{"id":4481,"date":"2012-06-05T14:04:08","date_gmt":"2012-06-05T18:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/?p=4481"},"modified":"2012-06-05T14:04:08","modified_gmt":"2012-06-05T18:04:08","slug":"the-gop-needs-to-be-born-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2012\/06\/the-gop-needs-to-be-born-again.html","title":{"rendered":"The GOP Needs to Be Born Again"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
The Republican need to go down in flames so they can remake themselves by rising from their own ashes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Yesterday’s post<\/a> elicited a response reading in part:<\/p>\n

If we gave the Democrats power next year, you know what they would have? A mandate. That\u2019s all we would hear about until the next election, which they would lose, because they thought they had a mandate. It\u2019s like watching a tennis match and rooting for the guy without the ball.<\/em>
\n Maybe the Republicans made it tough on Obama. Maybe Obama wasn\u2019t leader enough to overcome it. Did the GOP fail to vote in Obama\u2019s FOMC appointee\u2019s? Yes. Did Obama make recess appointments which were within his power? No. Obama is not a victim, he\u2019s the president. If the other guys played the system better to get what they want, than well played.<\/em>
\n Ezra says that this is the logical conclusion of a system biased toward gridlock. The system is broken. Let\u2019s fix the system instead of kickin the can down the road.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I certainly agree the system is broken.\u00a0 My preference would be to fix that. However, we have repeatedly failed to fix those problems. It would be great to see substantive campaign finance reform, have the Fed refocused on NGDP goals, revise Senate rules so that a super-majority isn’t required for everything, institute lobbying controls so legislation wasn’t ghost-written by special interests… I could go on.\u00a0 But the likelihood of any of those being addressed this year is vanishingly small.\u00a0 Not that we should give up on those reforms, but that there remain practical short term things we can fix in the meanwhile.<\/p>\n

I’m also an independent. I’ve voted for Republicans in the past, and I’d like to do so again. But the current incarnation of the party has gone beyond the pale, and until they find their way back to sanity, I will not vote on the GOP line. They have not only lost any willingness to compromise, they have lost the ability to agree to their own positions when the other side agrees with them.\u00a0 They lost the election in ’08, and have yet to acknowledge the legitimacy of the people we elected.\u00a0 Win or lose, there’s still a country to run. And they are refusing unless they are put back into power.<\/p>\n

I’m not claiming Obama is the greatest, or that the Democrats are above playing politics or fighting for their policy positions.\u00a0 But they have not engaged in the extreme intransigence of the GOP.\u00a0 If given full control of the government, would they eventually yield to the same sort of behavior the GOP is showing? Very probably. But that won\u2019t happen overnight. Policy-wise, Obama is far closer to Reagan than Romney. There is almost no chance the Democrats would take a mandate and run to the extreme left. It\u2019s much more likely they will stick to their current centrist proposals.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the GOP gets to go lick its wounds, expunge its extremists, and return to the center-right position of its roots. Hopefully, to again balance the system out in 2014 or 2016; before the pendulum swings too far the other way.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want a permanent Democratic majority. I want a functional two-party system with give and take from both sides resulting in actual governance that works in aggregate for the betterment of the citizenry.\u00a0 We do not have that now. And we don\u2019t because one party has checked out of the game. The notion that \u201cboth sides do it\u201d is a false equivalence. The Republican party has abdicated its responsibility to govern or even functionally participate in any government it does not control.\u00a0 It has pretty much given up on appealing to (or even tolerating) anyone other than white Christian males.\u00a0 It needs to remake itself or yield to a new party that will fill the void it leaves behind.\u00a0 The only way it will get that message is if it is resoundingly defeated.\u00a0 And not just at the Presidential level.\u00a0 If the GOP does okay at the federal and state level excepting Romney, it will read that as a failure to go with somebody more radical like Santorum. It only gets the message if it goes down in flames. And to be clear, the only reason I want it to go down in flames is so its old moderate reasonable self rises from the ashes.<\/p>\n

I want the Republican party back.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know what the hell that thing is hiding behind the elephant right now. But I\u2019m not voting for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I want the Republican party back. I don\u2019t know what the hell that thing is hiding behind the elephant right now. But I\u2019m not voting for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[118,89,40,23,41],"class_list":["post-4481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-2012-elections","tag-democrats","tag-gop","tag-obama","tag-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4481"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4488,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4481\/revisions\/4488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}