"The Republican Party is in big trouble and needs to find a way to move back to the middle of the country, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday."
Leaving aside his bad choice of phrasing, (the "middle of the country", aka "the heartland" has been consistently conservative for a long time, not the left-leaning centrists that Powell suggests they would be best represented by) this strategy interests me (in a morbid way). Let's see what he says next.
"The Republican Party is in deep trouble," Powell told corporate security executives at a conference in Washington sponsored by Fortify Software Inc. The party must realize that the country has changed, he said. "Americans do want to pay taxes for services," he said. "Americans are looking for more government in their life, not less."
I won't bother to quote him any more. Read the article if you wish, it's fruitless verbiage.
One might assume, based on the results of the last election, that Powell's words are true.
But over half a million of my fellow Americans who joined me in the tea parties might beg to differ. Half a million, yes, that's a very, very small slice of America. But behind every one of those people who showed up are tens and hundreds who feel the same.
The American Revolution was ignited by the issue of taxation without representation.
What we have now is a new and unnatural chimera:
Taxation without representation, and also representation without taxation.
Those who pay taxes have fewer and fewer advocates in the government which siphons off the money they have earned, while those who do not contribute to the system receive the ill-gotten gain, minus their freedom.
Meanwhile, Powell advocates a shift by the GOP from "Lie to your base for votes" to "Our base does not exist, let us become our opponents".
Republicans only have themselves to blame for their current troubles. Any true conservative or smaller-government advocate has been so burned by this point that McCain's loss would have been truly epic if millions of people had not voted for him merely to vote against Obama.
The Republican party had only survived that long because of their conservative voters. The homeschooler moms who volunteered, gun owners who contributed, pro-lifers who urgently invested in their cause. Those people have been repeatedly betrayed, their interests sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.
No more. The stake in the heart of the GOP of before was not Obama's victory, but the nomination of McCain. Palin was an unexpected boost, and nearly upset the election.
And yet, as the confetti was still falling in Chicago, the Republicans turned on Palin, who offered the only breath of fresh air in the race, the only factor that made victory even conceivable, and proceeded to blame her for the whole thing.
Imagine a man who sleeps for 14 hours a day, blaming his inability to win a marathon on the fact that, had he only enough sleep, say 18 hours a day, he could have done it.
The Republican Party will totally cease to exist as a political entity in the United States if they continue on this course. Only a seismic shift in their party mentality to recognize and work for the people who have repeatedly been the motivating power behind their campaigns instead of betraying them to pander ineffectually to politically apathetic centrists who fall left by default could possibly stave off disaster.
That is, if we will ever have them back.
-()4|<.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment