What Next for the Republicans?

One of the joys of being a leftie these last few days is watching the Republican party sift through the rubble of a failed election, looking for scapegoats and turning on each other like members of the Donner party. Liberal commentators like Keith Olbermann are gleefully reporting anonymous reports that Sarah Palin was called a "Wasilla Hillbilly raiding Neiman-Marcus from coast to coast" and that she did not know that Africa was a continent. This, in turn, has inspired the real meat-eaters of the right, like those crazy kids at redstate.com and freerepublic.com, to impose fatwas on anyone who would dare besmirch the image of their beauty-contestant politician. Why they would hitch their wagons to a woman who couldn't even win on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? is suspect.

There is no off-time now in the presidential cycle. Reports are that Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, are hitting Iowa in the next few weeks. Obama could be a fantastically successful president but he will not run unopposed in 2012 (the last president to run unopposed was James Monroe in 1820, during the "Era of Good Feelings," something that wouldn't have been possible if cable news had existed back then). In addition to Huckabee, Palin, and Jindal, surely Mitt Romney will be a candidate. The scuttlebutt is that it is Romney's staff that is circulating the embarrassing info on Palin. Romney has the money and bland good looks to get the nomination, but a scuffle between a Mormon and an evangelical Christian, whether it is Palin or Huckabee, or an extreme Catholic like Jindal (who has apparently participated in exorcisms) could be vicious.

It has been said of Democrats that they hold firing squads in a circle, while Republicans live by the commandment of Ronald Reagan: "Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of a Fellow Republican." Those days seem to be gone. The sniping over John McCain's doomed campaign is very loud and very deadly, but what does it tell us about the future of the G.O.P.? There are those who would not abandon the conservative principles the party espouses, but are they whistling past the graveyard? The demographics of the voters in this country have clearly changed--we are not a nation dominated by white men any more. Younger voters show a greater tolerance of cultural issues like reproductive rights, gay rights, and sensitivity to the environment. And when the economy is in the toilet these issues are put on the back burner, anyway. What Barack Obama was successful doing is uniting the young, black, Latino, women, college-educated people of this country into a new majority. When Karl Rove optimistically talked about a permanent Republican majority, he was 180 degrees off--it may be a permanent Democratic majority.

But that's optimistic. Obama may turn out to be a dud, another Jimmy Carter. I don't see that happening, but there's no telling what problems may lie ahead. The Republicans will head for the hills and regroup, and they will have to decide how to approach the 2012 election. Do they stick to the right-wing philosophy dictated by religious principles, or do they let go of that and reform into a party more in line with Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Michael Bloomberg, or Ron Paul? To do so would risk alienating the religious right, but it may be a gamble worth taking if they ever hope to see the inside of the White House again for the coming future.