Republican Roulette
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The nonstop appearances before the CPAC conference of presidential candidates past and present makes the Republican Party look like a roulette wheel in a casino. Cruz, Paul, Perry, Ryan, Christie, Rubio, Jindal, Huckabee, Carson, Santorum, Palin. The party seems to believe that if it spins the wheel often enough, lady luck will deliver a winning candidate. Sen. Rand Paul hit the CPAC jackpot for the second year in a row, winning the attendees' straw vote, though not 10 people can agree on what he stands for. Now there's a lucky fella.
An obligatory conceit of all the players at the Republican presidential table is to assert what "we" stand for. We? I believe that's "me."
It's obvious by now that most of these nominally Republican presidential candidates are political free agents for whom the party is largely a legal necessity. The eventual campaign has about as much attachment to the institutional Republican Party as Carmelo Anthony does to the New York Knicks.
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Watching Republicans run for the presidency is an exhausting crapshoot. When election day arrives, there's no there there. The voters who provide the margin of victory never get the Republican Party and its candidate into focus. There's a hodgepodge of fine "principles," but what is your party actually going to do if we let you run the country?
(snip)
One imagines GOP presidential dreamers spending weekends sifting polls, phrases, principles and personal obsessions to shape a unique campaign message. Great. But how much greater it would be if just once they gave voters a coherent, consistent Republican message connected to something real. The Entitlement State isn't a bumper sticker. It is a multi-trillion-dollar edifice of laws meticulously expanded for decades by Democrats in Congress. The Great Society wasn't a speech. Lyndon Johnson politicked it into existence. Republicans once did this, too. The Reagan tax cut of 1986 didn't pass because the Gipper gave grand speeches. It took years of legislative politicking to transform his ideas into law.
Neither achievement happened without broad party agreement about the goal. Republicans obviously are not allergic to policy seriousness, notably in the states. The core of Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp's tax reform—simplification and rate reduction—should be a common endpoint. But because the party hardly ever displays a critical mass around an idea that could become law, voters (and donors) never quite figure out what "GOP" stands for.
Roulette's fun. But ultimately it's just wheel-spinning.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304185104579435043031980808
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Love it!
= new reply since forum marked as read
Pretty much sums up the Republican Party.
