The schisms facing the Republicans in the post-Reagan years appear likely to be at least as serious [as those of the Democrats]. The conservative wing of the GOP is full of discontent with Reagan but it has been unable to coalesce around a candidate, and it has wavered at various times between Representative Jack Kemp, Patrick J. Buchanan, and the television evangelist Pat Robertson. Vice President George Bush is running into increasing difficulty as he attempts to become an ecumenical nominee supported by both Reagan conservatives and by the GOP's moderate, East Coast faction. Senator Robert Dole, in turn, is trying to revive the Taft wing of the Republican party, for which the principal issue is the danger of the federal deficit, the same deficit that has made the Reagan economic and military program possible. Dole seeks, moreover, to expand his constituency with support for such liberal programs as food stamps and aid to the handicapped, as well as for such right-of-center causes as opposition to abortion and to gun control, and conservative appointments to the federal bench.

... the continuing dependence on business money has damaged Republican efforts to promote a more populist image.

... Another Republican alliance coming under strain is that between the country-club Republicans who have controlled the party organizations in most states, and the increasingly restless conservative Christian political community. This alliance has been of prime importance to the GOP: between 1976 and 1984, white fundamentalist Christians accounted for a shift of at least eight million votes to Republican candidates, according to The New York Times–CBS polls. No other single group in those years did more to create a strong Republican coalition.

Conservative Christian political leaders, including Pat Robertson, have, however, become increasingly intent on gaining direct political power. They are sponsoring campaigns to take over numerous state and local Republican party organizations, and running their own candidates in GOP primaries. For example, in Indiana in 1986, fundamentalist Christian candidates defeated candidates backed by the party for Republican nominations in two congressional districts, severely embarrassing one of the strongest state Republican parties in the country. Similarly, fights between Christian groups and party regulars occurred in Republican congressional contests in South Carolina and Tennessee. In three out of four of these districts, the Republican would normally have been favored to win. In fact, Democrats won all four districts. Republican party regulars, dismayed by such activities, are having increasing difficulty maintaining control over nominations.

The GOP is in the midst of a balancing act, trying to hold together a great many divergent groups—including well-to-do East Coast Protestants, anticommunist Asian and Hispanic refugees, southern rednecks drawn to the hard right views of Jesse Helms, the new entrepreneurs of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, urban Catholics, embattled farmers, and evangelical Baptists. For the Republicans the arms-for-hostages scandal could not have emerged at a worse time—just when they were beginning to plan for the 1988 elections. No matter what the political atmosphere may be less than two years from now, the scandal has impaired Reagan's ability to hold together the GOP coalition by his personal popularity while waiting for a successor to emerge. The controversy has also clearly damaged the ability of the Republican party to recruit strong candidates for 1988. And it threatens to weaken the ability of the three Republican party committees to continue to raise the vast amounts of money useful in smoothing over ideological and economic conflicts within the Republican hierarchy. [my emphasis]

Besides, it’s delicious watching Republicans go after Democrats for being too emotional and irrational given the G.O.P. shame spiral.

W. and Dick Cheney made all their bad decisions about Iraq, W.M.D.’s, domestic surveillance, torture, rendition and secret hit squads from the gut, based on false intuitions, fear, paranoia and revenge.

Sarah Palin is the definition of irrational, a volatile and scattered country-music queen without the music. Her Republican fans defend her lack of application and intellect, happy to settle for her emotional electricity.

Sarah is a zealot, but she’s a fun zealot. She has a beehive and sexy shoes, and the day she’s named she goes shopping with McCain in Ohio for a cheerleader outfit for her daughter.

Only four days into her reign as John McCain’s “soul mate,” or “Trophy Vice,” as some bloggers are calling her, on the ticket known as “Maverick Squared,” Palin, the governor of Alaska, has already accrued two gates (Troopergate and Broken-watergate), a lawyer (for Troopergate), a future son-in-law named Levi (a high school ice hockey player, described by New York magazine as “sex on skates”), and a National Enquirer headline about the “Teen Prego Crisis” with 17-year-old daughter Bristol. [my emphasis]

If Barack Obama had chosen Hillary Clinton as his running mate, we would now be looking forward to the greatest night in the history of American politics: the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate between Ma Barker and Sarah Barracuda.

