How can the GOP come back? By doing all the same things, only more so.
Um … isn’t the defnition of “insanity” doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results?
The Republican brand is still alive and well, Rep. Mike Pence said on Fox News Sunday.
When asked by Chris Wallace what “conservative solutions” the GOP would bring to their current minority-party status, Pence said social issues like “the sanctity of marriage” will remain the backbone of the Republican platform.
“You build those conservative solutions, Chris, on the same time-honored principles of limited government, a belief in free markets, in the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage,” Pence said.
Similarly, the GM brand is alive and well, based on the time-honored principles of crappy workmanship, huge vehicles, macho appeal, and godawful gas mileage …
No, but, really — Pence is doing a marvelous job of combining the incoherent “time-honored principles” of the GOP. On the one hand, you have the fiscal conservatives — limited government, free markets. On the other hand, you have the social conservatives — anti-abortion, anti-gay.
The problem is, the two hands have nothing, really, to do with each other. There are plenty of people who believe in one without the other, and really, the two have no philosophical overlap save the efforts by Rep. Pence to brand them all as “conservative” stands. Indeed, arguably the two hands are inconflict with each other, one declaring “hands off” by government, the other insisting “hands on!”
The only thing you can say these “principles” have in common is that, aside from rhetorical posturing, the Bush Administration really didn’t do much to fundamentally support any of them.
More importantly, because these two hands have little to do with each other, the current power struggle within the GOP is further pulling the two apart. While I kind of doubt we’ll end up with schism, the civil war with the GOP will lead to one side or the other being in control, to the electoral detriment of both.