LOL...more like...
Posted on 08/23/2010 3:21:25 AM PDT by Scanian
It's widely acknowledged that in 2010, the Democrats are on the ropes. But just about the same could be said for the Republicans.
A few weeks ago, John Cornyn and John Boehner revealed this election's GOP platform. In a year of massive unrest, public disgust with government, and large-scale rejection of interventionist policies, the GOP will emphasize...deficits. An issue to warm an economist's heart -- and the occasional accountant's, too. Top that one, Obama.
In the wake of Scott Brown's stunning upset in Massachusetts last February, with the entire New England region open to exploitation, the GOP is doing nothing. There are no plans to challenge incumbents in New England. No money, no candidates, no program. Historical moment? Wuzzat mean?
No effort is being made to emphasize the achievements of the nation's Republican governors. Jan Brewer, Chris Christie, and Mitch Daniels, among others, are steering their states through the worst economy since the Carter '70s, pressing critical policy changes, and most important, defying Washington while they're at it. Yet the RNC knows them not.
We will merely allude to Michael Steele's perennial circus act to look beyond to 2012, where we have one announced candidate, the immortal Mr. Newt Gingrich, whose most recent sojourn is a national tour with the most Rev. Al Sharpton.
It can't be denied that the GOP is sweeping toward a historic victory, one that may even overshadow the legendary events of 1994, the Salamis of the modern Republican Party (that is, if the current party leadership doesn't throw the opportunity away at the last minute, a possibility never to be overlooked). But this owes very little to the GOP itself. It is instead due to the efforts of the individual candidates and outside parties, above all the Tea Parties, one of the most remarkable popular upsurges in American history. While the TPs are dead serious and out for blood, the Republican Party is tootling along in low gear, its slogan the soul-stirring "Business as usual!"
It's easy to trace the electoral strategy in this. The party intends to take the safe course while encouraging the Tea Parties to knock over garbage cans and tease watchdogs. But that's where the problem lies -- it is a safe strategy. It would be a smart strategy for a party that's on the run or otherwise not expecting much. But that's not the position that the Republicans should be taking in 2010. Rather than viewing the Tea Parties as allies in overturning the Democrats' Neue Ordnung, the GOP is treating them as a disposable resource. Rather than gathering all their forces for a wild, do-or-die charge on Dem strongholds, the party is sitting back and letting the chips fall where they may. This is not a formula for a lasting victory or a necessary political restoration. But it is all too typical of the party that has become used to the status of whipped dog of American politics.
For the adult lives of virtually everyone now living, the GOP has been the loser party. It got that way because of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Great Depression. Herbert Hoover, who had the unexcelled misfortune to be president when the 1929 crash occurred, responded with a grab-bag of interventionist policies -- tight credit, higher taxes, expanded tariffs -- that simply deepened the slump. Following the Bonus March fiasco, he retreated from public view, allowing himself to be caricatured as the "do-nothing" president, and was duly routed by FDR in 1932.
The GOP was routed with him. Republicans were caricatured as the Party of Wall Street, directly to blame for the nation's economic crisis. While New Deal policies failed at turning around the economy, they did convince a desperate public that the Democrats were "on their side." Operating under the aegis of the New Deal, Democratic political machines tightened control over cities across the country. The GOP's 1936 hopeful, the honorable, quixotic Alf Landon, went down to unparalleled defeat, taking the party's hopes with him. FDR settled into a twelve-year imperial reign while the Democrats held complete control of Congress until 1946.
The GOP's return to power under Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 changed little. Ike rolled back nothing, repealed no Democratic policies, and effectively acted as a caretaker for Roosevelt's legacy. (Certain liberal thinkers such as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. went so far as to claim this as the sole legitimate raison d'être for the GOP.) There was no consensus for change. Both parties had drifted considerably to the left. The "conservative" faction of the GOP was a disgruntled, reactionary rump of no significance. William F. Buckley was only beginning his career as a political firebug setting the landscape ablaze with a new, revitalized conservatism. In lieu of meaningful opposition, leftist thinking prevailed. The GOP might be slightly more business-oriented and slightly more hawkish involving defense -- but only slightly. For the better part of four decades following 1932, the GOP was for all practical purposes a junior party to the Democrats.
