The Incredible Shrinking Party
Normally this spaced is reserved for local and state matters, but every once in a while I get a bug in my craw to write about national matters. Today that bug is the national Republican Party.
I recently looked at some polling data and found that 28-percent of the population identifies themselves as Republicans, but 34-percent believe in UFOs. A bit of a non-sequitur, maybe, but it doesn’t bode your national aspirations very well when more people tend to believe there is more of a chance of life in outer space than there is in your national political party.
The sad part of all this is that the problem is mostly self-inflicted. When the GOP had power they abused it by spending too much. When they tried to retain power (i.e. John McCain) they ran the worse campaign I have ever seen. And now, instead of trying to grow the party past the white, rural, southern-west, male stage, they just seem hellbent on becoming even more irrelevant.
If you take the case of Republican-turned-Democrat Arlan Specter of Pennsylvania, you’ll see in a lot of blog comments “good riddance” and “he was a traitor.” Now there is talk that former PA Governor Tom Ridge may try to challenge Specter next year. I seriously wonder if Ridge, who is pro-choice, could get past the one track anti-abortion crowd. Instead of doing real soul searching, zealots are more comfortable with calling other Republicans RINOs (Republican In Name Only). By the way, one of the last places you want to be is in front of a charging RINO.
A handful of Republicans have seen the light and have realized that social, wedge issues alone aren’t going to get you elected into a governing majority. For one thing, the population trends don’t favor it. Twenty-five percent of the population is under the age of 21, and younger people tend to be more tolerate of a lot of things and have a live-and-let-live attitude about life. Abortion is never going to be outlawed in this country. And the Hispanic population is the fastest growing group in the country, so the harsh and in my opinion borderline racist, anti-immigration rhetoric isn’t winning many amigos either.
Hopefully, a majority of the National GOP will see the light and get with the program. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels gets it. I have found this country tends to function best with a healthy two-party system. It doesn’t help when one of those parties becomes so small that they are practically invisible.
And before I forget, can we drop the “Obama is a socialist” rhetoric. When you have a President with a 67-percent approval rating the only people who are going to listen to you are the other 23-percent who don’t like the job he’s doing.
