We are unquestionably the majority party; the Republican party controls Washington and most states. However, this grip on power is more fleeting that we'd like to believe and we need some triage before 2006. We have problems to confront and remedy, not to bury and ignore. John Fund observes:

With Rep. Tom DeLay's forced departure as majority leader, Newt Gingrich says, the Republican Party stands at a crossroads as important as any it has faced since nominating Ronald Reagan for president in 1980. "It must decide if it is going to be a party that fundamentally reforms government or one that merely presides over existing institutions and spends more money," he says. Which path the GOP now takes may determine not only how much damage it suffers in next year's elections but also whether it can hold the White House in 2008...

"The highway bill is an important part of building our economy," he told reporters. Mr. DeLay seemed to be channeling Richard Nixon, another big spender, who once foolishly claimed, "We are all Keynesians now."

Talk like that has demoralized much of the Republican base. With nearly all Democrats and two-thirds of independents reacting negatively to the Bush presidency, Republicans need to keep GOP voters in the fold. But only 78% of Republicans express approval of Mr. Bush, down from well over 90% at the time of his re-election. With only 32% of Americans believing that the country is headed in the right direction and only 33% approving of the job Congress is doing, the GOP has reason to worry. "By an eight-point margin, voters are now more likely to call themselves Democrats than Republicans; there was no gap in self-identification a year ago," notes political handicapper Charlie Cook...

Matthew Continetti, a writer at the Weekly Standard who is writing a book on the modern Republican Party, worries that a decade in political power might have "exhausted conservatism's fighting spirit, lowered the movement's intellectual standards and replaced a healthy independence with partisan water-carrying." That sounds an awful lot like a description of what the last period of one-party rule did to liberals in 1993 and 1994. Back then they ignored the "unseen" political consequences of their actions and thereby convinced the electorate they no longer deserved that power.

The Harriet Miers nomination will only exacerbate the current problem. When you trigger negative reactions from staunch conservatives that are key influencers in the conservative base, such as Bill Kristol, Rush Limbaugh, National Review and the majority of the conservative blogosphere (like Powerline, Right Wing News and Michelle Malkin), you undertake serious risks in alienating your base. A key indicator of this will be to watch contributions to the RNC. Wherever his (and he clearly wasn't around when Miers became the pick), we need Karl Rove back to fix things ASAP. It is up to us to fix our party.

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.gopbloggers.org/mt/majority.cgi/2204

---

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

What is the Vice-President's last name?

(NOTE: You must get this correct, otherwise, your comment will be rejected.)

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)