Both parties worked to impose centralized interventionist policies. The Republican slogan was "the same program, but slower," its major selling point the contention that it could emplace collectivist policies more "responsibly" than the Democrats. Nelson Rockefeller was the leader of this wing, which controlled the party unchallenged for two decades following WWII. Not even Richard Nixon defied this consensus. His one-and-a-half terms, in which he championed Keynesianism, the Environmental Protection Agency, higher taxes, and affirmative action, put him farther to the left than many Democrats.
Change began in the mid-'60s. The west-of-the-Mississippi GOP, not far removed from the days of the frontier, remained solidly conservative. An insurgent movement opposing Rockefeller faction control coalesced around the figure of Arizona's Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964. He was soundly beaten in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but his candidacy created the conditions for a rebirth of Republican conservatism, nurtured by Buckley's new conservative intellectualism. The conservative "Prairie Fire" culminated in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, the sole president in an eighty-year period to govern on strict Republican (one might go so far as to say "American") principles.
Reagan changed the game completely. Even onetime hippie leftist Bill Clinton felt compelled to govern as a right-of-center Democrat. But both Bushes reinstated the conventional Republican paradigm of a firm foreign policy coupled with domestic policies that were anything but -- not a good sign.
Congress took longer to adjust, with many of the Rockefeller branch (today termed "RINOs") remaining in office through the Reagan years. That began to change in 1994, with a masterful tactical victory engineered by the same Newt Gingrich today cavorting with Al Sharpton. But Gingrich's victory soon foundered on the rocks of his own ego, leaving the party under the control of impotent figures preoccupied with their own agendas while the party as a whole spiraled into blatant corruption -- again in direct imitation of the Democrats. The election of 2006 was a deserved rebuke for this dereliction.
In the 21st century, the GOP has fallen back to its ground state as the loser party, a shadow party that has learned its lesson -- submissive, cautious, and unwilling to take chances. (Shortly after the 1994 election, it was discovered that Democratic committee staffers were not being replaced. Asked to explain, an anonymous Republican said that if they allowed the staffers to remain, when the Democrats returned to office, perhaps they'd remember and do the Republicans a few favors. Nothing could illustrate the basic spinelessness of the traditional GOP more clearly.) John Cornyn has already stated that the party will make no attempt to repeal ObamaCare. If the GOP won't tear down that monstrosity, what good is the GOP? The current Republican Party is tired, frightened, and lacking ideas, no fit war wagon for the struggles that lie ahead.
But a wild card remains -- the Tea Parties. American political culture has never been limited, as it is in Europe, to a professional elite that makes the deals and then imposes them on the prole class. In this country the people speak, as they are speaking today. Obama has governed so ineptly, arrogantly, and stupidly as to arouse disgust in people who until now have been happy to ignore politics.
The Tea Parties are not Republican. They're not even necessarily conservative as we have grown to recognize the term. But they are American in spirit, and thus de facto conservative. They must turn to the GOP as a political vessel because they have nowhere else to turn.
The politically independent, philosophically conservative Tea Partiers will win the upcoming election for the GOP. Once that's taken care of, the current Republican leadership will do its best to put distance between the GOP and the Tea Parties, the quicker to return to their loser's slumber.
What's the alternative? Not a future as a third party. Third parties as a rule have a miserable record, from the forgotten John Anderson and H. Ross Perot, who can proudly proclaim that he put Bill Clinton into the presidency on two separate occasions, to the perennial embarrassment of the Libertarians, happily acting as tools for the Dems. If formed into an acting political party, as some are urging, the Tea Parties would probably do little better. (In any case, recent reports indicate that attempts to run "Tea Party" candidates are actually front operations overseen by the Democrats.)
