The 100 percenters aren’t going to like this.
Bush destroyed it...Nixon destroyed it...Hover destroyed it...everyone seems to be writing the party obituary. The GOP is a lot stronger than a single person. What it needs is leadership, which is currently lacking.
I don’t think it’s a very well-written piece. It founders and lacks evidence. Which is too bad. The evidence is there.
Bush wrecked the Republican Party by governing as a Scoop Jackson pro-defense democrat.
It was a monumental job of wrecking. The results are all around us in this election cycle.
Peggy Noonan taking on the king of the Jaw Bone Media. That will be interesting.
I’m voting for Mitt, the “Mormon”.
There’s nothing wrong with the Republican Party that couldn’t be cured with a dose of legitimate conservativism. It worked in 1980, and it worked in 1994.
I believe we have a great big BINGO!
We will never sell conservatism (or the GOP) to the electorate if we cannot define it. Even if we were not directly responsible, we have to point out where the “right” went wrong and exactly what we need to do to rectify the situation.
Brilliant headline on Drudge’s part!
Grabbed everyone’s attention, lured in all the Democrats thinking they were gonna get their Bush Derangement Syndrome jollies off it, then proceeded to read a long piece that eviscerated the Clintons. At the very end is a single sentence aside to a different story where Peggy says McCain can’t destroy the GOP because Bush already did.
Well played, Matt. Well played.
There is nothing new about this. Every thing bad that has happened since he was elected is his fault.
Well of course. But to be fair, he was simply making palatable the wussified RINO approach prevalent since the gov. shut-down cave in.
Shame on me for falling for it. No more.
Well damn! Me, and a very few other, use to get flamed for saying this, now it’s headlines on Drudge. Again, GWB will go down in history as the worse POTUS. He destroyed the Republican party, and most of our America.
Harriet Myers was a hard one to take ...
Already been posted plenty o’ times FRiend, i.e., “search is your friend”...
Bush didn’t destroy the party. He kicked it in the nuts.
Yep,
So now we will be left with McLame in November.
Unwarranted alarmism.
Your point concedes that there are/were many causes for the "destruction" of the Republican party, while you specifically fingered Bush's approach on spending, the war, and immigration.
Assuming for the sake of argument that you are correct, can you really say it was Bush's approach to these issues, and not the inherent divergent approaches to these issues within the party's ranks, that caused the division?
IOW, is there a politician on the face of the earth, using political tools, that, under all the circumstances, could have reconciled all the inherent divergent views on these issues within the party to the even more wildly divergent political reality outside the party?
If not, then was it the politician who "destroyed" the party or was it political reality?
I do agree that Bush could have taken a more conservative approach in several areas. However, I do not agree that it is correct to analyze the effect of an administration on its party in "pieces."
To do so, just plays into and gives legitimacy to the "single issue" (or, in effect, multiple "single/handful of issues") mindset.
An administration can never be successful when measured against the multitude of "single issues" inherent in a party.
What will destroy the Republican party is it becoming more and more like the Democrat party: that is, more and more a loose coalition of multiple "single/handful of issues" subgroups who are unwilling to measure the party's success in terms of "net gain" rather than on a zero-sum basis viz-a-vis a handful of issues.
When subgroups form around their handful of issues, and then measure the party on a zero-sum basis---e.g., the party didn't do what I thought was appropriate on immigration [fill-in-the-blank with an issue], therefore the party accomplished NOTHING across the board---NO party can endure and NO politician can cause it to endure.
The Republican party needs to use what worked before, The Contract With America. But why did it work?
1) It wasn’t so much what it said, but how it said it. Most of us probably don’t remember a single item on it.
2) How it said it was simple, clear and honest. No hesitation, no conflicting statements, no hedging, no qualifications, no voting both ways. It was a transparent agenda. You either signed on to it, or you didn’t.
3) Most of the people who signed up were new candidates, not incumbents who had become comfortable with the Washington way of doing things. As such, they were there to break the two party “monolith of stagnation”, not to become part of it.
4) The public loved it. Not just Republican voters, but Independents, and even a lot of moderate Democrats. Finally, a simple checklist to determine who *should* be running the country, and those who just *wanted* to run the country.
5) Conversely, the professional politicians and bureaucrats hated it. It was like light shined on cockroaches, forcing them to flee. They *couldn’t* sign on to it, because it would ruin so many of their schemes and plots.