The cluetrain left the station some time ago

There are many ways to measure how screwed Republicans are after the last election.

You can look at the avalanche of swing states that broke big for Barack. You can look at the demographic shifts that left McCain-Palin with decisive wins only among voters over age 60 and towns with populations under 50,000. Or you can look at my emergency telegram from John McCain.

For the uninitiated—and that would be anyone under 60—telegrams were the instant-message of the horse and buggy era, the Internet boom of the 1850s.

Telegrams don’t exist any more. Western Union sent its last telegram without much fanfare in 2006, after modern technology (beginning with the telephone) left it nothing more than a sentimental novelty.

But nostalgia is apparently alive and well at the RNC. They’ve been sending these same fundraising letters since at least the 1970s, when a portion of the population could still equate “telegram” with “urgent.”

Technology Gap - John Avlon @ The Daily Beast

Pricelessly (and tellingly) a source interviewed for this article goes on to describe McCain's election strategy as "...trying to scare the Abe Simpson vote."

And: on Meetup.com, McCain was not only comprehensively outdone by Obama, but in sheer numbers, by Bob Barr!

Into the wilderness

Rod Dreher on the future of the GOP:

...[T]he Obama Democrats' greatest ally will almost certainly be the addled Republican Party, which will be wandering around for some time like a google-eyed Wile E. Coyote after he's had an anvil dropped on his head. The recriminations on the right will make the Night of the Long Knives look like a knitting-needle ticklefest.

The civil war among conservatives will be between an enraged rump of die-hard knotheads and a disparate group of reformers. The knotheads believe that Obama's victory came thanks to the treason of some conservative intellectual elites and McCain's failure to be more like Reagan, whatever that means 20 years after the Gipper left the White House. Sarah Palin is the standard-bearer for the talk-radio faction within knotheadism, and Mitt Romney will emerge as the GOP establishment's last stand.

The reformers — well, they believe a lot of things, but most of all they believe that the GOP is intellectually exhausted and has to chart a new path to remain politically viable. But where should the party go? There is no clear answer — especially because in many ways the Bush presidency was supposed to be the center-right evolution away from doctrinaire Reaganism. But at least this bunch is asking hard questions instead of retreating into a self-justifying revanchism. Unfortunately, if the Tory party's example is any indication of the GOP's future, it will be years before the reformers find their David Cameron.

GOP Viewpoint: We Got The Thumping We Deserve (Rod Dreher @ NPR)

They must be going through a lot of litmus paper

Ross Douthat, writing a guest op-ed in the New York Times:

After being denounced as a tax-and-spender and a pro-life liberal, Mr. Huckabee won four primaries in four Republican strongholds, including Alabama and Georgia. Mr. McCain split the frequent-churchgoer vote with Mr. Romney, and eclipsed him among evangelical Christians, even though the religious-conservative poobah James Dobson has promised to sit out the November election if Mr. McCain becomes the Republican nominee.

The failure of conservative voters to fall in line behind Mr. Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, among others, reflects a deeper problem for the movement’s leadership. With their inflexibility, grudge-holding and eagerness to evict heretics rather than seek converts, too many of conservatism’s leaders sound like the custodians of a dwindling religious denomination or a politically correct English department at a fading liberal-arts college.

Or like yesterday’s Democratic Party. The tribunes of the American right have fallen into the same bad habits that doomed their liberal rivals to years of political failure.

The Republican Reformation (New York Times, 10 February 2008)

Response to a fundraising letter

Representative Tom Cole
Chairman, National Republican Congressional Committee
320 First Street SE
Washington, DC 20003

Representative Cole:

I recently received (and filled out) the “Ask America 2007 Nationwide Policy Survey,” and wished to amplify a few of the thoughts I expressed therein.

I’ve been a Republican all of my adult life. My parents were such true believers that they actually named me after Barry Goldwater. I’ve been politically active, donating money to, raising money for, and sometimes volunteering for Republican candidates at the local, state and Federal level.

I am a small-government conservative who is pro-business and pro-civil rights, the sort of person who used to form the backbone of the GOP.

And I don’t recognize what used to be my party any longer.

In 2006, after six years of relentless Bush administration incompetence, I had enough, and changed my party registration to “Independent.” (I certainly couldn’t bring myself to register as a Democrat, but just as clearly, I couldn’t remain a Republican.)

Six years of pervasive managerial ineptitude, calculated fiscal irresponsibility, egregious foreign policy ignorance, relentless demagoguery on unimportant issues, a blockheaded and idiotic denial of science that would do any Luddite proud, and a frightening and apparent disregard for civil rights at home and human rights abroad (as long as pandering excuses could be made under the imprimatur of “national security”)…

Enough.

As Alan Greenspan observed in his recent book, the Republican Party in recent years has traded principle for power, and as a result they now have—and deserve – neither.

So you might want to take me off your mailing list, as contacting me is just a waste of your money, and both your time and mine.

I’m not giving a dime, or lifting a finger, to help Republican candidates this year.


Sincerely,


Barry Campbell

None of the above

Wow. Not all that surprised, but, wow.

The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly a quarter of Republicans are unwilling to back top-tier hopefuls Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain or Mitt Romney, and no one candidate has emerged as the clear front-runner among Christian evangelicals. Such dissatisfaction underscores the volatility of the 2008 GOP nomination fight.