Sarah, who is now so renowned that she is known merely by one name and has a name ID of 90 percent, has to be a Kmart mom who appeals to Kmart moms and dads. She’s already shown that she can shoot the pig, put lipstick on it, bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. Now all she has to do is also prove that she can be the leader of the free world on a moment’s notice, and field dress Putin as adeptly as she can a moose.

Sarah has single-handedly ushered out the “Sex and the City” era, and made the sexy new model for America a retro one — the glamorous Pioneer Woman, packing a gun, a baby and a Bible.

Her explosion onto the scene made Obama seem even more like a windy, wispy egghead. Like W., Sarah has the power of positive unthinking.

And then there’s the Supreme Court, of course, which gave up its claim to rational neutrality when the justices appointed by Republican presidents — including Bush Sr. — ignored what was fair to make a sentimental choice and throw the 2000 election to W.

Bruce Miller at 11:05pm July 12
I really wonder if DeMint is such a dim bulb that he can't tell the difference among social democracy, Nazism, fascism, socialism and Iran's brand of Shi'a Islamism. Or if he's just trying to help Republican Party leader Rush Limbaugh and FOX News dumb down as much of the public as they can. Either way, it's irresponsible for him to be talking trash like this.

Richard Avery at 7:55am July 13
Senators have a long history of making intemperate statements. It was Democratic Senator Dick Durbin who compared treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo as akin to something that "happened by [sic] Nazis, Soviets in their Gulags, or some madman regime like Pol Pot." Was this Durbin's attempt to make Democrats dumber than they already were?

Bruce Miller at 10:57am July 13
Since Durbin didn't stand by his own statement, I wouldn't bother to defend him. Still, I've never been able to fathom why he thought *Holocaust survivors* would be offended by his opposing *torture*.

But Durbin at least knew something about the regimes to which he was referring. Anyone who thinks that Germany was a "social democracy" - or any other kind of democracy - in 1939 either knows nothing about the history of Nazism, or is trying to pretend that Nazism was some kind of democracy. Either way, it's ridiculous. But if South Carolina voters like politicians that clueless, it's likely they will have a chance to vote for more of them, including DeMint.

Richard Avery at 2:16pm July 13
The main regime Durbin was referring to was the United States. While he eventually backed off of his statement because of extreme criticism did he really think US personnel were acting like Nazis, Soviet Gulag guards, or Pol Pot's supporters?

As far as voting for clueless politicians is concerned, that is something that voters from all parties in all 50 states get to do too frequently.

Bruce Miller at 2:40pm July 13
Just curious, Richard. Do you actually have an opinion about the topic of Joerg's entry, i.e., what Jim DeMint said a few days ago?

Richard Avery at 8:48pm July 13
I would not have used DeMint's rhetoric because it is counterproductive, but It is no worse than what Democrats said about Bush for eight years. I am concerned that Obama is attempting to increase government control of the economy which will have a negative impact on the country and that he will use this control to reward friends and punish enemies.

I also think he would like to subvert the election process to increase the likelihood of Democratic victories. Funding ACORN, rejecting proposals to use social security numbers and drivers licenses for identification purposes, and dismissal of a case of voter intimidation against Black Panthers in Philadelphia after the case had been won all make it easier for Democrats to rig elections.

Conservatives can win, can draw people toward our cause with the proper language and the proper ideas. I don't think that conservatism has been rejected in the United States. I don't believe it. ...

I don't think all is lost. The country is a center-right country. The problem has been that conservatives in positions of responsibility, particularly in the Congress, lost their way. And in general conservatism has gotten a little nostalgic and less focused on the here and now, and on the future. I'm a huge Ronald Reagan fan. The Republican primary was almost all about Ronald Reagan: Who was the heir to Ronald Reagan? Well, I mean, Ronald Reagan would be talking about ideas, would be talking about broad principles, would be talking about issues, more than what we heard in the primaries. The world is radically different than it was in the 1980s, dramatically different. ...

I don't think there's any seismic shift. The Democrats have won on tactics. ... In fact, [Obama] basically won the tax debate, which is breathtaking if you think about it. Cutting taxes is generally considered a center-right idea, not a center-left or left idea. He made it appear like McCain was going to raise taxes, which was unfair, but there was no response back. When there was an ideological component, it was generally centrist or even center-right. Had he said what he was going to do as a candidate, [Obama] would have lost. [my emphasis]

Barack Obama would not have gotten elected if he'd let us in on his secret plan prior to the election. He would not have gotten elected if he'd said, "... My idea is to create a massive cap-and-trade system [based on the idea] that CO2 is [a] pollutant and we need to tax it in a massive way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions." ...

