Wednesday, February 17, 2010

GOP Risks Being Swept Away Unless They Adopt Tea Party Principles

Republicans are playing with fire if they continue to ignore the call for fiscal conservatism and respect for traditional values.  So says Bill Quick at Pajamas Media:  some excerpts:
In a recent blog post I wrote:
If the GOP cannot find some way to align itself with the Tea Party and its ethos, then it will be swept away.
This contention, as well as the title of the post — “Tea Party Versus Socialist Party” — generated a fair amount of discussion, requiring, I think, further elaboration on the ideas involved.
The political calculus is simple. Somewhere after George W. Bush’s reelection, it became obvious to the conservative wing of the GOP that Bush and party elders were straying further and further off the reservation of conservative principle — if, indeed, they had been on that reservation in the first place. The growing protest led to a sharp drop in support among conservatives and libertarians for Bush and his party, and was further aggravated by national party and presidential support for folks like Arlen Specter, as well as issues like amnesty for illegal aliens which Bush and others like John McCain pushed very hard....
The immediate upshot was the “unexpected” loss of the House and Senate in 2006 to the Democrats, as conservatives and libertarians stayed home in droves. The ultimate outcome was the crushing defeat of John McCain in 2008 by Barack Obama, as once again the conservative and libertarian segments of the GOP, otherwise known as the base, sat out the contest in even larger numbers than 2006....
The GOP has not yet decided what sort of blood runs through its own veins, which brings us to my contention that if it continues to resist the tea parties, if it continues its business-as-usual policies of endorsing and supporting candidates who are noxious to tea party principles, then it will be swept away. It will force the tea partiers into the formation of a third party that could guarantee Democrat domination for a generation unless the tea party movement supplants the GOP, much as the GOP supplanted the Whigs 160 years ago....
America would enjoy a much healthier and more vigorous politics if the tea parties either become the dominant force in the GOP or sweep it away entirely, so that for the first time in at least a hundred years Americans are given a clear-cut choice between a socialist (Democrat) party and a liberty-minded, fiscally responsible party that is represented by the tea party movement. At the end of the day the names don’t matter so much, but the policies and principles certainly do.
Read it all TEA Party & GOP folks,  we need to keep these things in mind and find ways to work TOGETHER or we will allow the libs/socialists to continue sending us down the road to perdition.-SP

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