I've been pretty quiet for the last few weeks. There’s an old adage in politics: when your opponent has a gun in his mouth it is not your responsibility to remove it. I just didn't see the need to comment. But now that it’s over and the afterglow is ebbing I have a few observations to make.
Many in the Republican Party have realized that they’re on the wrong track and if the party is to remain viable they have to assess what the party has become. Representative Tom Davis said of the Republican name brand, “If we were a dog food, they would take us off the shelf.” Peter Wehner, a former deputy assistant to President Bush said, "The problem with the Republican Party is that it is not speaking the language and addressing the concerns of the middle class." The Republicans have become "a white, rural, regional party," according to US Representative Tom Davis of Virginia. In other words, the GOP has been completely overtaken by the religious fringe and PNAC neocons to the exclusion of reasonable people.
Many Republican leaders are saying that the party must change and adapt, that if they want to win again they have to look more like the winners of this election, like Democrats. For the party to survive it has to repudiate the slash and burn politics of personal destruction and division. They have to separate themselves from racial and sexual bigotry and realize that it isn't the top driving prosperity to the bottom but the reverse. Just as John McCain discovered in the last weeks of his campaign, if all you have is the base, it’s a small ugly crowd.
Of course, not everybody in the party believes that. "The liberal wing of the GOP has caused the collapse of the Republican Party. . . . For a decade it has spat on the values of Ronald Reagan," said L. Brent Bozell III, an activist. House Minority Whip John Boehner issued a statement deriding Obama’s choice of Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, saying it is a divisive and partisan. Considering that the position of Chief of Staff is not a policy making position but more akin to an office manager why pick a fight so soon? The only reason I can see is to play to the extreme conservative base.
There is a battle raging inside the Republican party and the outcome still isn't certain. The true believers want to become more of what they already are and pragmatists see change as the only route to survival. Who wins will decide the outcome of elections for the next twenty years.
Then there’s Sarah Palin. I actually feel some sympathy of her. She was plucked from obscurity in a state with less population than the city of Dallas and thrust into the spotlight of world politics. It’s a bright light and dazzling, hard to resist particularly for someone as unsophisticated as a white, rural, regional governor. She is everything the base of the GOP represents: simple, a bit red neck by her own admission, big on talking about family values while exhibiting none of them and so easily seduced by a credit card and Neiman Marcus. She will be back in four years, a bit more schooled in little things like world geography and how not to screw up a two-car parade but if the Republican Party is to remain viable it won't be the one she is currently adored by. Poor Sarah, if the party changes it will not love her and if not she will lose and take her party even further down the road of irrelevancy. For her it is a no-win future.
At first I had planned to print bumper stickers with the Obama logo and “Get over it,” but after hearing both McCain’s concession and Obama’s acceptance speech I've thought better of it. No need to continue the division, the politics of hatred. We've won and winners can and should be gracious. Obama says we need to reach out and who am I to argue? Besides, we need the Republican Party; it is what defines and guides us. It is the ying of our yang, the right to our left, the balancing force that prevents us losing equilibrium.
Still, I look forward to telling someone to just “GET OVER IT!”
The new President Elect's website is here:
http://www.change.gov/
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