Visual source: Newseum
Doyle McManus:
At this point, the GOP looks more like a collection of warring tribes than a cohesive political force. Fiscal conservatives don't have much use for social conservatives. Libertarians and moderates don't get along with either camp. "We are factionalized now as a party," lamented Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). "We have to come together."
The long and relentlessly negative campaign is making all the GOP candidates less likable to independent voters, who will probably determine the outcome of this fall's general election.
Ben Adler:
But it’s unusual, even bizarre, how it is virtually assumed that the Republican nominee this year will ask Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) to be his running mate. Candidates are usually coy about whom they might put on their ticket, but in a recent debate in Florida Newt Gingrich openly said he has Rubio in mind. He has consistently led the Intrade market for the Republican vice-presidential nomination for months. [...] And what is it that he embodies? Most prominently it is the false hope that the Republican Party can win over Latino voters. [...]
It’s all kind of sad. They so earnestly chase after Latino voters, when they won’t have a chance of winning them. The Republican Party’s embrace of harsh language and policies toward undocumented immigrants does not help. Nor does their record of favoring the interests of the wealthy over everyone else.
And Republicans seem completely unaware of the diversity of the Latino community. Rubio is Cuban-American. Politically, that does not mean he has anything more in common with Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, or Mexicans. Cuban-Americans are much more Republican and conservative than other Latino immigrant groups.
The New York Times:
Even in the ultrapolarized atmosphere of Capitol Hill, it should be possible to secure broad bipartisan agreement on reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, the 1994 law at the center of the nation’s efforts to combat domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking.[...] Yet not a single Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted in favor last week when the committee approved a well-crafted reauthorization bill introduced by its chairman, Senator Patrick Leahy, and Senator Michael Crapo, a Republican of Idaho, who is not on the committee. [...]
Mustering the 60 votes needed to get the bill through the full Senate will not be easy, even though previous reauthorizations were approved by unanimous consent. Recalcitrant Republicans should be made to explain to voters why they refuse to get behind the federal fight against domestic violence and sexual assaults.
Jack Linden:
If the only goal of the Republican Party is to make sure that the president is either a one-term president or that he fails, what does this say about the party? Is the party so concentrated on that objective that they cannot help America and Americans get out of the economic situation we are now in? Most of the verbiage that they are spouting does nothing to answer the questions facing Americans now and in the immediate future.
We need specifics if we are to truly evaluate their candidacies. We need to know what they are for, not always for what they are against. Is it fair to the American electorate to ask them to vote against rather than for? Americans need specifics of how the candidates would govern if elected, not generalizations about what they are against.
Perhaps in the coming months, the Republican primaries will be about specifics and not about making President Obama a one term president. Perhaps it might be that the candidates will want America and Americans to win and not just the Republican Party.
Richard Stevenson:
If Mr. Obama was naïve back in 2008, as many Republicans asserted at the time, he is a lot less so now. If he aspired to post-partisanship when he took the oath of office, as many of his admirers hoped, he is much more openly combative now. If he thought then that he could change how Washington works – a proposition viewed skeptically, to say the least, by many experienced people in both parties — he has opted, for now, to play by its existing rules.
If circumstances and his own political skill allowed him to run in 2008 as something other than an ordinary politician, this time around he faces all the challenges, and carries much of the baggage, of any other standard-issue Democrat. To the degree that he and his team ever fully bought into the image they created of him as a transformational figure, it has given way to a practical focus on holding together a center-left coalition that can get them to 270 electoral votes exactly 270 days from today.