I think we all agree that the Republican party is in bad shape. It's leaderless (does Rush count? they're an awesome band but i wouldn't Consider them particularly conservative. Does Newt? Cute, but it's a small lizard like amphibian. Does Mitt? It's warm, but really you need two of them to be really useful) and seemingly hopelessly out of touch with the needs and desires of the electorate. To make matters worse, members of the party seem unable to stop going on television and saying things that are, to quote the late, great Oscar Wilde, totally f*$%ing insane. If this keeps up I believe most of us would agree they're setting themselves up for even more massive losses in 2010, and to be hammered in 2012. But what if this isn't the case?
Follow me over the fold.
I forsee a possibly devastating path the Republicans could take back to power, and possibly toward a large and lasting majority, and it terrifies me. With one simple act they can quickly and easily get the American people on their side, and in a decisive and potentially compelling way. What might this be? It's simpler than you think.
Overturn Bush Vs. Gore.
Bush Vs. Gore, the 2000 Supreme Court ruling awarding George W. Bush the presidency, is already controvercial, and should the republican mainstream throw their support behind it, and todays Supreme Court is MUCH more Republican friendly than it was nine years ago, so once the overturning of the case becomes the mainstream position of the conservative movement, with the number of left/liberals already on record as against the ruling, I can't imagine it'd be long before it was overturn. But how, I imagine you ask, would overturning Bush Vs. Gore help the Republicans win in 2010? Well, dear readers, that's as simple as pie.
They could run against President Gore's record.
Think about it. With Al Gore retroactively made president from 2001 to 2008, the Repub's would have a wealth of issues and abuses to run against, an enormous number of unpopular positions, failures and policies proven to be unpopular with the american people that they, retroactively removed from a Democratic White House for 18 years, could run against.
President Gore took more days off during his 2 term presidency than any president in history. All of them. He took every day off. Every single one.
During President Gore's 2 terms, enormous budget surpluses turned into the biggest deficeit in the nations history, to provide tax cuts for the wealthiest americans in spite of the fact that the country was fighting two wars.
Speaking of wars, Iraq was unnessessary and it began under false pretenses. President Gore not only failed to prevent this war, but he failed to prevent, in the name of the war on terror, torture, waterboarding, Guantanimo and all the related abuses from being performed upon people who were never formally accused of any crimes.
President Gore's response to Katrina was, to say the very barest minimum, insufficient.
For all President Gore's talk about fighting global warming, he did nowhere near enough with the bully pulpet the Presidency provides to actually attempt to push through concrete legislation to seriously reduce greenhouse emmisions.
....and these are just the least controvercial of the failures of a retroactive Gore presidency, should Bush Vs. Gore be overturned. Now, the Democrats in responce would likely, and perhaps rightly, argue that it's not President Gore they're running against, and that Obama is making real strides toward reversing some of retroactive President Gore's worst abuses. But would it be enough? It's one thing to say Obama is working to reverse the damage done by the Bush recession, and that we need to show him patience, but it's another thing entirely when the recession retroactively becomes the fault of a retroactively Supreme Court appointed President Gore! And, by running against both the abuses and failures of the Gore administration (the policies of which a wild majority of americans are currently against) and claiming Obama's progress to fix these abuses is "too little, too late" they may well be on their way to making serious gains in the 2010 midterms.
Now, fortunately the Republicans haven't thought of this. They've been too busy talking about how they have to attract latino and woman voters and attacking a latino woman who's been nominated to the Supreme Court to focus on much else, but we have to be vigilant. Because if they ever were to focus on this issue and overturn Bush Vs. Gore we could be in serious electoral trouble.