Will the Republican leadership get together for some Bill Clinton-style soul searching to see what’s next for their party or will that curl up in a fetal position, hands covering their ears and screaming, “No, no, no, no, no”?
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman hypothesizes the latter in his recent column, The Republican Rump.
. . . the Republican base already seems to be gearing up to regard defeat not as a verdict on conservative policies, but as the result of an evil conspiracy. A recent Democracy Corps poll found that Republicans, by a margin of more than two to one, believe that Mr. McCain is losing “because the mainstream media is biased” rather than “because Americans are tired of George Bush.”
Could the GOP base be that bullheaded? Krugman says that the Democratic gains in the Senate and the House will be loses for the Republican moderates.
Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.
He goes on to write what I truly believe that the Republican Party will become the party of intolerance.
But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.
This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.
One can only hope that the GOP moderates fight back and regain the soul of the Republican Party. Though even in Delaware, it appears that Republicans are losing that battle with the rise of a young Delawarean politican named John Clatworthy.