Here's what the Republican Party has been up to since it lost the election.
Gave the RNC chairmanship to a guy who thinks that government creates work and not jobs.
Considered giving the RNC chairmanship to a guy who thought it would be funny to send committee members copies of a CD containing the song"Barack the Magic Negro" . . .
. . . and to another guy who just recently resigned his 12-year membership in a whites-only country club.
And now, they got Kenneth from 30 Rock to explain that the current government can't help us through this economic crisis by using as an example the failures of his own party after Hurricane Katrina (transcript here). Also, that the government shouldn't spend money on monitoring volcanoes (along with other measures to prevent natural disasters) or imaginary high speed rail projects from Las Vegas to Disneyland.
And Karl Rove thought he was creating a permanent Republican majority.
2 comments:
I'd bet that the republican party will take at least as long to recover now as the democrats did after 2000 (wasn't 2006 the first post-clinton, election victory for the democrats?).
But I wouldn't count them out for good. They'll find traction eventually but only after losing for a long time. Maybe they'll actually sound a little more humble in a few years... I mean anything could happen, right?
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. It does seem that every generation or so, the party that loses the presidential election faces some sort of ideological struggle. With the Republicans, you have people on one side who say that the party needs to move to the center and that McCain would've won the election if he had repudiated the neo-conservatism of the Bush years and dropped Sarah Palin in favor of a more moderate running mate. Then you have people on the other side, who say that the Republicans need to embrace their ultra-conservative base and that McCain would've won if he put more effort into rallying the evangelicals.
If they choose the latter, I think they run a real risk of alienating an entire generation of voters who represent increasingly significant voting blocs—for instance, young people, who tend to be socially liberal and have been more politically engaged than ever before; political moderates, whose support for Obama seems to suggest an increasing lack of identification with the conservative movement among most Americans; and racial minorities, who largely associate with the Democratic Party and make up a growing, susbstantial population in key states and swing states.
So yeah, all of this to say that I think you're right that they'll lose for a long time, particularly if they embrace the same old policies. I'm thinking about Jindal's response to Obama's address to Congress, and how he had a great opportunity to offer up fresh ideas, a new direction...and all I got out of it was the same stale, tone-deaf party line. We'll see what happens, but so far, it's not looking very good.
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