GOP Primary: The Beginning Of The End Of The Republican Party

The current crop of Republican presidential candidates are simply too sad to make fun of. They attack each other over issues or topics that the general public cares little about, and in doing so make themselves look absolutely irrelevant. But the biggest issue with the Republican contenders is that they are all trying to appeal to enough of the party faithful to win the nomination, but none of them can seem to do it. Ultimately, I think this indicative of a huge shift in the Republican party that will see the organization shift and move towards a new direction after 2012.

National and state opinion polls reveal something interesting, giving an indication of the difficulty they are facing: it appears that no one can get more than 39% support in any one poll. Sometimes Romney has the plurality, sometimes one of the others — Sanctorum, Gingrich or Paul — has the plurality, but no one ever seems to win a majority of support.

This shifting plurality indicates to me (it may indicate something differently to you) that the Republican faithful just are not satisfied with any one of these gentlemen. The diverse nature of each of the candidates also reflects the ideological fractures within the party that are causing this uncertainty. I’m sure that once the primary season is over, the faithful will come together and unite behind their party’s candidate, although there is chisme out there indicating that at least one of the candidates may run as an independent if he does not win the party’s nomination.

Nevertheless, a look at each candidate reveals the great differences dividing the party.

• Rick Santorum — whose public pronouncements against gays, contraception, Islam, non-evangelical Christians and President Obama’s theology — has set himself up to appeal to a very narrow group of voters within the Republican Party and may prove to be unelectable generally.
• Newt Gingrich, who has not met a personal scandal he hasn’t liked, appeals to anyone who can see past his scandals and does not appeal to many folks outside of his home state of Georgia.
• Ron Paul simply is, as I have said before, in the wrong party! Congressman Paul is a Libertarian and ran under that banner a number of times before. His position on personal freedoms is enough to scare away a large number of Republican voters who believe in regulating one’s private life or believe in Social Security because his ideal world would be one of no government at all!

And, then we have the presumed nominee who can’t seem to win a primary but he is still the anointed one — because, I guess, he has good hair, he’s relatively tall, and possessed of a square jaw. The only problem is that Mitt Romney can’t seem to behave like the “average Joe,” the “normal guy,” “Mr. Everyman.” He tries to act like one of the average day-to-day voters, but every time he tries, he comes across as the rich elite person he really is. I particularly liked him trying to indicate that he was a hunter, except by the time he finished indicating that he hunted small varmints like rodents rather than large animals like deer, he ended up looking and sounding like a patrician trying to excuse himself from hunting.

I just don’t know. Sometimes I think that the candidates in the Republican party primary are only going through the motions trying to seek a sacrificial lamb to offer up on the high altar of the 2012 election, because whoever ends up facing the president will probably do so poorly it will be the end of his political career. I see only one thing positive coming out of the primary, and that is that, by the time the smoke settles, the party faithful and leadership will have had the opportunity to restructure itself into a new party.

Right now the chaos surrounding the primary is really a reflection of the infighting and fighting among the various disparate factions that make up the Republican party. The Party of Reagan, Nixon, Goldwater and Rockefeller is dead. It will be interesting to see what the new party looks like and who will represent it in the future.