But what future do they have in the GOP full of untrustworthy pols yearning for a return to the old days of well-rewarded ideological servitude? The answer may well be to reverse the equation: for the Tea Parties to use the GOP as a resource.
There are already a number of Republican Tea Partiers, people who believe the same things and share the same goals. Michele Bachmann and Mike Pence are the best-known of these. Next January, they will be joined by a large number of newly-elected politicians who owe their success not to the GOP, but to the Tea Parties. This substantial group could serve as a kernel around which a program of internal conservative reform can be carried out, much as the Goldwater backers did in the 1960s. They will not simply be new recruits, or another faction, but something on the order of a driving wheel for a party that lacks one. It's interesting that Bachmann has already formed a Tea Party Caucus -- exactly what you'd expect of someone with such plans in mind.
The Tea Party could turn the GOP into a vibrant political entity worthy of the new millennium rather than merely a group of tired hacks rubber-stamping the social changes mandated by the Democrats and awarding themselves earmarks. It's possible to view this as a historical imperative, a broad-based citizens' movement fulfilling the promise of the incomplete Goldwater, Reagan, and Gingrich revolutions.
Even if the Tea Parties fail in rejuvenating the GOP, they could utilize the party as a chrysalis in which to grow and expand until, some time in the near future -- perhaps eight or ten years from today -- they are established enough to emerge as a viable third party, leaving the husk of the GOP behind, much as the Republicans left the Whigs in the 1850s. Either course is viable. Either would offer us a way out of the current impasse of twin parties growing more and more to resemble a political oligarchy in the purest and least democratic sense.
The period of 1994 through 2006 proves you wrong. There was sustained growth, low tax burden, etc, etc. Despite too much spending towards the end of that term, much was defense spending post 9/11. The deficit was curving back downward before the Dems took over. Saying we are worse off with the Dems in charge of the congress is simply a fool’s argument.
Dude.
I don't read past the headline.
Y'see.
I do not really care WHY you are part of the Democrat campaign apparatus.
Of course the GOP isn't listening!!! We've all been (or at least most of us have been) castigating the dems for "not listening" to the American punlic.
Well, "behind the scenes" so to speak....and due mostly to failed leadership, complete lack of useful ideas, and an "old white man" mentality....the RINOs haven't been listening either.
Except to say that those rinos now in power are pretty sure their seats are safe from this coming Nov's bloodbath, and so are now piping up about how wonderful they are, how tough it's been for them, and that we should all run right out and vote for them.
This, so they can return to power - then do the same things the dems have been doing - for the next two years (e.g. :Scott Walker, MA). That is "rino-ing" to the best of their ability.
One wonders if we should not re-name the two parties??
Perhaps the "demlicans" and the "repubocrats"? Since they are a mix of liberal ideas from far far left to slightly left of reason, why don't we name them as we see them?
Where oh where oh where are the true conservative leaders running for office?????
Good one.
I should say: I do not really care WHY your are part of the GOP/RNC campaign apparatus.
But I won’t.
‘WHY your are part of the GOP/RNC campaign apparatus.’
Proud to support a pro-life, anti-amnesty, pro-defense, tax-cutting party which supports cutting government regulation and opposes an Islamic takeover of the West. So what is your reason for assisting Obama again?
Let’s see how the GOP stacks up vs. the positions you claim it holds:
Pro-life: In words, yes, in actions, no.
Anti-Amnesty: Yea, uh, who was it that gave the first amnesty to the illegals? Was it that Reagan guy? And who was just running on the GOP ticket this last time? That McCain dude? Didn’t that McCain dude author legislation offering more amnesty?
Pro-defense: Pro defense spending isn’t the same as ‘pro-defense.’ If the GOP were truly ‘pro-defense’ they would start working on the Mexican border for real, and they’d cease allowing students from Muslim countries into our country on student visas - especially for engineering and science degrees.
