Enough of the economy, Palin, and McCain, let’s get to the real issue: The fact that Today’s GOP resembles 1970’s Ragu spaghetti sauce.
Back in the seventies you didn’t eat pasta with yummy chunky tangy spaghetti sauce; you ate noodles with runny tomato sauce. If you went to the grocery store you would find only thin Ragu.
Given the competition the thicker tastier Prego should have been getting more business, but it wasn’t, so they hired a consultant to find the "perfect" sauce. He couldn’t find it, but eventually he discovered they didn’t need the perfect sauce. They needed perfect sauces.
They needed Diversity.
They needed thick sauce, thin sauce, spicy sauce, and chunky sauce. With the diverse list of options their sales went through the roof. Seeing their success Ragu followed suit.
Looking around the GOP convention you couldn’t help notice... um... a lack of diversity.
The GOP convention was like a town where you could only buy burgers.
The GOP ideas too are not diverse. They aren’t a spectrum of ideas but rather a set of tribal camps that are each only interested in a single issue and cede the rest of policy to the other camps. They try not to cross with the other camps. They try not to encourage a diversity of ideas.
- You have the religious right camp. The true core of the party now, the Palin nomination proves as much. They are the "values" voters, though living the values is secondary to espousing the values. The evangelism in evangelical doesn’t mean you live like a priest, okay?
- You have the big business, lobbyist camp. "Look do whatever you have to do to get elected just keep giving me money and don’t touch what money I’ve got."
- The NeoCon crowd. America’s moral standing be damned. We must win and start wars. Who needs the Pax in Pax Americana, Pax is for whimps.
Now the camps often overlap in belief in the other camps ideals, but more out of the need to conform to the official party line. In truth their issue is all that matters.
The Democratic Party is famous for its disunity. But the disunity often comes from the fact that the party’s philosophies and beliefs are a spectrum. They are all over the place. They are diverse.
And that is our strength. Diversity. It is what makes America strong and it is what makes a large restaurant selection better.
With what is facing the world today we need a plate full of ideas on how to make this a better place.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein
And now the excellent and fun TED video about diversity and spaghetti sauce that got me on this train of thought:
Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce
Cross posted at my site: This Century Sucks