The country needs a serious right-of-center party – one that has real ideas, one that can engage in a serious debate with the Democrats, one that has a sense of a larger national purpose beyond winning the next election, and one that can actually attract more Americans to its banner because it has earned their trust, not because it knows how to polarize.
Maybe Democrats should be happy that Republicans have been reduced to a lunatic fringe. But the lunatics still have their seat at the table, and someday they may be sitting at its head again. What then? (Source)
2010 will be an interesting test of the future viability of the GOP. The party not in the White House usually gains seats in the midterms, but it's important that the GOP not gain seats in 2010. If the GOP continues to lose seats, it should force the grownups in the Party to reassert themselves. But exactly who are those grownups? Pawlenty, Grassley, Coburn, Graham, Jindal, Romney, McCain, and Hatch? Considering their recent behavior, it's questionable whether even they can be considered grownups, but even if they are, do they have the clout to take the party back to a reasonable center right? I don't know. Apparently they don't think they do now; otherwise they'd act more like grownup and not cave to the extremists. But that could change after serious losses in 2010.
If the GOP loses more seats in 2010, it should send a signal to the Dems, one would hope, that Conservadems, like Konrad and Baucus, define the center right, not Republicans, and so the real center is further left. That's the kind of realignment that would more accurately represent the country's electorate and give us some hope of a return to sanity. One would hope.
The frightening prospect is that the GOP will actually regain some seats. It would seem unlikely. If only around 25% of Americans self-identify as Republicans now, centrist independents turned off by GOP extremism should swing more to the Dems except in the neo-Confederate districts in the South and in some other very red districts in the mountain west and rural north. One would think.
But I've learned never to underestimate the power of motivated, organized, and well-funded minorities, no matter how fringe they might seem in their mentality. As I wrote last week, this rightwing fringe differs from the left wing fringe of the seventies in that it has major media megaphones, it has the financial backing of the Corporate right, and it has clever people who know how to organize angry, frightened people to make a much larger impact than their numbers would warrant. The power and influence of the far right in this country should never be underestimated.
We'll learn a lot in 2010. The survival of the GOP as a legitimate, serious party depends on its being humiliated again in 2010. The important thing that both GOP leaders and the MSM must learn is that the kind of extremism that has become mainstream GOP thinking is the road to political oblivion. That if the party continues to allow Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, and Coulter to dictate its agenda, it no longer has any legitimacy and cannot be taken seriously.
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