Tax-cutting: That much is true.
Cutting government regulations: In my lifetime, I have never seen government regulations cut. Never. During the Bush administration, the number of regulations I endured as a farmer continued to go up, it never went down. Want to talk about regulation? Then let’s talk about regulation. Who brought the EPA into existence? A Republican. Who brought the Department of Homeland Security into existence? A Republican. Who brought us the wonder of the TSA? A Republican. I no longer fly where I’m going because of the policies of A Republican.
Don’t talk to me about cutting regulations.
“Opposes an Islamic takeover of the West:” Uh, provide some evidence please. Where has any elected Republican actually done anything other than flap their gums on this issue? When have they done something concrete, like expose Islam for what it is? Who coined the bucket of treacle, “Islam is a religion of peace?” Oh, that would be a Republican.
What it means to be a Republican these days is as unclear as it was in the days before Ronald Reagan emerged in the wake of Gerald Ford's electoral loss in 1976 to rally conservatives behind a positive, coherent vision of America as a natural and exceptional leader of the free world.
As others (most notably, author Angelo Codevilla) have discerned, there is a cultural divide in the GOP today just as there is within the Democrat Party - but with a vital difference. Both parties' leaders are largely "ruling class" elitists fully at home in Washington, DC and in other urban metropolises, but rarely in the vast exurban and rural lands that comprise most of "country class" America.
For its part, the Republican leadership feels compelled to distance itself from its core supporters - conservative activists, Tea Party enthusiasts, evangelical Christians, and 2nd Amendment supporters among them - precisely because the GOP leaders share none of these enthusiasms. Rather, they wish to act as political middle managers, not leaders; caretakers, not owners. The "rabble" in the countryside just distract from their mission, which is not to roll back government but to preside over it with more care, fiscal probity and discretion than Democrats would. Not to put too fine a point on it, but how did that work out during W.'s last term?
The Democrat leaders are of course, also elitists, though of a more radical disposition, seeking as they do the advancement of Progressive social experimentation in all areas of life without recognizing any significant restraint on the government's ability to do "pretty much whatever it wants" (in the words of one Fortney "Pete" Stark).
But here is the critical difference - Democrat leaders love their base voters - unionized government workers, blacks, urban single women, trial lawyers, and government dependents at large - not because they are also elitists (although some are) but because they are valued clients of the Democrat Party who donate their time, loyalty, and money to the party in exchange for billions of dollars in Federal largess.
The GOP, in contrast, will never attract the fealty or enthusiasm of its core voters until Republican leaders decide to give their voters what they want - which is largely to be left the hell alone. Shrink government. Slash the spending that is sucking the life blood out of our economy. Reform a tax code that ruthlessly penalizes productivity and investment. Eliminate bureaucracy and burdensome regulatory rules that no one truly understands. Get the Federal government out of our way so that America can become America again.
As a practical matter, the GOP must abandon the "status-quo, don't make waves, don't rock the boat, go-along-to-get-along, politics-is-the-art-of-the-possible, compromise is always better than conflict" mode in which they find themselves. Which is why they're presently hunkered down and waiting for the Tea Parties to carry them to victory in the fall (without open support from the party brass), after which time... they'll... er... what, exactly? Quietly accede to Obama's 1st term victories by refusing to fight for a repeal of the health care law or an extension of Bush's tax cuts? You betcha. That's the plan. But at least now they'll get the nicer Capitol offices and the really good tables at lunch.
Since your list of RINOs includes Ronald Reagan there is no point in discussing things with you. However, I am talking about the current GOP leadership, including Sarah Palin, Sharon Angle, Rand Paul, Bob McDonnell, Bobby Jindal, Nikki Haley, Jim DeMint, etc. Why folks like you give assistance to Obama, Reid and Pelosi and call yourself conservatives is hard to grasp.
Two terms in the US Senate (12 years!)
Six terms in the US House (12 years!)
Then go home, sit out 1 Senate term & 2 House terms before the “professional politician” can return.
