Posted by
flagwaver on Friday, November 05, 2010 9:02:51 AM
“This is the GOP’s last chance.” I have heard that phrase or some variation so much in the last two days that I am already sick of it. “If the GOP screws this up, they will go the way of the Whigs.” Really? After establishing itself since the Civil War era one more bad governing cycle will see the GOP assigned to the dustbin of American political history? Does anyone really believe that, or is it just the new thing to say to sound politically aware?
Because if people actually believe that, it may be one of the dumbest things I have ever heard intelligent people say. I no more believe that the GOP will cease to exist than I believe the moon is made of green cheese!
I understand the sentiment and the emotion of saying things of this nature, and I suppose that it is being said to serve as a warning to the GOP to legislate according to the will of the people. I get that. What I don’t get is this notion that if every member of the GOP doesn’t vote every way that we want on every issue, then we must overthrow the GOP. That sounds all well and good, but if that were ever tried, where would the conservatives go? The Libertarians? The Constitution Party? A wholly new Tea Party? And if such a move were tried, do we actually believe that it would be ultimately successful?
I say that we reject such a course of action and stay the course that has just plotted during this election season, because it is working. Not every Republican who has served in the Congress is a bad guy or girl; there are people like Jim DeMint and Michelle Bachman that the conservative grassroots can rally around. And the simple truth of the matter is that we need people with political experience and connections in order to be a political success. People like Richard Armey are invaluable to the conservative resurgence that we are seeing, because they have an insider’s knowledge of how to work the system that is needed, because the current system is not changing overnight.
Again, I say that we have plotted a course that can bear even more fruit if we continue to follow the path we have set down. We don’t need to overthrow the GOP; we need to continue to take it back from those who have happily watched as it drifted left over the years. We need to commit to continuing to nominate conservatives in the primaries; we need to continue to support them in the general elections; we need to step up efforts at wresting back control of the Party at the local and state levels and returning it to its conservative roots.
The current attitude being bandied about just seems counterproductive to me, because it would punish the entirety of the members for our prolonged failures as an electorate. We have always had the ability to do what we did this week, but we never stepped up en masse and attempted to do anything about the leftward drift in the GOP. Instead we stood by and watched the Party become something that we hardly recognized, often described as Democrat-Lite. We watched the GOP give us senators like Linc Chafee, Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins. We accepted presidential nominees like Bob Dole and John McCain, and we voted for them out of a sense of loyalty to the Party and because we felt they were the lesser of two evils (SCDSers excluded). Now we want to start threatening the GOP if they don’t correct all the wrongs that we watched accrue over more than two decades in less than two years? That would be like a parent allowing a child to run wild, with no attempts at discipline for 14 years to suddenly decide that after the child turned 15 it had one week to shape up, or the kid is getting sent to military school. It ain’t the kid’s fault that mommy and daddy never reined him in, so it’s not exactly fair to the kid for mommy and daddy to suddenly demand an immediate change in behavior with zero tolerance for slip-ups!
Let’s have a little patience with the new GOP Congress members, and put the entrenched members on notice that if they drop the ball they can go the way of Bob Bennett, Charlie Crist, and Mike Castle. We have started to take back the levers of power in the GOP and our voice is not only being heard, but heeded. Let’s not throw away the megaphone of an established Party apparatus without first making full use of it.