The Republican Party, not having gotten the message in 2006, has been slapped down by the electorate yet again, only this time with considerably more feeling. It used to be the Democrats controlled the coastlines, while the Republicans had the heartland.
Now the Republicans lost some of that heartland and saw North East Republicans become virtually extinct save for Judd Gregg in New Hampshire and the Pigeon Sisters, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, in Maine.
As a Northeast Republican myself and a very low level Gregg operative in the early 1980s, I am mad as hell about this, and I am not going to take it anymore. The party Ronald Reagan expanded with his big tent philosophy has seen fit to hire bouncers and toss various interest groups out on their ear. The few moderates still left in the tent, sit cowering in a corner hoping for order to be restored while the current powers that be seek to insult us by calling us wishy-washy RINOs (Republicans in Name Only.).
Well goddamnit. Let’s form the RINO party and get the hell out of here. I will invoke my imprecise recollection of what Alan Simpson had to say was the reason for his leaving DC. He stated he was startled to hear people say that to compromise was to be “wimpish.” He didn’t understand that, he said, as he felt his task was to go to DC and try to get something done, and to do that, you had to compromise.
If you wanted to write a book about the current Republican Party, let me suggest to you the working title of “Angry White Men and the Women Who Love Them” because that is all that is left. The cultural changes around them drive them crazy, and they make this measure of personal conduct their driving political message.
Screaming Howard Dean said it best when he declared that “Guns, God, and Gays don’t have a thing to do with running this country.”
He’s right. You don’t like gay marriage, then don’t marry someone of the same sex, and join a church that won’t perform them. You don’t like abortion, then don’t have one. You think premarital sex is wrong, then don’t engage in it.
So it is time for disaffected Republicans and old Reagan Democrats to form a center coalition and hopefully work to drive a stake through the heart of the extremist cabals on both sides of the aisle. To perhaps offer a conciliatory gesture to the Blue Dog Democrats, we ought to call it the Blue Rino Party, but let’s leave that up to the operatives, shall we?
More to the point is, for what should this party stand?
Fiscal Responsibility:
Neither part does well with this. Each rails about the other’s profligate spending practices, but once they get in there, they hemorrhage cash.
We don’t necessarily need to balance the budget, as there are government investments with lifespans longer than a yearly budget cycle, but we sure as hell have to start discussing how we intend to pay for each and every new program we think we want to add to the pile. Likewise, we can begin looking at things to eliminate.
Republicans touched on what I consider to be an alarming statistic during the campaign concerning what percentage of the population contributes how much of the income tax take. Close to half the country pays little to no income tax. This alarms me from the perspective of a majority of the citizenry not having any compelling self interest to hold government accountable to deliver services efficiently. If you seemingly pay nothing for a service, where is your interest in seeing that it was done efficiently?
Geo-Political Responsibility
Like it or not, 9/11 obliterated conventional wisdom as to how to view the world. We previously planned for traditional threats of clearly identified uniformed armed people shooting at our clearly identified uniformed armed people. This conduct serves as the fundamental underpinning of Geneva Conventions.
Today we face a threat from civilian-clothed individuals with tenuous allegiances to specific nation states seeking to infiltrate our society and wreak as much havoc on our civilian population as possible. There’s no neat little category in the international lexicon to address this problem.
The recent legal rulings, gnashing of teeth, and administration vagaries stem from the administration’s need to establish a precedent on how to address them. They are not “just civilians,” nor are they “soldiers.” We need to seek to convene a new Geneva Convention to address this.
A secondary and equally as critical element here happens to be our national compassion. I am utterly appalled at the position my party has taken with respect to immigration. I am sorry, but I understood this country to be about opportunity.
The myth is one of being able to pick oneself up by the bootstraps and make a better life. If people are risking their lives to get here via make shift rafts from Cuba or container cars from Mexico, China and wherever, then we should be welcoming these people with open arms. If the laws are too restrictive to be realistic given the current population base, then change those laws.
