got to know us, you would see that we have been loyal Republicans willing to try new ideas and help advance our party.

Oh, and he would realize that we do have principles.