The Republican Choice is Clear: None of the Above
According to a new survey Republican voters don’t like any of their choices at this point. Last night on Colbert I saw him endorse Gingrich with this quote, “You have my support, because I’ll never vote for a Mormon and you are the best adulterer we’ve got.”
I wonder if it’s better to have no clear choice at this point or to have 3 good choices at this point?
The Republican’s anemic field of candidates is related to the general dissolution of the Republican Party and the exposure of Republican policies to basic scrutiny.
For people who are prone to think of history as a series of philosophical waves and counter waves (similar to Marx’s dialectics) it is easy to suppose that the Republican majorities of the past ten years and its domination of the executive branch were the outworking of some greater social seasonality.
However, this does not account for how quickly the Republican system has fallen apart. The idea of the “swinging pendulum” falls short of describing why liberal thought predominated for 60 years (some point to polls which indicate that there is still a “liberal” consensus in the country when it comes to governing) and the vampiric conservative programs could not withstand six years of being exposed to even a sliver of daylight.
Rather than a “swinging pendulum” we seem to be living through a period of history in which the “mostly harmless town crank” of conservatism accidentally (or through our liberal faith in common sense) got elected to office.
The fracture between fiscal conservatives and social conservatives appears to be permanent.
It is a bit odd and ominous that the Bush Administration has not groomed another PNAC-endorsed candidate.
Either Bush isn’t planning on leaving in 2008, or the VWRC is planning to cash in its chips and live off the interest for the next decade.
ummm, that’s “VRWC.” Sorry, I went to a public school.
That choice is the safe bet, but I would not count out the idea that Bush is going to try and stay.