Republican? So, What's The Point?

Betsy Newmark has an item up pointing to the problems facing the Republican Party today, at least some of them. As a Big Tent kinda guy, I get it, however, somewhere along the way you have to ask yourself, what's the point? Yes, I'd like to see something of a re-alignment around immigration reform (read border security) and National Defense as defining themes for the Republicans in 08, but does anyone believe throwing off low taxes as a campaign theme is going to help the Conservative, or Republican cause? Heck, why not throw off limited government and lose the libertarians, too?

Tony Blankley is tired of various groups of Republicans trying to read one candidate or another out of the party.

A few weeks ago, it was social conservatives reading Giuliani out of the party. Now, in an almost Sicilian revenge pattern, several free-market, low-tax conservatives are coming after Mike Huckabee with baseball bats -- or perhaps with badminton rackets (given the elite Eastern origins of the attackers.)

I so agree. Let these guys compete for the votes of Republicans. If we start carving out this exception here and that exception there for whom we consider solid Republicans, we'll be left with a very small core that might be pure by someone's standards, but will never win elections.

And as for the social conservatives, yeah, I get that a portion of the Republican Party feels the party has been beholden to them a bit much. But guess what? They show up with campaign contributions and they also turn out to vote. If they hadn't in 2000 and 2004, we'd be coming to the end of Al Gore's second term.

I'm confident Republicans will come together in the end. But it's the primary season. Republicans should be having these fights now. This is becoming a standard theme for Blankley and some other notable Inside the Beltway Right-side pundits. So much so that I wonder if they aren't more worried about their current or future positions in DC, than what positions make sense for an ideologically conservative party to represent.

I want Republicans to win in 08. But I want them to stand for things that matter. And past experience suggests that isn't such a bad idea in the end.

Comments

[rwilymz]

Big party politics, whether democrat or republican, runs into the same brick wall: trying to be all things to all its adherants. It cannot be that. It's more than a little foolish to try. ...for any length of time.

Sure, you can go through specific stages of societal evolution in which there is a galvanizing issue which attracts a large portion of any given voter bloc, but those morph fairly rapidly and often simply evaporate if not altogether then into a condensed pool of fringe voters.

The basic problem with democrats is that over the past generation, their galvanizing issues of the generation prior had evaporated into condensed pools of fringe voters and the democrats were furiously trying to cobble them together into the cohesive unitary voter bloc that they once were. Labor == minority == anti-war == ecology == abortion rights [et al].

For many of these "core" issue groups, the majority simply does not buy the democratic line: minorities are being discriminated against today just the same as they were in the 50s... fair wages is just as much of a problem today as it was in the 30s... back alley abortions are just as big a killer as they were in the 60s, and abortion-on-demand is the only solution...

Even a majority of the staunch democratic voters don't buy the platform. It's based on outdated realities. Mostly. One stands out.

Anti-war is coming back into vogue. Never mind that in order to do it the anti-warriors are disingenuously reworking Iraq into a neo-Vietnam. The similarities are practically nonexistent, but that doesn't matter. It's politics. Politics is the fine art of bullshitting the masses, and if they *believe* that up is down and wet is dry, then that is "real" enough for politics.

The democrats are actually congealing for the first time in a generation.

It's the republicans who are now distilling themselves into a fractured "base" of disparate -isms that can very likely render them irrelevant for a generation.

You've got fiscal conservatives forced to settle for the profligate Bush because, well, "it's better than an economy run by a democratic Congress". You've got the majority republican social moderates force to accede to the social conservative because riding the brakes on accepted social change is more rational than taking the brake off completely... et cetera.

Two thirds of the nation, and a majority of self-described republicans, want legal abortions even if not all abortions being legal. Even more of both want federal stem-cell research funding. Cut the social conservatives loose. For every vote you lose, you'll gain two in the center.

If you want to be the party of fiscal restraint, then by god act like it. Don't create bureaucracy simply because you *can*. ...and I'm looking at TSA and HomSec, here. The fiscal conservatives are going to leave sooner than later: they have money to make and time's a-wastin.

The president needs to be charismatic and glib. It hardly matters what their positions or policies are. Of all the available candidates [that I've seen much of] only Giulianni and Obama fill that. Hillary is the democratic McCain -- a bitter sourpuss. If we hadn't had Gore recently, I'd say Edwards has the personality of a stump; Edwards is a stump with moss growing on it, I guess -- perfectly coiffed moss. The rest of the republicans and democrats are largely indifferentiable dweebs, and I look forward to another meaningless political season.

[Fred Beloit]

Like your thoughts overall, rwily, but have trouble with the wobbly term "social conservative", though all these political terms start to wobble under close examination like solids under quantum theory.

Is this a social conservative? 1) Sees Judeo/Christianity as natural culture of America, though the Government can't "establish" one religion. 2) Opposes gun control, sees 2nd Amendment as citizen right to bear arms. 3) Sees military and warfare as necessary to preserve a free country. 4) Sees federal government as far too powerful in too many ways. 5) Sees the Constitution as being essentially as valid now as ever and cannot make it jibe with the feds continuing expansion into fields where constitutionally it does not belong.

This list could be much longer. But if this is social conservatism that can be dumped by the Repubs, then I could no longer be a Repub for I hold with most of these concepts.

[David M]

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 11/01/2007 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.

http://thunderrun.blogspot.com/2007/11/web-reconnaissance-for-11012007.html

[seekeronos]

I'm more or less where Fred is at. Trying to roll in too many things like the Dems have... we'll become cat-herders as much as they are.