I don’t buy this Kavips comment. I think that there is something here, but I also think that Delaware’s exceptionalism can be better explained by a less Rube-Goldbergian sequence of events. A remnant of Eisenhower Republicans remain here in Delaware and they still regard themselves as human beings first and conservatives second. That’s the simple explanation. We are not the Swiss. We are not a blogging Athens, to the rest of the county’s Fox News Sparta.
There were a few embers of the old style Republicans still alive, but this April they will get pissed on and go out with a puff of acrid steam. That’s all. Nothing to see here folks. The new Republican Party is in place to take up their arms for the Plutocracy under the impression that they are really at war with sinful modernity. The Fox News revolution was simply delayed by a few years in Delaware, not defeated.
Well, I don’t know. Despite all the quibbling back and forth, there seems to be a bigger issue here, of major historical significance..
First of all, visit the site and look at his profile picture… He’s up against a wall… That’s the first clue…
Secondly… if you used to be a Republican, and that party got dissolved, and you didn’t consider yourself a Democrat, how would you list yourself? Remember, you’re seeking votes.. as an “EX” Republican?
Thirdly, this is a sign that Copeland and Ross ran the Republican party into the ground so hard, it is buried six feet under….
Fourthly, as a historian interested enough in how a party dies, so I could for similar symptoms with the death of the Republican party, I’ve actually looked back to see how former Federalists and former Whigs classified themselves when their parties were sputtering… For the most part, they ran as non affiliates…
I think we can bury the Republican party in Delaware. Yes, nationally they have a House… and made gains in the Senate… But… in Delaware, they don’t amount to much… So, …
The next great question to ponder is: Why did Delaware buck the national trend? What are they doing differently?
I think the answer stares back at us every time we visit one of these sites… Here, we live off… ideas… Our state is so small, we have no television, we are all unified at vilifying Ron Williams who has come to personify ( probably not fairly) the News Journal, so we look to blogs for guidance. And no one blog is really better than another… This one has a plethora of good writers, so the chances of seeing something exciting, are higher here than elsewhere… And we hear the arguments from both sides….
And here is what I think is important: when you hear republican ideas stacked up against logic, they fall flat. When you hear republican ideas stacked up against those of democrats, unless you are in the top 1% income bracket, they seem self serving just to that 1%, and hurtful to us….
So I think, the challenge is for Democrats to figure out how to get their ideas into American Red Zones. If they can do as we did here in Delaware, create a forum free of corporate influence, where both sides can banter back and forth, those ideas that are Democratic and solid, can move forward to make our nation better. And the opposite is true as well: those ideas that are Republican and solid, can also move forward to do the same… But for both of those to happen, you have to have communication.. And where over 80% of our state officials read these blogs, and the other 20% have to listen to that 80% the next morning… we have that here….
I know it’s a lot to pull out of a former candidate running as a non affiliate….
But then again…. re-heating my coffee by pushing a button and waiting for the timer to go off, only came about because one man wondered what it would look like if someone fell off a cliff and threw a ball up in the air as they were falling……