In Wednesday's LATimes, Nick Gillespie writes yet another lament of how the Republican party has lost its way since the halcyon Goldwater days. There are actually a couple Republicans left out there who have NOT BEEN PAYING ATTENTION.
Gillespie urges the GOP to remember that "government [does] not belong either in your boardroom or your bedroom..., [o]r, as Craig might add, in your bathroom". Precious, but irrelevant. Karl Rove rewrote the playbook a decade ago, and Gillespie is whistling past the graveyard if he thinks otherwise.
Every so often, a GOPer comes out of the woodwork to try to remind the party about Barry Goldwater's old-timey libertarian values and urge present-day Republicans to return to principle. In fact, this was quite the meme after the 2006 Dem Congressional takeover.
It's being trotted out now to excuse Larry Craig's Minneapolis guilty plea, in Nick Gillespie's op-ed apology for Craig, quoting Goldwater as saying "you don't have to be straight" to serve, "you just have to shoot straight".
By all accounts, Larry Craig was an uber-straight shooter. The LATimes describes him as "a leading voice on issues affecting the West" . So, as far as we can tell, Idaho got a leading Western-issues voice, as well as a reliable anti-gay vote. While this is really all Idaho voters bargained for, there are some in the Republican party who now want Craig's head on a silver platter. His offense? Not that he isn't "principled enough", but that he is gay.
And, let's please remember that being gay is the ultimate mortal sin for a GOPer. Any Goldwater principle can be ignored, but being gay is death.
Why? Because the list of "principles" was repopulated by Karl Rove's politics. It is no longer possible to win a majority of the vote with Goldwater's old-timey principles. More voters agree with the progressive/Democratic platform on those issues. Rove saw this and devised a new set of principles to cobble a majority for the GOP. Anti-gay is probably number 1 on the list, racism number 2, and they really don't need much else. In fairness to the naive swing voters, "family values" probably ties for number 2. When the GOP can fashion a message tearing down the Dems for violating either number 1 or 2, they win. In 2006, they couldn't do that. It has nothing to do with old-fashioned conservative principles.