The Rise and Fall of the Republican Empire

The balloons have all fallen. The votes have been counted (for the most part). The decision is done. Instead of ads ripping the opponents a new one, the mattress and erectile dysfunction ads are back on TV. The fat lady even sang, though it was more of a public Rove Lament than a Wagner aria. To say that the GOP is stunned wouldn't entirely be hyperbole.

The night of November 6th, 2012 was won by the incumbant, Barack Obama.

But...

It wasn't what one would call an overwhelming endorsement of leftist policies. After all, according to analysts, there were eight million white voters (like me) who, also like me, stayed home. White, middle class voters. The core of the GOP. The election was relatively close when once considers the overall count. About a hundred million voted (give or take). About 2% more went for Obama than Romney (give or take). The difference was about three million votes. The electoral college vote, however, wasn't even close. Obama won 332 electoral college votes to Romney's 206. As it happened, neither Ohio or Florida (which both went to Obama, with Florida by a slim margin, though much greater than what Bush had over Gore when the ballot counting was forced to stop in 2000) played any actual part of the decision. Romney could have won both, and still lost the presidency.

The decision of who won was actually settled about three hours after the polls closed on the Pacific coast. To be honest, that rather surprised me. I had somewhat expected Obama to win. I didn’t expect the decision to be quite so clear nor so quicky arrived at. In some ways, I'm rather pleased it was. It makes inciting a revolution against the government much harder to pull off. Eight million disenchanted voters NOT voting for their man tells me they didn't want right-wing control of the government, which is what would have happened if right-wingers were in favor of it in the first place. I don't see anyone putting their lives on the line to install a government they could have simply voted in without all the fuss and bother.

But the overall results of the election changed nothing between Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats gained seats in both the House and the Senate, but not enough to change the control of either chamber. However, given the gerrymandering that went on during the two years between 2010, when Republicans had the good fortune to gain control over many state legislatures at a time when the poll was done, it may be that their House majority was achieved more through consolidation (or abuse, if you will) of political power than by heeding the will of the majority.

What this election highlighted was that I was really hoping to see: the need for a moderate party. Instead of it being a ringing endorsement of a President widely viewed as being vulnerable by the GOP, it was a firm rejection of GOP policies. When one considers the gerrymandering that went on, it was likely a bigger rejection than it appears.  Most especially it was a rejection of the policies of the extremists in the Tea Party who saw high-profile candidates - Akin and Mourdock, about whom I've mentioned - defeated. Even Bachmann, the virus-brained bimbo from the GOP primaries who apparently is the Chief of the Tea Party (that was a pun - think about it), was almost defeated, squeaking by with less than one percent of the vote. (3000 out of 350,000 votes).

The GOP ran a campaign basing its campaign promises (assuming one could nail them down) on the same bullshit they talked about 30 years ago. It's obviously escaped their attention that things have changed. I talked about how the right-wing was going to implode - twice - and why. And it's happening right now. They marginalized all their moderates to the point that 8 MILLION of them said, "Fuck it, I ain't gonna vote for either one of them."

That cost them the election in a campaign where defeating a weak president during economic hardship should have been a slam dunk.

There were some key things that went against them. Most of them due to the changing religious demographic in the U.S.

For example, the subject of banning abortions rose constantly in the election. The GOP kept saying they wanted to ban them (Romney would be a "pro-life" president, even though he would allow abortion in cases of rape, incest or a health danger to the mother, but was rather inconsistent in that stand). And yet, polls have CONSISTENTLY shown that only about one in five Americans favor banning all abortions - at MOST. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the GOP is appealing to and catering to a smaller and smaller demographic. That's not how one wins in a democracy.

Organized religions are almost all seeing an overall decline in U.S. membership. Methodists, Presbyterian, Catholics, Episcopals, Baptists - the traditional GOP tactic of pandering to the religious is falling on fewer and fewer ears. Nondenominational memberships which are not tracked may be rising, but may not. The point is the traditional "values" upon which the GOP rests its entire social agenda are falling to the wayside as hot-button issues to the majority of voters.

Gay marriage was approved by the voters in Maine and Maryland. In Washington state and Colorado, marijuana was legalized by the voters. The war against gays and the war against drugs both took gigantic hits in that respect. Especially if one considers the money that went into backing GOP ideals and candidates

The GOP promoted what it called "smaller government" in its call to arms. They wanted to cut entitlement programs. It SOUNDED good but a look at the realities of the world today proved that it would have been the equivalent of political suicide (unless the purpose behind doing that was to drive the poor, retired, disabled and handicapped from their states). When it comes to taxes for entitlement programs, there are far more red states taking more from the government than they pay into it. To maintain that revenue, they would have to do what they consistently refuse to do: Raise taxes. In this case, the taxes of the individual states who would see a gigantic shortfall of budget revenue. In the face of this reality, it's really hard to believe they'd be serious about doing that.

No one really wants to see a bloated government with massive pork and irresponsible spending. Most Americans agree that "smaller government" is a good idea if it gets rid of costly and unnecessary programs. Deciding what constitutes costly and unnecessary is a matter of compromise, of course. However, Grover Norquist's ideology is anathema to most Americans. Reverting to a confederation of independent states - which is basically the essence of his ideology - would destroy the United in "United States of America" as most of us know it today. So when you talk about something being hated by most people in a democracy, it isn't going to get ANY traction outside of a bunch of isolated, rural communities.

The bottom line is that the Republican party ran a campaign that would win in 1980 but could NOT win today. The country has changed a lot since 1980. The Republican party has NOT.

One wouldn’t THINK that the country would change so much in two years, that what was embraced all across America (or so goes the GOP mindset) just two years ago would be firmly rejected in the next election.

