David

Karki

Read David's bio and previous columns here

January 21, 2008

The GOP: Going the Way of the Whigs

South Carolina has had its turn at a Republican primary, and for conservatives it was a dismaying night. Fred Thompson could do no better than a distant third place, in a state that one would think would be tailor-made for him. Even if he stays in the race through Florida and into Super Tuesday, it would seem that he'll not be much of a factor.

This leaves a three-way race between John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. Rudy Giuliani may get back into this with a win in Florida, but if Thompson's performance yesterday is any indication, a late-arriving guy who hasn't been in the news recently probably shouldn't get his hopes up.

Even if Giuliani does turn it into a four-way race, it doesn't really change things insofar as conservatives go. There is no candidate that we can get behind, get enthusiastic about and really be for, as opposed to simply accepting the lesser of two evils, solely to prevent an even-worse Democrat from winning.

And let's be honest here: There is a certain point where this line of thinking is completely counter-productive. If we are going to become a European-style socialist country, and suffer the disastrous consequences of such an ill-advised leftward move, better to do this under a Democrat president so they can receive the full measure of responsibility and/or blame. The worst of all worlds would be to have a liberal Republican signing all the left-wing crap Sen. Reid and Speaker Pelosi would shovel out of Congress, so that the Democrats could still blame the GOP for the inevitable awful results.

Just as it took Jimmy Carter's stagflation and foreign-policy fecklessness to get America to turn to Ronald Reagan, so too might it take something worse than that to get what now appears to be a more liberal country to turn away from socialism's inexplicable allure.

By the same token, it might take a term or two in the political wilderness for the Republican Party to decide if it wants to survive or go the way of the Whigs and into oblivion.

We have seen in this primary that conservatism is no longer the driving principle of the GOP. The candidates that remain all embody P.J. O'Rourke's classic line about the motto of the party: We're just like the Democrats, only not quite as much!

Suffice it to say, the best any of them can hope for is that conservative voters are motivated to vote for them out of horror at the specter of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards. The best-case scenario for this Republican field is that such fear will be stronger than the motivation to vote third-party out of disdain for them. If the candidates won't even tack rightward during the primary, what chance is there that the winner will do so in the general election campaign? About the same as the temperature outside as I write this – less than zero.

This is no way to win in November. The GOP is well on its way to nominating someone who will make Bob Dole in 1996 look electable. And it might finally have reached the point where conservatives are no longer going to bail them out in November just to keep a Democrat out of the Oval Office. After all, if the Republican is nearly the same anyway, what's the point of the effort? It's like choosing between arsenic, strychnine and cyanide. Either way, you're just as dead.

The only solace I take in what seems to be conservatism's defeat and possibly death is this: Being in Minnesota, a state that has no chance of going Republican, my vote is hardly going to matter anyway. And when the Republican Convention is held here in the Twin Cities this August, we'll get to observe the outright absurdity of MoveOn.org wackos militantly protesting a party whose acceptance of their liberal policies is about to give them back the complete Democratic control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue that they have so lusted for since the moment they lost it in 1994. How ironic that they lost it because of Hillary's attempt to have government take over health care, something that appears to have been enthusiastically embraced some 14 years later.

And that instead of protesting the GOP, they should be thanking the GOP and quietly getting out of the way while their opponent commits suicide.

What was it that Karl Marx said about history repeating itself, first as tragedy, second as farce? (Hey, he might actually have been right once. It still doesn't make up for giving the world the evil known as communism, but it's something.) 

But one humorous moment cannot make up for what appears about to inevitably happen. A party seems ready to step off the cliff into the abyss. It would seem that nothing can stop it, and we can only hope it doesn't take the nation down with it. 

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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