The late great Republican Party

By Ron Beasley

My friend and former blogging partner at Middle Earth Journal, Jazz Shaw, made the New York Times yesterday.  That's the good news - the bad news is that put him in the cross hairs of über wingnut Ted Nugent. Bad rocker turned homicidal maniac Nugent declared that RINO Season Is Now Open earlier in the week.  Jazz, who left the Republican Party in 2004, responded with a post at his post MEJ venue, The Moderate Voice, with a sensible post.

While talking heads are dashing back and forth suggesting how to “fix” the Republican party, various solutions are being offered. These include suggestions as extreme as rounding up the RINOs and executing them. Most of the plans include a return to their Reagan roots of small government fiscal conservatism, which is a good plan but doesn’t speak to the real issue. Hand wringing over the fate of a party currently backed into a corner of the deep South should not focus on how to win more elections, but rather on finding a plan for America that solves real problems which Democrats are leaving on the table for them.

Item one on this agenda is the 800 pound gorilla of Social Security and Medicare. Frantic “anti-socialist” elements in the extreme fringe of the party who would see all Federal entitlement programs ended do not hold the answer, but a solution is still required. We have no need to scrap these programs, nor would America’s voters tolerate such a move, but they are still driving us toward a national economic crisis in the next 30 to 40 years which could dwarf the one currently dominating the news cycle. The Democrats have failed to field any serious proposals to fix this because the cure is seen as too painful for an entitlement minded electorate to face. But if the cure is phrased properly, people will be willing to recognize that a little pain up front is preferable to an avalanche of agony further down the line. Take the lead on these issues and you’ll start swinging some hearts and minds back in your direction.

Now while Jazz and I might not agree on "the cure" this is indeed the only way the Republican Party can recover.  But Jazz has some company in Nugent's cross hairs.  Christine Todd Whitman and Robert M. Bostock put themselves on the hit list today -

Free the GOP

The Party Won't Win Back the Middle as Long As It's Hostage to Social Fundamentalists

They recognize that the issues of the social conservatives are on the down side of demographic realities - the "pro-life, anti-black, homophobic population is shrinking through both death and enlightenment.  The wingnuts of course responded as one would expect.

Some advice to my friend Jazz - your Republican party is history.  The Frankenstein monster created by Lee Attwater and Karl Rove has taken charge of  the Republican Party and you are not going to get it back.  It is now a regional party.  The problem is there are very few people living in that region. 

Comments

[Kevin]

I'd heard about Nugent's rant via one of the writers on my blog. But I had no idea that he'd been responding to Jazz - whom I've been a fan of going back several blogs, including his gig before MEJ - the name of which escapes me at the moment.

Like Ron, I don't agree with Jazz's vision of "the cure." Returning to anything that Reagan left would be to remain in the problem rather than return to a pre-problem solution, IMHO. Mostly because the path's taken since Reagan by the GOP all trace directly back to Reagan. And I say that as a former Republican who left many years ago in part because of Iran/Contra.