The Fragmenting Republican Party
The Republican Party, under the leadership of RNC Chairman Michael Steele, has continued to sink deeper and deeper into the black hole of “irrelevance”. Faced with a massive exodus of membership, Chairman Steele has inexplicably refused to conduct any serious in-house policy meetings, lending credence to public opinion branding the Republicans as a group of naysayers with no agenda of their own. DNC spokesman Hari Sevugan summed it up well when he said “you can take the ‘party of no’ out of Washington, but if all you offer is more reflexive partisan opposition and a new package for the same old failed ideas, you’re not taking Washington out of the ‘party of no’”
Partly out of frustration with Chairman Steele’s incompetence, a group of notable Republicans, including Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney and John McCain have highlighted their differences with the RNC by launching a new group called the National Council for a New America. The idea is that the new group will travel around the country holding town hall-style meetings to try to show that Republicans really do have some new and constructive ideas. Not to be outdone, some senior Republican strategists have launched their own group called Resurgent Republic. In typical Republican disarray, notably absent from either group were Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford.
The desperate moves by many of the Republican Party’s elites to distance themselves from the do-nothing RNC shows just how fragmented and rudderless the once-influential Republican party has become. The recent defection to the Democrats by Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Spector, and the now “filibuster-proof” majority that the Democrats hold in the Senate are further signs that the Republican Party is in for a rough ride. If the best that the Republicans can come up with is creating fragmented splinter groups within their own party, then the ride is sure to get a whole lot rougher in the years to come.
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The next big political party will be either the libertarians, or the Independents. The Republicans are toast. They have become the southern white redneck party. It’s unfortunate, because they used to be a real economic minded group that held spending in check.
Shelly,
I agree that the Republicans are “toast” for now; however, they won’t be kept down forever. Eventually they will see the light and understand they can’t be regarded as the “party of no” and expect to win elections. As far as the Independents go, they have all turned into Democrats and jumped on the Obama bandwagon. Libertarians are dead on arrival.
Saying “no” to $787 billion of pork plus everything else is great by me.
I find it rather interesting that no one is doing an introspective exam to determine how a black guy, which a strange name, whom 40% of the population believed was a secret Muslim, won states like Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina. As the tent continues to get smaller, the Republicans pull the sides in even farther. Like a red giant collapsing under its own mass, the Republican party is becoming–ironically–a brown dwarf.
As long as they think the real reason they are losing elections is because of fiscal policy, the Republicans will continue to lose.
Power shifts are a good thing. The Republicans ran things for a bunch of years now it’s Obama and his gang’s turn. Let’s see what happens, and pray for the best.
peace,
mike
livelife365
Dear Cherlock,
The point you miss is that the Republicans do not have to stand for anything since they are out of power. They merely have to sit and wait for the Democrats to do what they always do. In 4, or 8, years the populace will desperately be looking for an alternative. Deficits will be greater than the GNP. Radical Islam will be embolden by our lack of resolve, the intellegence community will have been decimated by Obama witch hunts for Bush era interrogators, Socialized medicine will fail because there is no politcally effective way to control costs etc etc.
It happens to every political party after they’ve been in charge for a while. It happened to the Democrats for 20 years. It’ll happen to them again.
Obama didn’t win by a huge margin but he did win. Tough to say whether he won or Bush helped to lose it for McCain. Depending on how Obama performs he could give the Dems a majority for a while or could blow it for them for the next decade.
No party is dead they are just re-grouping.
And Obama, for his success, never won a large primary. His strategy of winning all of the little caucus votes paid off.
The Democratic party looked very similar a few years ago. For eight years about the only policy proposal or solution to national problems that the Democrats would come up with was “Bush sucks.” They were kind of like those dolls where you pull the string and they say the same three lines over and over again. I have to admit, Democrats showed remarkable genius by giving ownership of the economic crisis to Republicans, when such a massive crisis can only realistically be blamed on hundreds of millions of Americans and policy makers from both sides.
Burro,
The current economic crisis in our country is a direct result of Republican policies that discouraged (even dismantled) government regulations that were intended to safeguard our economy. There may be enough blame to go around for both political parties, but it was George Bush that was sleeping at the switch when all this sub-prime mess was brewing.
Harrison,
I think you are right about the constantly changing fortunes of political parties in this country. After eight years (maybe) of Barack Obama the public will probably flock to the “newly revitalized” Republican party that has answers for everything that ails the country.
I am curious what Republican policies you are referring to. On the other hand to say that the eonomic crisis is a direct result of any specific policy seems naive. At what point does Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall act enter your argument? At what point does Clinton’s failure to regulate the equity markets that led to the crash of 2000, thus encouraging the fed to drop rates to practically .5% enter the argument? At what point does Jimmy Carter’s overregulation of industry, which gave Japan a comparative capital advantage, which led to a massive inflation of all asset classes in Japan, which eventually collapsed, which eventually sent capital fleeing to other Asian economies in the early nineties, which eventually collapsed, which sent capital fleeing to American tech stocks in the late nineties, which eventually collapsed, which sent capital fleeing to real-estate, which collapesed, which sent capital fleeing to the sidelines where it currently sits in fear of what Obama is going to do to this economy. I won’t disagree with you, that Bush is partly to blame, but there were factors much larger and far more powerful than our little government that led to this crisis.
Burro,
Great comment; your point is well taken. I must admit, though, I got dizzy reading it.
As I was writing that extremely long run-on sentence, I was thinking in my head that I felt sorry for anyone who had to read it. So I apologize. I was trying to summarize information that I gleaned from two books:
1. Devil Take the Hindmost
2. Manis, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises
The authors of these books can probably trace the current financial crisis back to Amsterdam in the 1600s, but that would have been a really long run-on sentence.