Blog For Arizona

Michael: GOP doesn't need 'The Hammer'... They need 'A Plumber'

Perhaps it just wishful thinking on my part, but it certainly seems that the GOP has brought itself to an unfavorable tipping point. Unable to shed the offensively juvenile protest politics of a minority faction of their party, the party's agenda has been consumed in the popular mind by a succession of unproductive symbolic issues that fail to move America forward.

Of course, they still hold a majority in Congress, so they have been able to deliver the bacon to key narrow interests, such as the consumer credit industry's shiny new bankruptcy law and a few other key pieces of legislation that sacrifice the public interest at the behest of wealthy vested interests. Most importantly they been able pass a budget that Democrats weren't able to lay a finger on. When Americans learn that far from reducing the deficit, this budget expands it by over 600 billion a year for the next 5 years, and gets much worse from there, what will happen in the 2006 elections? The budget also alienates key GOP constitutencies, especially the elderly, with some of it's 'austerity' measures.

The Democrats haven't been very effective, save for some of Reid's strategic maneuvering in the Senate, but I'm begining to think that the GOP has done more to wound itself, especially among moderates in their own party, than Democrats could ever do. The fanatical intensity of the GOP's ideology, which has supposedly made them into a 'party of ideas', may prove their undoing as many American discover that they don't like those ideas at all.

Democrats may be unfocused, but at least they aren't insane.

posted by Michael Bryan @ 4/30/2005 09:59:00 AM