[Jack Black]

There is never a time for more gun control. The Dems are liars, communist and fascist sympathizers and losers.

[Viking2002]

I simply cannot wrap my mind aound how anyone would want to be a member of that Leftist rabble. I'm telling you, it's a mental disorder.

[xzins]

The Democrat Party has become a bunch of really smart men and women doing real stupid stuff.

Not so fast with part A of the above sentence.

I don't think they're smart at all.

[LS]

Actually, my co-author on "A Patriot's History of the United States," Mike Allen, makes a better case that the Dems are resembling the Federalists:

1) Their primary "position" on anything is anti-war;

2) They are overwhelmingly centered in New England (CA didn't exist as a state back then);

3) They were the party of 'big government,' and while the Madison/Monroe Republicans were certainly not "small government" (Jefferson introduced the first "internal improvements plan" that cost DOUBLE the entire federal budget---it was killed), they were less oriented toward big-government than the Federalists; and

4) They were the party of elites vs. the common man Republicans.

Contrary to what the author says, the Whigs always did have a program (really just the old Republican internal improvements program) but what killed the Whigs was that a) they refused to take the opposite position than the Dems on slavery (the Dems were for it) and b) they retained the old Federalists' view of elites. Most of this is in the book:

(BTW, PHUSA won the Lysander Spooner Award for February from Laissez Faire books for "literature that advances the cause of liberty."

[Mark in the Old South]

Re: "- ex-Whig Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party won, triggering the American Civil War and bringing an end to the Whigs"

Does the writer realize that by including this line he is opening the line of argument that the Whig Party was re-born into the Republican Party? By the way this is not an idea original to myself.

[CHARLITE]

"The mean spirited, counter-intuitive assault of Dr. Condalessa Rice’s nomination to be the first black woman Secretary of State was beyond myopic."

What a very odd error for a professional political writer to make! It reveals how little actual reading of the PRINTED WORD people do now, and how much information is taken from sound bites........even considering internet reading.

Of course, Dr. Rice's name is spelled: Condoleezza.

He also has "Republiccan" somewhere in the lower third of the piece. Oh well. Maybe he was hiccupping while writing Republican. :)

[Steven Scharf]

I was at a Lincoln Club Dinner last night where our speaker, Kerck Kelsey posited that Isreal Washburn, the a congressman from Maine gathered a group of 30 together the day after the Kansas/Nebraska Act was passed and called for the forming of the Repbulican Party.

Isreal was one of 5 Washburns brothers who helped foster the rise of the party in 5 different states.

Mr. Kelsey recently published a book on Isreal and his contribution to Maine and National politics.

[maine-iac7]

whizzing match.

love that - gentle way of putting it.

[maine-iac7]

- It took less time to take Iraq than it took Janet Reno to take the Branch Davidian compound. That was a 51-day operation

we should tuck this one into "Campaign 08" file. It's a great analogy - and reminds of how brain dead these people are - (first, they caused the fire and then the wouldn't let the fire trucks onto the property until far too late to save anyone - including some 30+ children.

I do not know how Reno can look herself in the mirror -

Actually, wonder if she has a mirror that hasn't cracked just looking at her

[lancer]

Sycophant democrats are still so wrapped around partisanship, they are incapable of recognizing the self-destruction they are fueling.

(Shhhhhhhh...)

[x]

It's often said that the Whigs were our most truly national party. Maybe that's because they were equally weak everywhere, rather than equally strong in all parts of the country. In presidential elections the Whigs could count on Webster's Massachusetts, Clay's Kentucky, Vermont, and in a good year maybe Conncticut, Rhode Island, Tennesee, Delaware and Maryland. Only when a popular general ran on their ticket could they break out of the cellar.

But the Whigs did seem to really care about keeping the country together. Today, we might question whether all the compromises they tried to work out were worthwhile, but they did understand that disunion would bring weakness, and likely civil war, so their exertions were understandable. The Whigs have long been maligned as mere obstructionists, but as Andrew Jackson's reputation has declined, historians have come to rediscover some of the virtues of his opponents.

What killed the Whigs is that they were blindsided by a divisive new issue that made it impossible for them to maintain their coalition. Of course, they knew about slavery, but they had hoped that it wouldn't become the central issue of American politics. When it did, many Northerners identified the Democrats with the expansion of slavery, and sought to create a party that would expose that expansion.

What killed the Federalists forty years earlier is that they just didn't want to compete in democratic politics. They were what they were and couldn't or wouldn't adapt to win over undecided voters -- a noble stand, perhaps, but a foolish one.

David Gelernter has an article on Disraeli in The Weekly Standard. He overdoes his admiration of that 19th century British statesman. But he does make the point that the GOP has aimed at becoming a "national party," like Disraeli's Tories, leaving the Democrats a "philosophical party" of like-minded ideologues. The Federalists were an ideologically-driven "philosophical party" that wouldn't become a truly national one. The tragedy of the Whigs was that they aspired to be a national party, but the country didn't much want them, and eventually, didn't much want to one country any more.

It's certainly premature to talk about the Democrats going the way of the Whigs or the Federalists, though. They're were the Republicans were in 1936 or 1974 or so -- at a crossroads, but not on a sinking ship.