[Q:]Do you believe global warming is primarily man-made?

I'm a skeptic. I'm not a scientist. I think the science has been politicized. I would be very wary of hollowing out our industrial base even further... It may be only partially man-made. It may not be warming by the way. The last six years we've actually had mean temperatures that are cooler. I think we need to be very cautious before we dramatically alter who we are as a nation because of it. [my emphasis in italics]

... Palin's unconventional step [announcing she will step down from the Alaska governorship] speaks to an ingrained frontier skepticism of authority — even one's own. Given the plunging credibility of institutions and élites, that's a mood that fits the Palin brand. Résumés ain't what they used to be; they count only with people who trust credentials — a dwindling breed. The mathematics Ph.D.s who dreamed up economy-killing derivatives have pretty impressive résumés. The leaders of congressional committees and executive agencies have decades of experience — at wallowing in red ink, mismanaging economic bubbles and botching covert intelligence.

If ever there has been a time to gamble on a flimsy résumé, ever a time for the ultimate outsider, this might be it. "We have so little trust in the character of the people we elected that most of us wouldn't invite them into our homes for dinner, let alone leave our children alone in their care," writes talk-show host Glenn Beck in his book Glenn Beck's Common Sense, a pox-on-all-their-houses fusillade at Washington. Dashed off in a fever of disillusionment with those in power, Beck's book is selling like vampire lit, with more than 1 million copies in print. [my emphasis]

I think it's okay to have a deeper understanding of things. I think it's okay to talk in three-syllable words. The world we're living in is incredibly complex. And simplifying things to the point where you're misunderstanding where we are as a nation isn't going to help people overcome their fears or give them hope that they can achieve great things. I don't get inspired by shameless populism.

Outside her family's Dillingham smokehouse, Palin lays out a robust indictment of the Obama agenda. "President Obama is growing government outrageously, and it's immoral and it's uneconomic," she says. "The debt that our nation is incurring, trillions of dollars that we're passing on to our kids, expecting them to pay off for us, is immoral and doesn't even make economic sense. So his growth-of-government agenda needs to be ratcheted back, and it's going to take good people who have the guts to stand up to him."

She continues. The cap-and-trade energy plan "is going to drive the cost of consumer goods and the cost of energy so extremely high." Democratic health-care proposals, she says, look increasingly like the ideas that McCain proposed during the campaign. [This characterization by the writers doesn't seem to reflect the Palin quote that immediately follows.] "One thing reporters aren't asking the Administration is — it's such a simple question, and people around here in the real world, outside of Washington, D.C., want reporters to ask — President Obama, how are you going to pay for this one- or two- or three-trillion-dollar health-care plan? How are you going to pay off the stimulus package, those borrowed dollars? How are you going to pay for so many things that you are proposing and you are implementing? Americans deserve to know."

It was, to the extent that my brother was unable to get the Congress to go along with meaningful entitlement reform, although he tried, which by the way the Republicans were not supportive of. It was because we fought a war, and we had to build a homeland-defense structure that didn't exist. But I think my brother gets a bad rap about the general idea that there were massive amounts of spending beyond those two things.

The interest on the debt, and Medicare alone, will weaken our country to the point where we're not going to have the same influence that we need to have, or should have, or want to have in the world.

In this interim period, we have to pay for our sins and show some humility.

[Q:] What are those sins?
We didn't advocate our positions well enough to win.

We're all sinners under God's watchful eye. There's a road to redemption. But the road to redemption requires some humility and some patience. To campaign on these ideas is a good way to do it. It's not about a person's ambition. It's about the power of these ideas. And they need to be developed thoughtfully, with the input of a whole lot of people and the advice of a whole lot of people. It doesn't have to be in Washington. It can grow organically... I'm going to be involved as best I can.

The late 1960s remain the fastest-changing period in my lifetime. For example, I was recently telling my son about the worldwide demonstrations in 1968, when he asked, “Did feminism play a big role in 1968?”

"Oh, no," I corrected. "Nobody cared about feminism in 1968. Feminism was 1969, not 1968." On further reflection, I helpfully added, "Environmentalism, however, was 1970, not 1969."

At that point, it struck me how bizarre it must seem by today’s slow-motion standards to assign huge historical movements to a single year with such confidence. For a child of the 1960s, however, it seems natural.