I knew in 2000 that Bush would be a disaster for the Republican Party. My strong prediction was that he would be the last Republican ever to hold the Presidency. My weaker version of that is that he at the very least has lead the GOP to the political wilderness where they will stay for at least a generation.
So when I say the GOP will be replaced by the Democrats, I don't mean that our party will become the out-of-touch lunatics that the GOP are. I mean that the pre-Ronald Reagan (or even pre-Richard Nixon) GOP will be replaced by the 21st century Democratic Party.
The GOP will be gone. Below the fold for the body . . .
Leaderless
The first problem with today's GOP is that they chose George W. Bush as their leader for the 21st century. This was a gigantic mistake. I told Republican friends of mine back in 2000 that he would be a disaster, and obviously this was true. Though feeble attempts will be made to rehabilitate Bush, these are the last gasps of a dying movement that is rapidly losing touch with the concerns of mainstream America.
The second problem with today's GOP is that they chose Sarah Palin as Bush's successor. Regardless of who was on the ticket as "Presidential" candidate, the '08 election was clearly about Obama v. Palin, as subsequent events have shown. Palin, dumb as a brick, rude, money-grubbing, shallow, corrupt, and incapable of even finishing a single term of elected office, has been spotlighted as the future of the GOP. Every time she opens her mouth the press falls all over her. Rush Limbaugh may be the man to whom all Republicans defer, but he's not ever going to run for office.
Palin may be imagining that she'll be a Presidential contender in 2012. I don't know if she has a chance of getting past the GOP primaries, but it's probably a shoo-in to see her as the ultimate mockfest Tea Bag Party candidate. There will be no end to the hilarity as she flames out more hugely than any politician in recent memory.
Finally, other "leaders" of the GOP include a known drug addict whose sole claim to fame is that he can operate a microphone and gets lots of wingnut welfare to do so, a disgraced former Speaker of the House who still doesn't understand that most of America despises him, the Man with Too Much Tan, and a television show host who weeps fake crocodile tears and is also addicted to drugs and will likely flame out in front of the public in a spectacular and horrifying way.
I was surprised to find that in addition to approval ratings for Palin (which stands at 55% strongly disapprove, 37% approve, and only something like 17% strongly approve), there are approval polls taken for Rush Limbaugh. Why anyone would care what his public approval is is beyond me, because he's far too chickenshit to run for office. Although the Gallup poll I read had a breakdown by political affiliation they didn't ever sum the polls together. Probably not wanting to show just how widely despised Limbaugh is in America. I am sure there are polls for almost all the folks I've listed above, but the obvious thing is, none of these most prominent people in the GOP have a positive vision for what the GOP would like to accomplish.
That Vision Thing
I remember how Bush the Senior famously struggled with his "vision thing." It was an early warning klaxon that the GOP, the party of Reagan, had pretty much exhausted the bench of leaders when you had an already-elected President publicly stating his lack of vision. The flippant tone of Bush the Senior's "vision thing" comment suggests that as far back as 1989, Republicans pretty much had checked out on the leadership front and were content to worship at the altar of Reaganism and keep the status quo.
As the 1990's progressed the GOP's outrage at the election of a non-Republican to the White House consumed their vision entirely. 1994 was the last time the Republican Party clearly and succicntly stated their goals for America, with Newt Gingrich's "Contract for on America's working class."
Referendum on Clinton
By the end of the 1990's, the continuous legal assaults on President Clinton (all undertaken at taxpayer expense, all frivolous and absurd in their complete lack of real importance) had taken a toll on the Democratic brand, making the 2000 election a referendum on an outgoing President who was extremely popular. With a cloud of ugliness floating over the Gore candidacy, Ralph Nader running his vanity campaign, and the chicanery of the Republican Party and the Supreme Court, a virtually illegitimate election put unqualified moron George W. Bush in the Oval Office.
Referendum on Republicanism
With opinions divided only as to whether Bush was the worst President of all time, or just the worst President in the last 100 years, the "permanent Republican majority" that Karl Rove crafted out of dodgy electioneering and a captured media industry now lies in ruins. The 2006 election was the beginning of the end of the political landscape of the latter half of the 20th century, and the GOP is on the brink of complete irrelevance. The Teabagger movement has revealed that the core of the GOP are ignorant, intolerant and racist zealots who are angry at almost everyone else in the country but haven't got a fucking clue why, and seem to have nothing to offer to the conversation except threats of violence and infantile displays of "force." The clownish fools who are now the public face of conservatism (Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Erick Son of Erick) are turning more and more of the American public off with their Neanderthal opinions. These people represent the past, and an ugly past that most of America is eager to move on from.
I don't think the GOP can recover. If I were to envision a scenario it would be by the GOP finding a LEADER who is credible, not a wild-eyed asshole, not a liar and a crank and a fraud, and that leader needs to pull them back from the precipice by stopping the purity purges, pragmatically planning strategy, and moving the party back into the mainstream.
Doing so would require them to sever ties with FOX news and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, to start taking the job of governing seriously, and to start taking the conversation seriously. I don't think the GOP has thought seriously about governing in decades. They don't have a framework for doing so.
They also need to stop picking zombies from the Heritage Foundation or any other think-tank to be their back-bench team. In fact, they need to stop funding those think tanks and start developing a living philosophy based on what their constituents tell them.