The simple fact is, the GOP fucked up. The country didn't really change THAT MUCH in two years. But what it did get was two years of ultra-rightist-caused congressional deadlock, an ultra-rightist-caused drop in the country's credit (for the first time in our history) and FOUR years of over-the-top ultra-rightist rhetorical bullshit that only got louder and more extreme.

The country took a chance on ultra-rightist radicals in 2010 and while some places certainly still embrace them, many others that used to, no longer do. That these folks made no GAINS AT ALL says to me that their ideology is seen as bullshit by the majority of Americans, both left and right. Right-wingers who think (Center-right) didn't want to embrace Obama, but they sure as hell didn't want the loons from the Tea Party controlling the country, either. Faced with no choices, they stayed home.

I know how they feel.

I mentioned before that the Republicans treated the center like it treats their ardent followers - as if they can't think. Well, that's exactly true and the thinkers in the Republican party raised eight million middle fingers to the GOP to let them know of their displeasure in how they were treated. I've been doing that since the 1990's.

But it took two years of the the over the top bullshit from the Tea Party to make America go "Whoa, those fuckers are nuts." The GOP had the VERY BAD judgement to align themselves with those wackos and even TRY to embrace them. Had the GOP moved to the center and characterized all of the radical lefties and the radical righties as nut jobs, presented a candidate with a solid background grounded in moderation - a fiscal conservative and social progressive - willing to work with others to arrive at a negotiated agreement on how to run the country, it almost certainly would have carried the vote. I'm relatively certain there are at least 8 million people who would have voted for him. And a hell of a lot of people I talked with were unhappy with both candidates, looking for someone in the middle.

Now, the fact is, the GOP CAN'T go to the middle and expect to stay there. Dropping the social agenda would be like calling in a zephyr on a foggy day. Those social agendas distract their followers from the things the right-wing does that actually screws their followers over. As George Carlin says, these followers get corn-holed by the right-wing by the fiscal policies they promote. I'm not saying the left doesn't do it, too, but at least the left is more up-front about what they're doing. The right-wing uses these social agenda issues as a smokescreen to distract their followers. Without them, their policies would be laid bare.

Now, I'm all for laying them bare, but in order to maintain the GOP status quo (stealing from the poor and giving to the rich - after all, the wealthy wouldn't have invested a BILLION dollars in the campaigns if they didn't expect a return on that investment), the GOP would have to better explain their policies without being able to distract their followers should the discussion not go according to GOP plans.

What can the GOP do to regain political power with enough appeal to actually gain control again?

With Romney's 47% remark revealing the true heart of the GOP - that it only cares about people who make enough money to be taxed and since it was done in front of wealthy, powerful donors, it's willing to do and say ANYTHING to help those wealthy and powerful donors as long as it helps the GOP get into power - the last thing the GOP can do is embrace the wealthy as closely as is has in the past. It has to become the champion of the majority of VOTERS, not the majority of the money.

The 2012 campaign proved that one could raise money from regular people. The amount spent by "outside sources" for Romney ALONE was three times more than Obama, but Obama out-raised far more in direct campaign denotations by nearly two to one. Unlike Romney, who raised most of his cash through the wealthy, half of what Obama raised was from non-wealthy donors. Although the Romney side spent over a billion dollars to get him elected (and that's only as of October 27^th, 2012 - final totals aren't in yet), Obama spent less - and won.

That's a critical factor here. Money is no longer buying elections when the message being promoted doesn't sell to the majority of Americans. Before you could baffle them with bullshit. Today, not so much.

So to wrap it up, the GOP is screwed. They can't do their usual crap anymore. What worked for 30 years no longer works. They have to come up with a new game plan and they have to do it within two years to keep the Democrats from gaining full control.

What was happening before - a slow recovery, but a recovery - will likely continue regardless of what Congress does. There was talk of compromise, but there used to be some as well in 2008 until about two seconds after Obama was sworn in. Boehner, the speaker of the house, was characterized about being willing to discuss things. Now he seems to be back-peddling (he wants to find "common ground" rather than compromise - which doesn't seem to be any different - but I wrote way back when about how they have no more common ground left.). If the GOP can't get it together and tanks the government's budget with another situation that puts us over the fiscal cliff through obstructionist tactics like those used when they caused the credit rating of the U.S. to drop in 2011, it will spell the end of the GOP. They could only do that ONCE, because the backlash against them was severe.

After all, if the people liked what the obstructionists were doing, they would have voted MORE in. And they didn't.

So the recovery will continue. That can only help the Democrats - especially if the rightists go back to their stalling tactics. So going over the cliff won't help them. Stalling won't help them. The BEST they can do is hope they can introduce some good legislation that actually helps the regular people. I don't see them doing that. And they're NOT going to get elected based on the over-the-top crap they've been pushing for 30 years. I DO see them trying THAT.

So in the end, they're not going to have much of a chance to recover. If the Democrats are given their heads and do what they want to do all the time, it may screw the country enough to swing things back to a more rightist point of view, but that isn't going to happen either. Republicans need to engage in talks that include the word compromise. They need to make themselves part of the solution. But they can't do that and still serve their employers (masters is such a loaded, but appropriate, word).

They're screwed, blued and tattooed. What replaces them will likely be more moderate, more accommodating of the will of the voters, less accommodating of the will of our wealthy overlords, less fiscally absolutist than the GOP, more socially progressive than the GOP and far more palatable to the American people than the leftists.

But for the next ten years, at least, the GOP will not likely be a viable alternative for most voters, and if it can't get back in the game before then, it strutted its stuff on the American political stage for the last time in 2010.

What I predicted before is beginning to come to past. It remains to be seen how right I am about the rest.