War within the GOP? Yes, please.
I’m sorry, but am I the only one that reads this and thinks, “Good!”
WASHINGTON – A Republican civil war is raging, with righter-than-thou conservatives dominating ever more primaries in a fight for the party’s soul. And the Democrats hope to benefit.
The latest examples of conservative insurgents’ clout came Tuesday at opposite ends of the country. In Florida, political newcomer Rick Scott beat longtime congressman and state Attorney General Bill McCollum for the GOP gubernatorial nomination. And in Alaska, tea party activists and Sarah Palin pushed Sen. Lisa Murkowski to the brink of defeat, depending on absentee ballot counts in her race against outsider Joe Miller.
The GOP is likely to survive its bitter intraparty battles in such states as Alaska and Utah, even if voters oust veteran senators in both. But tea party-backed candidates might be a godsend to desperate Democrats elsewhere — in Nevada, Florida and perhaps Kentucky, where the Democrats portray GOP nominees as too extreme for their states.
If Murkowski joins Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, as a victim of party activists who demand ideological purity, other Republicans are still likely to win in November, though Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would have to deal with more maverick members who are loathe to compromise. And the conservative insurgency is hardly all-powerful, as Sen. John McCain proved by easily winning renomination in Arizona despite a challenge from the right by J.D. Hayworth.
A few comments about this. First, political parties are supposed to stand for something. Granted, they exist ultimately to ensure that a majority of their members are represented, but the whole point is that there is supposed to be some sort of ideological common ground. Frankly, I think that a large reason for the surge in the Tea Party movement has been a general frustration with the “moderates” in both parties. Listen, if you are always standing in the middle of the road, it means you’re not standing for anything at all.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I think that what the electorate is clamoring for is more partisanship, not less. The Republican Party is scared to death that ideological conservatives are going to take over their party while the Democrats are scared of the same thing from the left (as evidenced by Robert Gibbs’ recent statements). It is stories like these that expose the real lie of Washington politics for both parties: it’s all about power.
Neither party wants to display any kind of real principle because that might cause someone to disagree with them. If enough people disagree with your side, you get voted out of power. So rather than stick to your principles and actually try to solve problems the way that you think they need to be solved, you pander and hide your true colors to do what is necessary to get elected.
Democrats have been in complete control for almost 2 whole years, and they’ve governed like true Democrats. And look how angry the people are. Republicans are too damn stupid to figure out that the people want conservatives in charge right now. People are emphatically rejecting the liberal agenda of the Democrat Party. Why are Republicans so afraid to present them with a real, conservative agenda? You know, the kind of agenda that the Republican Party is supposed to believe in?
Until the Republican Party gets wise to the fact that our principles are popular and will allow us to win elections, particularly in the face of such awful failures of liberalism, there will always be a civil war within the party. As there should be.
