This is absolutely worth a read…
“Their rigidity is killing them. It’s either holy purity, or you are anathema,” Tom Korologos, a premier Republican lobbyist and the ambassador to Belgium under George W. Bush, said in a phone interview. “Too many ideologues have come in. You don’t win by what they are doing.”
A number of prominent figures in the Republican Party share this harsh view. Jeb Bush warned last year that both Ronald Reagan and his own father would have a “hard time” fitting into the contemporary Republican Party, which he described as dominated by “an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement.”
A few months ago, Bush, who is expected to run for the party’s nomination in 2016, took it up a notch. At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in March, Bush declared:
All too often we’re associated with being anti-everything. Way too many people believe Republicans are anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-gay, anti-worker, and the list goes on and on and on. Many voters are simply unwilling to choose our candidates, even though they share our core beliefs, because those voters feel unloved, unwanted and unwelcome in our party.
Two months later, Bob Dole– the Republican presidential nominee in 1996 and a 35-year veteran of the House and Senate– was asked on Fox News Sunday: “Could people like Bob Dole, even Ronald Reagan, make it in today’s Republican Party?”
I doubt it. Reagan wouldn’t have made it. Certainly Nixon wouldn’t have made it– because he had ideas.
Dole added, “They ought to put a sign on the national committee door that says, ‘Closed for repairs.’”
As early as September 2011, Mike Lofgren, a staff member for 16 years on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees, wrote on the liberal Web site TruthOut:
The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.
Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and one of the original architects of the bomb-throwing right, jumped ship seven months ago:
The conservative movement– a bulwark of American strength for the last several decades– is in deep disarray. Reading about some conservative organizations and Republican campaigns these days, one is reminded of Eric Hoffer’s remark, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” It may be that major parts of American conservatism have become such a racket that a kind of refounding of the movement as a cause is necessary.
I’ve long held that while Republican politicians continue to pander to the extreme right “tea party” base of their party, a base that’s not getting any bigger, the Republican Party will steadily diminish both in popularity and in its ability to win elections.
In a word? Amen.
No one should be fooled for one moment by Jeb Bush. He signed Stand Your Ground into law and his immigration comments are a joke. He’s a one per center who will sound moderate for votes. Trust me, he’s not.