While the Democrats are criticized nationally for sending muddled messages, the different factions now understand their fortunes lie in being united. But what is the future of the Republicans when the moderates and the conservatives are at such odds?

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson said at a First Person Festival forum here last month that the current White House ultraconservative Republicans (George Bush & Co.) have hijacked the party. That helps explain why Denise Furey, a Republican volunteer in the 27th Ward who considers herself a moderate, is concerned that her kind are no longer welcomed into the "Big Tent" by conservative members of the party.

Furey likes the philosophy of former Republican New Jersey Governor and former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman. Whitman began her PAC, It's My Party Too, in response to the Bill Frist holier-than-thou crowd shooting centrist Republicans on sight.

So on Tuesday, Furey hosted a reception to introduce Republicans in southeastern Pennsylvania to Whitman's PAC. No fundraising was involved and Furey hoped her guests would learn more about Whitman's efforts to strengthen the Republican Party nationally.

After her book It's My Party Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America (Penguin) came out last year, Whitman started the PAC to further spread her message.

"If I just wrote the book and people agreed with me, that's not enough," said Whitman from her Northern New Jersey office. "I needed a place for them to go."

There are now organizations in 29 states working with the group. Whitman said the group's Web site, www.mypartytoo.com, has received some 15 million hits.

"We are raising money and focusing on the local and state level to start to support and promote candidates who are not in any one place on any one particular social issue," she said. "I have an advisory board of over 55 that are all over the place on social issues. It's about saying we are big enough to incorporate and encompass these issues. We can disagree without being disagreeable and that we need to be more open as a party."

Whitman said she believes that GOP moderates have not asserted themselves as they should and, with many important elections coming up in the fall, they must be re-engaged.

Using environmental issues as an example, Whitman explained that major legislation was passed with a Republican president and a Democratic-controlled Congress from 1970 until 1992. Since 1992, there has been only one major piece of environmental legislation passed: the Brownfields Revitalization Act of 2002.

"Since then, the parties have been stymied, they cannot work together anymore," Whitman said. "Look what they're talking about in Washington now — flag-burning ... when there are so many more crucial issues such as the war, education and the budget deficit. Of course, people may care about the flag, but they also care about problems like Social Security and energy."

Whitman said that extremists in both parties are not what the country needs and that continued partisan fighting will result in the breakdown of the two-party system. She said she hopes some centrist Democrats will try to do what she is trying to do for the Republicans.

"The two parties today are in danger of becoming irrelevant if they don't understand that the American people are getting very, very fed up with what's happening," she said. "We are not mean-spirited people and the American people are not mean-spirited and narrow-minded and they don't like it when they see themselves portrayed as that. Right now, the Republican Party is seeing themselves portrayed as that."

Moderate Republicans are often pro-choice and not necessarily vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage, but differ with the Democrats in that they are fiscally conservative and believe in smaller government.

Are centrists the politicians of the future? GOP U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter is certainly a centrist and has survived all these years, while Democrat U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is now considered a centrist because she wants to be more electable as she prepares for a possible 2008 presidential bid. How the state's U.S. Senate race ... which is turning into a referendum on ultraconservative GOP Sen. Rick Santorum ... plays out could help answer this question.