GOP in Distress: Is The Party Over?
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| Mon, 05-11-2009 - 10:56am |
Complete article at link.....
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1896588,00.html
These days, Republicans have the desperate aura of an endangered species. They lost Congress, then the White House; more recently, they lost a slam-dunk House election in a conservative New York district, then Senator Arlen Specter. Polls suggest that only one-fourth of the electorate considers itself Republican, that independents are trending Democratic and that as few as five states have solid Republican pluralities. And the electorate is getting less white, less rural, less Christian — in short, less demographically Republican. GOP officials who completely controlled Washington three years ago are vowing to "regain our status as a national party" and creating woe-is-us groups to resuscitate their brand, while Democrats are publishing books like The Strange Death of Republican America and 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation. John McCain's campaign manager recently described his party as basically extinct on the West Coast, nearly extinct in the Northeast and endangered in the Mountain West and Southwest.
As the party has shrunk to its base, it has catered even more to its base's biases, insisting that the New Deal made the Depression worse, carbon emissions are fine for the environment and tax cuts actually boost revenues — even though the vast majority of historians, scientists and economists disagree. The RNC is about to vote on a kindergartenish resolution to change the name of its opponent to the Democrat Socialist Party. This plays well with hard-core culture warriors and tea-party activists convinced that a dictator-President is plotting to seize their guns, choose their doctors and put ACORN in charge of the Census, but it ultimately produces even more shrinkage, which gives the base even more influence — and the death spiral continues. "We're excluding the young, minorities, environmentalists, pro-choice — the list goes on," says Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of two moderate Republicans left in the Senate after Specter's switch. "Ideological purity is not the ticket to the promised land."
Polls show that most Republicans who haven't jumped ship want the party to move even further right; it takes vision to imagine a presidential candidate with national appeal emerging from a GOP primary in 2012. DeMint, the South Carolina Senator, greeted Specter's departure with the astonishing observation that he'd rather have 30 Republican colleagues who believe in conservatism than 60 who don't. "I don't want us to have power until we have principles," DeMint told TIME after firing up that tea-party crowd in Columbia. Voters certainly soured on unprincipled Republicans. But it's not clear they'd like principled Republicans better.
Déjà vu............
DNC Web Ad: Is it 1996? Or 2009?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnKR6ztHIIs


Cheney’s Model Republican: More Limbaugh, Less Powell
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/us/politics/11cheney.html
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said on Sunday that he preferred Rush Limbaugh’s brand of conservatism to former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s, saying Mr. Powell had abandoned the Republican Party when he endorsed Barack Obama for president last year.
“Well, if I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh, I think,” Mr. Cheney said in an interview on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “I think my take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican.”
Mr. Cheney said he “assumed” Mr. Powell’s support of Mr. Obama over Senator John McCain was “an indication of his loyalty and his interest.” The endorsement, in a carefully timed and deliberate statement after Mr. McCain chose Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate in a move to fire up the party’s conservative base, helped solidify Mr. Obama’s campaign.
Mr. Powell, a retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, identified himself as a Republican only after retiring from the military. Last week, Mr. Powell said the Republican Party was in “deep trouble” and needed to find a way back to the middle of the political spectrum and away from polarizing leaders like Mr. Limbaugh and Ms. Palin.
His view, if not a new one, came after Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switched to the Democratic Party and as Republicans debated where the heart of the party lay. In response, Mr. Limbaugh suggested that the moderate Mr. Powell should leave the party.
“What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat, instead of claiming to be a Republican interested in reforming the Republican Party,” Mr. Limbaugh said on his talk show.
Mr. Cheney has been a particularly fierce critic of the Obama administration and a defiant defender against critics of the Bush administration, including President Obama. While his remarks have been striking, they are not unusually outspoken by comparison, for example, to former Vice President Al Gore’s condemnations of the Bush administration when it held office.
Mr. Cheney said he did not want to drive moderates from the party, but did not want the party to move left.
“I think there is room for moderates in the Republican Party,” he said. “I think partly it’s a semantic problem. I don’t think the party ought to move dramatically to the left, for example, in order to try to redefine its base. We are what we are.”