Tuesday, November 04, 2008

The Broken Party

OK, I held my nose and voted for McCain. We've had a systemic problem with Republicanism for several years. The Republican party has demonstrated in the last two elections that it is broken. After the 2006 loss there was not enough done to fix the party. Why didn't the party leadership take a delivery from the clue train?

I'm not thinking we should kick anyone out of the party, but we've got to be smarter about who we're listening to. Ronald Reagan is dead. We need someone else who can speak articulately to small businessmen and libertarians and values voters without embarrassing the country-club set.

I think that we've seen country-club presidential candidates in both Bushes, Dole, and McCain. The civil war within the Republican Party is about to start. Mitt Romney strikes me as yet another country-club candidate. The bizarre whispers that Sarah Palin was a drag on the campaign or that she had "gone rogue" appear to have come from Romney stringers.

It is my earnest hope that Sarah Palin will emerge as the next leader of the Republican party. If not her, I'll look to another neo-Reagan like Bobby Jindal. I have a hard time believing that yet another country-club Republican can unite the party and assemble a winning coalition to reboot the Republican party.

I expect to see a lot more class-warfare in the next four years. Ronald Reagan effectively fought class-warfare because the guy from Dixon, IL positioned himself as the alternative to Rockefeller Republicanism. We'll need someone who isn't old money or married to it to lead us out of this Babylonian captivity. I don't think that person is Mitt Romney.

No comments: