GOP Re-branding: Please, let them keep talking.
This week’s traveling GOP minstrel show, and no, I’m not referring to Bristol Palin’s abstinence road show, seeks to re-brand the Republican image as getting back to its roots of small government, personal freedoms, and strong defense. Moderates Republicans, and I say that with a modicum of sarcasm, such as Cantor from Virginia and former governors Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, are on a listening tour of the United States. I find it rather amusing they have waited until now to start listening to the American people. Is it because the “neo-carnation” of the party over the years has produced a brand with the staying power of New Coke?
For a party who professes to stand for small government, personal freedoms, and strong defense, the GOP is suffering from an identity crisis. Ronald Reagan, the deity of the party, proudly announced that government was not the solution to the problem, it was the problem. Not anymore. The Bush administration with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Medicare prescription drug plan, the Patriot Act, and No Child Left Behind assembled a far reaching and many times intruding expansion of the federal government. Since the Reagan years, there have been few social issues that the Republican Party didn’t want a hand in, or other part of their anatomy. From attempts to legislate morality in the Terri Schiavo case, to LGBT civil rights, to immigration reform, the Republicans did little to uphold personal freedoms. In fact, a case can be made for the GOP trying to take Constitutional freedoms away. In terms of national defense, the outcome of the last eight years is evident. We lost our moral conscience and the ethical high road, and in the process, our strength. George Bush’s Republican Party did more to hurt the GOP’s historical advantage on national security issues than any Republican president in modern times.
The above mentioned “moderates” have created the National Council for a New America. It’s not so much we are a “new” America; it’s that today’s GOP is so out of touch that they don’t recognize us anymore. America has evolved, but the American spirit and ideal is still very much the same. Darwinian Theory can be applied here as the Republicans continue to exist on all fours while the majority of America has grown a spine and moved on. A few members of the party have recognized that you either evolve, or you do not survive…but only a few. They have been met with ridicule and venom from members of the ultra right wing, such as Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh that is usually savored for Liberals. Seems to me they are doing nothing but undermining their party…but you are going to hear no complaints from me.
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The problem is the loudest and most obnoxious Neo-cons in the party believe the answer to the GOP’s problems is to win the debate or win the argument, not to step back and examine what’s not working. Though I can’t say I am surprised that the leaders are not accepting responsibility for the last ten years. Only cowards believe torture is an enhanced interrogation technique.
The Republican Party has become a party of regional Southern strength where racism and bigotry have a long and ugly history. The educated, suburban voter across the country has fled the GOP for obvious reasons. Education level is becoming an easier and easier predictor of political allegiance. Republican problems relating to minorities and younger votes are also well established, but the Neo-con establishment marches on with little acknowledgement of this reality. The GOP has no new clothes; it stands naked before the country old, wrinkled, and flaccid. God in heaven, gentlemen, cover up.
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