If the don't do any of these things then they are going to vanish into the political wilderness. The Tea Party is going to ruin their chances at making any gains this fall, and there's a very good chance they won't come back from that for decades.
I think the other most likely outcome of this will be that as the Republicans decay into irrelevance, a new party will move in to fill that vacuum. But my prediction is that party will be a LEFT-leaning party, and here's why: the Republican party can't do grassroots activism at all. They can fake it but it's not real, it's not coming from a community or a genuine need. It's made up in think tanks and extremist churches and enclaves, and is not an expression of "we the people." Republicans are some of the most poorly-informed people on the planet who aren't living in grass huts, so how they could organize a third party around anything but a vague fog of celebrity like Sarah Palin is beyond me. These folks want their "country" back but they don't know what's wrong with it like it is. Nor do they have a vision for what it should be that isn't drawn from a 1950's sitcom. Basically they're a bunch of bitter old people who want their youth back, as far as I can tell.
So I think as they decay the Democratic Party may actually lurch to the right MORE, and sane and pragmatic conservatives will flock to it as a liberal 3rd party moves into the gap created FROM THE LEFT as the Democrats move to the right.
Progrssivism will come from THAT party.
Progressives
One of the reasons I'm writing this diary is to talk about what I think is going on with the progressive movement, why I think it needs to breathe freely on its own, why I am actually being driven politically to the middle (which I never thought would happen to me -- scratch me and you discover a near-communist mentality that feels like almost all of our economy would be better off in public hands), and why I am leaving this site.
The brouhaha that is going on over the Obama health plan has been a source of near-constant stress to me for most of the year. I am very glad it is over with, and to me it represents an establishment of principle: government WILL regulate healthcare. We may have thought we were fighting over a health bill but the real conversation in this country was, "Will government be empowered to regulate healthcare?"
The answer is YES. The bill we have is a compromise forced on us by decades of industry capture of our Congress. I am not pleased as punch with it but it is a step in the right direction.
And I'm just done with reading the continuous disparaging comments made at Obama for getting done as much as could be done. I'm not interested in having juvenile arguments about how Obama should have done this or done that because the fact is, he is President and I am not. I can see pretty clearly how clubby the Senate and House are, so it's hard to judge what the first real progressive in the Oval Office in 30 years has to deal with just to get a bill to the table. Obama chose a strategy that guaranteed that the ONE point that needed to be made would get made: government SHALL regulate healthcare.
The rest is details that will be getting hammered out for years. But the public is done with the notion that the "Free market" can fix healthcare and we've now ensconced that in law.
And the Left is hacking Obama to pieces over it. I just don't see the point in having these conversations with people who refuse to understand the makeup of the Senate or the magnitude of just getting our national discussion turned around to accepting government regulation of healthcare. We have been trying for a CENTURY folks. A baby step is so much better than no step at all.
I think what is going to happen next is all too predictable. The far left (a goodly chunk of the "base") is going to peel away from the Democrats and form that party I talked about above. I won't be a member of that party because I want to be part of the real conversation.
What I see the "base" doing is basically acting very childishly. It is like when I used to take my 6-year old daughter to the store to run errands. She would constantly ask if I would buy something for her, until I shut her down by explaining that Daddy didn't have money for all those things in the store. This is the problem Obama had: he had political capital enough to make this one change. That was the change that the political environment in DC would allow him to make. It would have been great to punitively dismantle the health insurance industry but that is not the political environment we have. And I still trust Obama's long game enough to know that we are NOT done with this issue, and by no means is it going to just stop here.
But like small children the Firebaggers continue to hack into Obama for his imagined sell-outism, railing against him because he couldn't afford to buy the biggest shiniest toy in the store.
I have no trouble associating these folks with the Teabaggers because I see very much the same mentality in them that views the opinions of the rest of America with condescension and dismissal. Teabaggers think America should be a white-bread clone of their youth in the 1950's. Firebaggers think it should be a clone of their Utopia from the future. Neither party gives a shit what those of us in the rest of the country thinks or if they address it at all it as if we aren't really in a Democracy.
Conservatives were handed a big sack of fail with the HCR bill because they refused to negotiate, refused to compromise, refused to accept that SOMETHING was going to have to change. And firebaggers have been handed the same sack of fail. Unwilling to negotiate, unwilling to compromise, they have stamped their little feet and insisted on a version of events that is unalterable in their minds but has nothing to do with reality.
I registered Democratic for the first time last year when I moved. I have been Independent for a very long time, but I want some say in what my party does. I look forward to injecting my far-left views into the discussion through my primary votes, but I don't expect the Democrats to lurch to the left anytime soon.
Instead, this new party will appear after the GOP has their final Ringling Brothers/Barnum & Bailey circus show freakout around 2012. That is when the GOP will be utterly destroyed because I am almost positive they're gonna pick Palin as their candidate. Nobody else is going to work for them. And Palin will make a laughingstock of their party and destroy it. If it's not her, it will be someone equally clowntastic. At the same time, it is my sincere hope that a far-left party will arise to fill the vacuum. That far-left party will act as a pendulum to drag the Democrats to the left in order to meet the nation's real center. And those of us who remain will all be conservatives, suddenly.
Which is weird. But the pendulum has swung. I have waited for it to swing my entire adult life and it is clearly now happening, and it is time for me to concentrate on myself, on being me, on solving the problems in my personal life that have gone unsolved for far too long.
So, farewell, Daily Kos. I shan't be back.