The Future of the GOP

So I'm watching some DVR of Colin Powell articulate the virtues of an inclusive, tolerant Republican Party. Am I crazy, or is he way more eloquent and compelling than I remember?

Of course, Powell spoke rarely and through his career he has often been the voice of various GOP administration war efforts, so he was extremely confined as to what he could say. Since he's retired, he's been more public, and more able to speak candidly. And I'm pretty thrilled to have the guy as a defender of moderates. How, when presented with this intelligent, competent, reasoned man, could any member of the Republican Party say they'd rather have a gasbag like Rush Limbaugh, as Dick Cheney did?

Cheney said he considered Powell a Democrat, because the general endorsed Obama. Think about that for a minute. One vote that Cheney disagrees with removes for him 50 years of service to the party. I know I harp on this a bit, but it's worth thinking about a again: That's the opposite of Democracy. In a Democracy or a Republic, an individuals votes are supposed to be based on an understanding of the candidates and the needs of the government. You are in fact obligated to vote based on your own conscience and intellect, not to do what someone else tells you to because you share a same monetary and organizational structure. George Washington hated political parties, and thought they would destroy the country. While that's a bit strong, I think we can all agree that the right to vote and to choose one's own party are fairly basic in our system. I suppose Cheney would like a system where you must vote with your party, and for whom they tell you to vote? Maybe he would.

Regardless, this battle for the GOP is real. The reason Cheney is so vocal right now reflects more of a vacuum of leadership than anything else. The supposed leader of the GOP, Michael Steele, is a total laughing stock and couldn't even keep his own organization from passing a resolution to relabel Democrats as the "Democratic Socialist Party." Sarah Palin's approval rating is down to the 50s and can't seem to do anything that doesn't make her look more lost in the national scene. Bobby Jindal has been MIA since the Kenneth the Page disaster. No one else seems to want to grab the reins, and that might be because no one trusts the horse. Why would you step up to lead this party right now, when the past ways of doing things don't work, and any new position you might take will lead to being ostracized by the ones with the money?

Which leads me to wonder where the party is going. I see another bad year next year in Congress. It'll be a bad year in the sense that no much will change. A few seats here or there might switch, the GOP might even pick up some House seats, but everything we're seeing now indicates that the supermajority in the Senate is likely to be reinforced for the Democrats. Yes, yes, lots can change, but it's hard to see what that change would be. Anyway, if we assume that there are no seismic shifts, and we're at the same place in 18 months, what happens then?

Certainly, in 2012, people will use the presidential election to see if they can take over the leadership. But can a moderate win the primary? Not right now, certainly. I've written that I thought the GOP self-assesment would take some time, but the entrenched leadership there has really surprised me, and it's tough to see a way out of this spiral, short of a deus-ex-machina type of change in ideology nationwide. And that could happen; things move in cycles, and we could swing back reactionary at some point.

So, either the Republican Party can modernize, as Powell et al. would like, or we as a nation can be seized with a conservative furor.

Or, something else could happen.

If the GOP continues to drive itself off a cliff, we'll wind up with a very large tent on the Democratic side, and soon they'll be the one having the debates. Obama seems too savvy and pragmatic to let it happen, but another Dem leader could well lean to the left and allow hubris to control treatment of the crucial moderates. If that happened, things could get interesting.

We don't have the Whigs anymore. Or the Progressive Party, or the Tories, or the Know-Nothings. Political parties die in our system, once or twice a century, and we're due. The reality is that, if there were a party of Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Colin Powell, Claire McCaskill, Arlen Specter, Jim Webb, my boy Heath Shuler, etc., it would be more popular than the Republican Party. Since most of those names are Dems, it's hard to know if it would be more popular than the current Democratic Party, but it would be close. The names I just listed alone would be enough for a pretty serious faction, and think of how many would come out of the closet if the group actually broke off.

The key, of course, is building the money and organization that American political parties wield as their main weapons. But money will follow success, and that party would have plenty of success. Again, those people are some of Obama's biggest supporters, so I doubt very much that he would be foolish enough to neglect them to a point where they would leave. But Republicans didn't win a presidential election for decades after Hoover, and that could happen again. Which would mean that there would Dem leaders other than Obama. And what have we learned about what happens when one party has control over this country's governmental system? They can go completely, ideologically insane. It's not at all hard to see how, within 20 years, we could have a radically different set of political parties.

Of course, if this fun little scenario actually happens, one of the parties will have to fail. Our country has never sustained three parties, and sooner or later we'd be back down to two. Would it be the marginalized right wing, the Dems gutted by the defections, or the upstart centrist party? See how much fun speculation can be?

Incidentally, the last time we had a semi-major shift in political parties was the defection of Strom Thurmond's band of Dixiecrats, who were their own party for a short time but caucused with - and then became the power base of - the Republican Party.

Okay, didn't want to sign off without linking a summary of the credit card legislation. It's been mostly underreported, and it's easy to make too much of these minor victories, but any end to some of these hideous practices by banks is worth applauding. CNN Money has a fairly easy - if a little enthusiastic - summary of the changes.

Tomorrow, as you all know, is a holiday. And while observing for 24 hours what Memorial Day is actually about is probably more than anyone can expect, the U.S. government has made the very reasonable request that we observe a moment of silence at 3 p.m. on Monday.

People die all the time, and I'm not sure I'm one of those people who believes dying in battle is more glorious than dying anywhere else. Fighting to defend one's country certainly takes bravery, but so does living with a disease you know will kill you, and the latter doesn't come with glory or a salary. But we've all seemed to agree that death is bad and we should try to live as long as possible, and the thing about wars is that the people who fight them are young.

My DVR of This Week just showed me that the Pentagon released the names of four service members killed in our operations abroad this week. Of those four, only Specialist David A. Schaefer Jr., of Belleville, Illinois, was older than me. He was 27. Even the most ardent pacifist can appreciate that our soldiers are young, and when they die, they leave behind not just a life, family and friends like everyone else, but the potential for an entire life that goes unlived. So, if nothing else, take a moment at 3 p.m. tomorrow and think about all of the moments that our servicemen and women missed out on because they were taken in the course of protecting the country.