The professional GOP is now essentially a debating society for mean people. The current GOP is a small regional party, cutting a broad swath through parts of Appalachia. Not that I'm looking forward to it, but one day the GOP will be back with juice. When that day comes, none of the professional republicans you can name right now – politicians and commentators – will be there.
It'll be a new class of republicans, ones that GET how idea-free the GOP of 2008 was. The professionals who are currently meeting, warring and planning for a resurgence are not the people who will actually be forces in the next GOP that actually connects.
The 2008 GOP presumed a lot of stuff that wasn’t true:
• That most people knew the official McCain story, whitewashed or not. As far as I saw, they never really went out of their way to tell the story in detail, yet again. They acted as though just saying he was a hee-row was enough.
• That most people understood why the hell he kept saying he was a maverick, or why that would matter.
• That most people knew what the hell the "Weather Underground" was or why they were supposed to shit their pants when it was invoked.
• That the Hanoi Hilton was not a place to steal towels from.
• That anyone outside their base gave a damn what Obama’s preacher said. (Most people outside their base don’t have a preacher, and the ones that do ignore him/her when they say something stupid.)
• I have to presume that younger voters roll their eyes at the mention of Vietnam, the way they do when old farts talk about how cool the 60’s were. The right wing is still fighting that war. Large blocks of voters DO NOT CARE. (It didn’t help Kerry much either. If it had, they couldn’t have stolen Ohio.) I first voted in 1972, when the Korean war was far more recent than Vietnam is today, and I didn’t know squat about the Korean war, and I was comparatively engaged.
Or maybe the GOP won’t be back. Maybe it was just the first of the two parties to kick the bucket. There’s a beautiful article by David Carr in today's NY Times called How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power. Carr says that "Political parties supply brand, ground troops, money and relationships, all things that Mr. Obama already owns," and that perhaps the Democratic party (and by inference the GOP) are officially obsolete.
Remember how the insta-polls of undecided voters rendered the spin doctors obsolete after the debates last month? How about a Democracy where TV ads and October Surprises are obsolete, too, along with eVotes that flip before your eyes?
Imagine, national consensus derived from people actively participating in social networks instead of from endless, inane political spots and hopelessly dated assumptions about what we care about and aspire to.
Now if we standardize on vote-by-mail and count-by-hand, we might get to see what Democracy REALLY looks like. Where the left and right of America really shake out.
Center-right, my ass.