by Clifford F. Thies, Senior Editor

E.J. Dionne’s op-ed “Tory Lessons for Republicans” would be a joke if the guy wasn’t a profound thinker about things political. He starts by asking how can the Republican Party be the party of the Big Tent when, in Florida, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Marco Rubio was so far ahead of Governor Charlie Christ in the race for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator, that Christ re-registered so as to run for the Senate as an independent?

In today's GOP, someone like Cameron would be condemned as a big-government sellout and buried under a mountain of tea bags. For even as the news in Britain focused on Cameron's comeback courtesy of his effort to detoxify the Conservative Party brand, the political news here was Florida Gov. Charlie Crist's decision to abandon the Republicans and run for the U.S. Senate as an independent.

Could it be that, in the Republican Party, the candidate who better connects with the party’s base will win the nomination, without regard to the fact that the candidate is a Roman Catholic, an Hispanic American, the son of immigrants to our country, whose parents who worked in jobs such as bartender and hotel maid?

Dionne then derides Republicans for passing a law in Arizona what he characterizes as anti-immigrant. Well, what does Rubio say about that legislation? He says, “I think aspects of the law, especially that dealing with ‘reasonable suspicion,’ are going to put our law enforcement officers in an incredibly difficult position. It could also unreasonably single out people who are here legally, including many American citizens.” So, on this legislation, Rubio shares the opinions of Dionne, yet Dionne wants to characterize the Republicans as monolethic on the issue. Rubio is an inconvenient Republican, just like the African Americans who join in the Tea Parties, and the women, starting with Sarah Palin, who are emerging as the real leaders of our party. Dionne has his idea of what a Republican is, and he’s not going to let Rubio get in the way.

Dionne also derides Republicans for not endorsing the welfare state. He says we Republicans should be more like the Conservatives of Great Britain. Dionne is apparently unaware of the reform of the welfare state proposed by center-right parties throughout the world. The issue is how to fashion social insurance. Will it be, as in Chile, actuarilty-sound, pro-work and pro-saving, and run by the private-sector? Or, will it be pay-as-you-go, undermine work and saving, and be run by a government bureaucracy? For Dionne to bring up the U.K. Conservative Party while criticizing the U.S. Republican Party on this matter means he is as ignorant of what the British Conservatives are proposing as he is of the American Republicans.

Dionne then concludes by saying Latinos now know why it is important to vote this fall. He doesn’t mean so Hispanics like Rubio can be elected to the U.S. Senate. No, he means, reflexively, Hispanics will vote Democratic. Hispanics, in Dionne’s mind, don’t think like White People where some are liberal and some are conservative, while others are neither. For elitist liberals like E.J. Dionne, making broad generalizations about people based on their gender, race or ethnicity is considered to be profound thinking.