Similar restrictions need to be imposed and the state, county & city level!
Unfortunately Congressional term limits appears to require a constitutional amendment. This would probably require an Amendment proposed by the states or even a second Constitutional Convention. In any case, it will not be done quickly enough to save the country from the immediate crisis.
“We are screwed. We didn’t get to this sorry state as a country in just the year and a half Obama has been in office. We have been traveling this path for at least five decades, of which in two of the past three decades, a Republican held the White House. It’s been a progression move to this point. A Bipartisan one. Screw both parties. This house of cards is gonna fall under either of the ruling parties. Tell me why I should think differently.”
Thankfully, those who share your views sit behind keyboards and rant with a hand full of like minded know it alls. It is a big country and fortunately the overwhelming majority of them are sensible.
LOL...more like...
Did I call Reagan a RINO? No. Have I ever? No.
Was he? Clearly not.
You’re putting words in my mouth, and you might want to stop that. I have only limited patience for people like you.
You can’t seem to handle the facts:
Fact: Reagan brought forward the first amnesty, thereby giving us the root of our problems today.
Fact: Reagan was a Republican.
Fact: Reagan was a conservative Republican.
Fact: Some Republicans and Republican candidates today point to that amnesty when supporting a new “path to citizenship” for illegals.
Having been active first as a conservative then as a conservative Republican for 50 years I can say that the Republican party’s leadership has NEVER been more conservative than it is right now, and since the oldest Republicans tend to be the most liberal, and because of the influx of tea party types, the GOP is rapidly becoming more conservative.
Thank you for posting that. I could not have written that more eloquently or more succinctly than you did. I would like to highlight one passage of your posting that rings like a bell put over my head and hit with a sledgehammer:
“The GOP, in contrast, will never attract the fealty or enthusiasm of its core voters until Republican leaders decide to give their voters what they want - which is largely to be left the hell alone. “
You just hit the X ring, Andy. That’s is a beautiful and clear summation of the salient issue at hand.
This is also part of why I believe the GOP is destined to fail and fail big. NO politician goes to DC to “do nothing.” They all claim they have big dreams and aspirations for what they want to do in office. None of these morons go to DC to a) do nothing and b) undo that which never needed to be done before. Every last one of these buttinskis thinks that their meddling in my life is for my own good.
And this is why I’m fed up with the GOP. They promise to reduce government, but they never do. These idiots and hair-lipped morons NEVER, EVER reduce the bureaucracy I am forced to deal with every day. Want to impress me? Show me that just ONE form that I have to fill out in the course of a year has gone away, that I will never, ever need to deal with that piece of paper again. Want to really impress me? Eliminate a half dozen forms I fill out over the course of a year.
They can’t even stir themselves to find something concrete and eliminate ONE form, one piece of stupid mail from the government that takes my time.
For example: I’m looking at opening a gun smithing business. Want to impress me? Eliminate all ITAR requirements that gunsmiths who don’t sell guns to the military or who never export anything.
At this point, I have to little confidence in the GOP’s ability to actually eliminate any paperwork that I’d settle for even less: I’d settle for the GOP to force a concrete resolution as to who needs to pay the ITAR fees every year, and for a clear-cut policy letter on what constitutes “manufacturing” of a firearm. I’d also like a clear-cut statement of the Internal Revenue Code in such a way that anyone can understand it completely and easily upon one reading.
Want to impress me? Make compliance with the Agricultural Census optional for farmers. I hated with a passion receiving these idiotic letters every month/quarter/year with a bold “$300 fine for non-compliance” on the outside of the envelope. Who the *&(*& is the government to tell me, a private company engaged in lawful commerce to report to them how much I was producing, of what, and for how much I sold it ... under penalty of a fine? It always made me madder than heck.
The GOP has accomplished none of these types of things, much less promising or delivering on being “left alone.”
“So what is your reason for assisting Obama again?”
Is there an echo in here?
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