Republican or Repubstricken?

[doh_phooey]

“A party that has over the years been the home of a series of optimistic figures in American politics — from Ronald Reagan to Jack Kemp, who died last week, to (at times) George W. Bush — is increasingly coming across as downbeat or angry. And it is something that has Republicans increasingly worried.”

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/05/13/1930416.aspx


Republicans scarcely have reason to sigh in relief. The study adds more to the tome of bad news for the Republican Party, recording lows unseen since the years following Watergate. The GOP is dejected and depressed. It sits at rock bottom, considering a range of issues from public image to morale to the GOP's anemic ranks.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/realclearpolitics/despite_bad_economy_no_big_shift_in_values

[doh_phooey]

1. Republicans in Distress: Is the Party Over?

Republicans in Distress: Is the Party Over?

By Michael Grunwald

These days, Republicans have the desperate aura of an endangered species. They lost Congress, then the White House; more recently, they lost a slam-dunk House election in a conservative New York district, then Senator Arlen Specter. Polls suggest that only one-fourth of the electorate considers itself Republican, that independents are trending Democratic and that as few as five states have solid Republican pluralities. And the electorate is getting less white, less rural, less Christian — in short, less demographically Republican. GOP officials who completely controlled Washington three years ago are vowing to "regain our status as a national party" and creating woe-is-us groups to resuscitate their brand, while Democrats are publishing books like The Strange Death of Republican America and 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation. John McCain's campaign manager recently described his party as basically extinct on the West Coast, nearly extinct in the Northeast and endangered in the Mountain West and Southwest.

As the party has shrunk to its base, it has catered even more to its base's biases, insisting that the New Deal made the Depression worse, carbon emissions are fine for the environment and tax cuts actually boost revenues — even though the vast majority of historians, scientists and economists disagree. The RNC is about to vote on a kindergartenish resolution to change the name of its opponent to the Democrat Socialist Party. This plays well with hard-core culture warriors and tea-party activists convinced that a dictator-President is plotting to seize their guns, choose their doctors and put ACORN in charge of the Census, but it ultimately produces even more shrinkage, which gives the base even more influence — and the death spiral continues. "We're excluding the young, minorities, environmentalists, pro-choice — the list goes on," says Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of two moderate Republicans left in the Senate after Specter's switch. "Ideological purity is not the ticket to the promised land."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1900251,00.html