On the other hand, beef up USCIS staffing to monitor this as well as potential terrorist comings and goings. We are not necessarily here to extend government services to the indigent of other countries. We are here to give them a chance to become self-sufficient. If that self-sufficiency does not materialize after a set period of time, then deport them.
Personal Responsibility:
This issue cuts both ways. We need to outline quite clearly a decidedly libertarian view here. The government should retreat from its citizen’s personal lives:
Have sex with whom you want. Marry whom you want. Abort if you want. Smoke what you want. Eat what you want. Drink what you want. Exercise as much or as little as you want. There should be a standard review process for each and every proposed law that evaluates the extent to which it infringes on the individual rights of the citizens. Those with considerable infringements better have very clear justifications for that intrusion.
The flip side of this renewed sense of personal freedom will be a renewed sense of personal responsibility. Turn to government for less, rather than more.
We should absolutely take a detailed and very intense look at the cultural aspects of those stuck in the permanent underclass. We have thrown countless dollars at this issue for almost two generations now, and yet there’s a certain stasis.
Why?
It cannot be laid completely at the feet of external forces anymore. It is time to take a good hard look at the elephant in the room – personal conduct.
I had hoped McCain would tap Lieberman as a direct appeal to center voters that could have served to marginalize the flank. Sadly it seems he was talked out of this idea based on the belief the party would rebel and not nominate Lieberman, resulting in ugly, internecine warfare. So instead, he plucked a Not Ready For Prime Time individual who played to an ever-dwindling base.
And the knives are now out. The extreme flank seems to think the way to regain a majority coalition is to retreat further to the flank. How is that going to work, exactly?
Government is not there to define culture. The baby boomer battle over this has worn thin. The Hatfields and McCoys were more civil to one another than these self-absorbed enemies. It is time to take a stand and get government out of this business and back into the business of protecting our citizens, maintaining an adequate infrastructure, and living within its means.
It’s time for expatriate Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats to come together and show the nation there are leaders who understand the value of conciliation and compromise. It is time to form the (Blue) Rino party.
I had to read this column very quickly, so my quick response is going to use very general terms.
As I see it, the ultimate causes of the Republican defeat are generational and demographic changes that the GOP so far refuses to address.
By 2008, Democrats had learned how to win over an increasingly younger and more racially diverse electorate, while the GOP kept appealing to the same voter segment that put Reagan in office in 1980.
That GOP voter segment by now has aged considerably and consists mostly of 50+-year-old Christian white men and women, and now, increasingly, of Christian white men and women who are over 60 or even over 70 years old.
In the meantime, in 2008, the Democrats captured two-thirds of voters aged 18 to 29 years. This means that the Democrats have captured nearly an entire future generation of voters.
This younger generation of voters is less obsessed with wedge issues than the over-50 crowd. This younger generation is almost entirely urban and lives in major metropolitan areas rather than small towns.
This younger generation is also at least slightly better educated than the over-50 crowd, at least to the degree that the younger generation is less
intimidated by the need to asborb new information all the time. These kids absorb new information nonstop on their Blackberrys and laptops, and they’re less tied to hand-me-down cultural stereotypes.
Republicans lost these voters once these kids learned that the GOP is terrified of new information. In fact, the GOP is terrified of anything new: New ideas, new strategies, new marital arrangements, new anything. In 2008, the GOP practically presented itself as the party of cripples, and younger voters want nothing to do with it.
If any conservative party, GOP or otherwise, is going to regain younger voters’ loyalty, conservatives will have to show that they, the conservatives, live in the same world as younger voters, and that conservatives are more than willing to innovate where innovation means improvement.
Finally, conservative politicians have to drop the wedge issues. Younger voters are simply not as intimidated as their elders by racial and cultural differences. Conservatives have to prove that they, conservatives, are philosophically better equipped to deal with modernity than anyone on the left is. So far we haven’t done that.
Hmmm. Let’s not take the Lord’s name in vain while ranting on failed fellow travelers, either (see paragraph 4, above). Divisive anger became the giant sword apoplectic Republicans impaled themselves upon. Sounding like what you reject is classic transference. All small thinking might get larger with responsive and embracing calm. Good luck with that conciliation and compromise –