GOP ABANDONS PRINCIPLE, ENDANGERS FUTURE

boblonsberry.com ^ | 09/19/05 | Bob Lonsberry

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Hillary Clinton will win the White House because the Republicans have stopped being Republicans.

Not to diminish her significant abilities and political savvy, but she can campaign til the cows come home and never earn more than 49 percent of the vote on her own.

The margin of victory won’t come from Democrats, it will come from disaffected Republicans.

Not Republicans who are really Democrats, but Republicans who are really Republicans. There aren’t many of them anymore, but they are a swing vote, and they’ve always swung the GOP’s way.

And who knows, maybe there’s enough fear and hatred of Hillary Clinton still bumping around to make conservatives hold their noses and vote for Anybody But Clinton. It’s worked before, and it might work again.

But there’s precious little to recommend the Republican Party to conservatives. It has spurned them, adopting their rhetoric at election time but abandoning it in office.

And by conservatives I mean people who have read and understood the Constitution. People who know what the Founding Fathers were after and have seen those principles guide our nation successfully since. By conservatives I mean people who know what America is supposed to be about, who lean more toward Jefferson and Madison than Marx and Engells.

There is an ever-shrinking knot of people who remember and revere the American spirit and ethic. The freedom-loving, individualistic values which defined this country are increasingly forgotten and spurned.

Even by the Republican Party.

As evidenced by the president’s speech last week from New Orleans.

It would have been a good speech from a Democrat, but from a Republican it was a betrayal. It called for an unrestrained increase in federal spending and a massive increase of federal power while simultaneously sabotaging local control and individual responsibility.

In one fell swoop it saddled our children and grandchildren with additional hundreds of billions of dollars of suffocating debt.

We have a going-nowhere war that is hemorrhaging our federal treasury, a giant free-pills-for-gramma program that will do exactly the same, and now we have the federal government assuming every cost for cleaning up this hurricane, remedying past racial wrongs and providing big new welfare benefits to people who refused to follow an evacuation order.

It makes you wonder where all that money is supposed to come from.

The sad answer is that in the short term it will come from foreign lenders who will then hold the note on America’s future economic vitality. In the long term it will come from even higher taxes for us, our children and their children.

It will sap our liberty and vitality.

And all this came from a Republican president and a Republican Congress.

It was Tom DeLay, supposed conservative Republican leader of the House, who said that the bloated, immoral and fundamentally socialist federal budget had no more room for cuts. He said that everything that could be cut out of it had been cut out of it.

It was, of course, a preposterous statement, a sign of just how dead the Republican spirit has become. Being conservative has been reduced by manipulative party hacks to nothing more than the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments. The principles of small government, free people, individual responsibility and balanced budgets have gone out the window, replaced by warmed over – and enslaving – European-style socialism.

There are no Democrats to blame for this one. As loathsome and wrong as they may be, this can’t be blamed on Pelosi, Reid, Kennedy or Clinton. This is our mess. This is a Republican mess.

And we’re supposed to forget that on election day? We’re supposed to drool like Pavlov’s dogs at the midterm election, to strengthen the GOP hold on Congress, and then line up to elect whoever the party puts up for president?

How dumb do they think we are?

How desperate do they think we are?

Unfortunately, the fact may remain that we will find ourselves so desperate that, like a beaten wife returning to her abuser, we will take the devil we know over the devil we don’t know.

But there will be a loss of enthusiasm, a reluctant vigor, a lack of zeal and commitment.

And that could give Hillary her two or three percent.

And she will have won the White House because the Republicans stopped being Republicans.

Mark my word.

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The election is still two years away, and if the Republicans choose a very dynamic candidate he or she won't be in Bush's shadow. But it only takes a few Republican voters in key states staying home to give the election to the Democrats. It's not that they'll turn to the Democrats, it's just that they won't bother with the election. If you don't use ideological appeals and philosophical differences they rust away and after a while they don't work any more.