Is the GOP Broken?

by Michael Reagan – Human Events.com | Before the Republican Party even begins to think about curing what ails it, members have to recognize the fact that the party is Balkanized.

We are never going to win elections if we remain broken up into separate factions, sometimes barely speaking to one another. Bizarre as it seems, each group within this Balkanization of the GOP is united in the belief that Ronald Reagan is its standard bearer.

This, they tell us, is the man they want to follow. Ronald Reagan was not someone who found ways to disagree with you, but spent most of his life trying to find ways to agree with you.

He always sought to find a common ground — to move the party and the country forward. A lot of Republicans quote his statement that we must not let the bad be the enemy of the good. But today’s Republican Party is wedded to allowing the bad to be the enemy of the good.

As a result, we don’t win elections. I may agree with you on taxation, for example. Or I may agree with you on immigration. If I disagree with you on abortion, however, I may just stay home on Election Day, or not vote for you; I might even vote for your opponent.

As a result, we end up electing the candidate who disagrees with us on taxation, a person who disagrees with us on immigration, and also disagrees with us on abortion and everything else. We excuse this exercise in irrationality by claiming we want to make a statement.>>>>Read the Full Article

Prediction: Obama’s Fate

By Fouad Ajami – The Wall Street Journal | There is something odd — and dare I say novel — in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right.

As the late Nobel laureate Elias Canetti observes in his great book, “Crowds and Power” (first published in 1960), the crowd is based on an illusion of equality: Its quest is for that moment when “distinctions are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.” These crowds, in the tens of thousands, who have been turning out for the Democratic standard-bearer in St. Louis and Denver and Portland, are a measure of American distress.

On the face of it, there is nothing overwhelmingly stirring about Sen. Obama. There is a cerebral quality to him, and an air of detachment. He has eloquence, but within bounds. After nearly two years on the trail, the audience can pretty much anticipate and recite his lines. The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest — African-Americans and affluent white liberals — has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertakin>>>>Read the Full Article