Much has been written here and elsewhere about the need for the Republican Party to renew itself and become more competitive in national politics. It'll be a tough road in that the electorate is getting less white, less rural, less Christian — in short, less demographically Republican.
I thought I'd try to do a little research on what's being said about the GOP, including what the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself is saying, in an effort to figure out what the GOP can do to re-establish itself as a competitive political alternative.
Here are statements made by leading members of the party, the RNC itself, or analysis published in national media...
-- John McCain's campaign manager recently described his party as basically extinct on the West Coast, nearly extinct in the Northeast and endangered in the Mountain West and Southwest.
-- "(The GOP espouses) extremely conservative ideas tarred by association with the unpopular George W. Bush, who helped downsize the party to its extremely conservative base. A hard-right agenda of slashing taxes for the investor class, protecting marriage from gays, blocking universal health insurance, dogmatically defending the pro-life thesis in the most fundamental religious way, and extolling the glories of waterboarding produces terrific ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but it's not a majority agenda." (TIME magazine)
-- FDR's New Deal made the Depression worse, carbon emissions don't really hurt the environment and tax cuts actually boost revenues — even though the vast majority of historians, scientists and economists disagree. (unknown national coumnist)
-- "We're excluding the young, minorities, environmentalists, pro-choice — the list goes on," says Olympia Snowe of Maine.
-- "The far right wing has highjacked the Republican party." (Senator Arlen Specter)
-- 200,000 Republicans have re-registered as Democrats in the past year. (Philadelphia
Enquirer)
-- "(The GOP) is starting to look like the Federalists of the early 19th century: an embittered, over-the-top, out-of-touch regional party en route to extinction, doubling down on dogma the electorate has already rejected." (TIME)
-- The RNC published an alternative to President Obama's proposed budget in early April. John Boehner, the House minority leader, presented the alternative budget at a press conference on April 1, but with no numbers attached. Many in the press thought it was simply an April Fool's joke. When finally published in a revised version, it included the following proposals...
- Make President Bush's tax cuts permanent while adding about $3 trillion in new tax cuts skewed toward the rich.
- Replace almost all the stimulus — including tax cuts for workers as well as spending on schools, infrastructure and clean energy — with a capital gains–tax holiday for investors.
- Replace Medicare with vouchers, and eliminate Medicaid in favor of block grants to the states.
- Freeze all government spending except defense and veterans' spending for five years at the 2008 level, examining programs for food safety, financial regulation, flu vaccines and many others for complete elimination.
- Means test Social Security payments.
-- Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he's so outraged by GOP overspending, he's quitting the party.
-- Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, a conservative who keeps a bust of Reagan on his desk, declared that the Reagan era is over. "Marginal tax rates are the lowest they've been in generations, and all our party can talk about is tax cuts," he said. "The people's desires have changed, but we're still stuck in our old issue set."
-- "To the average American who's struggling, we're in some other stratosphere. We're the party of Big Business and Big Oil and the rich. In the Bush era, the party routinely sided with corporate lobbyists — promoting tax breaks, subsidies and earmarks for well-wired industries — against ordinary taxpayers as well as basic principles of fiscal restraint." (Senator Olympia Snowe, R-ME)
-- "The Democrats talk about fiscal restraint, but they've got an atrocious record, and they've got even more atrocious fiscal plans," says Robert Bixby, executive director of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition, a government finance watchdog group.
-- RNC chairman Michael Steele said on recent a TV appearance, that there's "absolutely no reason, none, to trust our word or our actions." He actually went on to say that Republicans had proclaimed that President Clinton's tax hikes would destroy the economy, that GOP rule would mean smaller government, that Bush's tax cuts would usher in a new era of prosperity, none of which has proven accurate.
-- John Boehner, the House minority leader says it's "comical" to think carbon dioxide could be harmful, and RNC chairman Steele says the earth is cooling, not warming.
-- Only five states currently have more registered Republicans than Democrats. (CNN)
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I think everyone wants our government to be run by a two-party system--that the electorate be given the clear choice between candidates and parties with well-enunciated and believable core values. I know I sure do. But we don't have that now, and that condition doesn't seem to be on the horizon. You can't have a center-right coalition when you've said good riddance to the center. The GOP has little chance of winning elections if by it's dogma, it turns away anyone with thoughts different from it's ultra-conservative base. The continued decline those that call themselves Republicans seems assured. The chance that Republican candidates can win on a national basis is becoming less and less probable.
How do the Republicans return to a position where they have a reasonable chance at getting 50% of the vote plus 1? How do we return our democracy to a system with a legitimate two-party choice?
If you want to read a disturbing (to Republicans anyway) analysis of the state of the GOP, read the cover article from a recent issue of TIME at
http://www.time.com/time/politics/ar...896588,00.html