AP Poll: GOP pick is "none of the above" (AP via Yahoo News)

GOP rally cheer, early in the third quarter of 2007:

Who do you want?

SOMEBODY ELSE!

When do you want them?

REAL SOON!

Liberaltarians

The conservative movement--and, with it, the GOP--is in disarray. Specifically, the movement's "fusionist" alliance between traditionalists and libertarians appears, at long last, to be falling apart. To understand what's happening, look at the Democratic gains made in previously Republican strongholds on Election Day. In "Live Free or Die" New Hampshire, both House seats--as well as control of both houses of the state legislature--flipped from the GOP to the Democratic column. Out in the interior West, Jon Tester squeaked past Conrad Burns in the Montana Senate race, while other Democrats picked up a House seat in Colorado (along with the governorship) and two more in Arizona. These parts of the country are all known for their individualism and suspicion of officialdom--in short, for their libertarian sympathies.

Libertarian disaffection should come as no surprise. Despite the GOP's rhetorical commitment to limited government, the actual record of unified Republican rule in Washington has been an unmitigated disaster from a libertarian perspective: runaway federal spending at a clip unmatched since Lyndon Johnson; the creation of a massive new prescription-drug entitlement with hardly any thought as to how to pay for it; expansion of federal control over education through the No Child Left Behind Act; a big run-up in farm subsidies; extremist assertions of executive power under cover of fighting terrorism; and, to top it all off, an atrociously bungled war in Iraq...

...Here, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the rival ideologies of left and right are both pining for the '50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there.

(from "Liberaltarians," posted at The New Republic Online, December 4, 2006)

David Brooks: Thinning The Herd

David Brooks (behind the TimesDestruct firewall, I'm afraid) explains to Republicans, one more time, one big reason that they're going to take a pasting in a few weeks: they've been so busy pandering to The Base that they've alienated the moderate, "empiricist" (his term, not mine, but a good one) branch of the party.

[Republican moderates] are looking for orderly places to raise their children. They are what you might call antiparty empiricists. They distrust partisans and can’t imagine why anyone would be sick enough to base an identity on a political organization. They don’t expect much from government but a few competently delivered services, and they don’t like public officials who unnerve them.

The Republicans used to do well in these areas, but now it’s as if they are purposely trying to antagonize the married moms at the pseudo-New Urbanist outdoor cafes. The deficits alarm them. Tom DeLay was a perfectly designed Northeastern alienation machine. As insular Democrats know little about what life is like in flyover country, so insular Republicans know little about how people think in the suburban Northeast, where blue New York Times delivery bags dot the driveways each morn.

The big issue is Iraq, but the core problem with suburban voters is not the decision to go to war; it’s the White House’s reaction to the mess afterward. As Robert Lang, the superlative suburban specialist at Virginia Tech, notes, when people mess up a project in an office park, there are consequences. But Donald Rumsfeld never gets fired. Jerry Bremer and Tommy Franks get medals.

This is not how engineers and empirically minded managers behave. The people in these offices manage information for a living, and when they see Republicans denying obvious trends, or shutting out relevant data, they say to themselves, “Those people are not like me.” [emphasis added - bc]

Thinning The Herd - David Brooks, New York Times, October 22, 2006

By the way, don't you find it interesting that "The Base" is how "Al-Qaeda" is typically translated into English? I do.

NYT: Foley Case Upsets Gay Republicans’ Tough Balance

A key Republican Party strategy, pandering to social conservatives (especially the evangelical Religious Right) is creating a storm of ugly hypocrisy in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal.

Some gay Republican staffers on the Hill may have finally had enough.

Conservative blogs and Web sites pointed out that gay staff members played principal roles in investigating the Foley case, suggesting that the party was betrayed by gay men trying to hide misconduct by one of their own. In the meantime, a group of gay activists, angered by what they see as hypocrisy by gay Republicans, have begun circulating a document known as The List, a roster of gay Congressional staff members and their Republican bosses.

“You can see where it would be easy for some people to blame gays for something that might bring down the party in Congress,” said Brian Bennett, a gay Republican political consultant. He was a longtime chief of staff to former Representative Robert K. Dornan, Republican of California, who regularly referred to gays as Sodomites.

“I’m just waiting for someone in a position of authority to make this a gay issue,” Mr. Bennett said of the Foley case.

The presence of homosexuals, particularly gay men, in crucial staff positions has been an enduring if largely hidden staple of Republican life for decades, and particularly in recent years. They have played decisive roles in passing legislation, running campaigns and advancing careers.

Known in some insider slang as the Velvet Mafia or the Pink Elephants, gay Republicans tend to be less open about their sexual orientation than their Democratic counterparts. Even though the G.O.P. fashions itself as “the party of Lincoln” and a promoter of tolerance, it is perceived as hostile by many gay men and lesbians. Republicans have promoted a “traditional values” agenda, while some conservatives have turned the “radical gay subculture” into a reliable campaign villain. And there are few visible role models in the party; Representative Jim Kolbe of Arizona is the only openly gay Republican in Congress.

Foley Case Upsets Gay Republicans’ Tough Balance - The New York Times