Self Destruction, Not Self Examination As The Republicans Lurch Into The Future

No one expected the Republican Party to be able to get back on its feet quickly after the drubbing it received seven months ago this week, but its ongoing quest for self destruction -- as opposed to self examination -- reveals what a burned out shell it has become.

I say this with only a trace of schadenfreude. While the Grand Old Party deserved the licking it got, I am much more interested in its revival than relishing its self-immolation. Being stuck with a two-party system, Americans need it to be viable and not a lop-sided caricature.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who knows a thing or two about personal wealth, once said that Republicans are about supporting efforts to generate it while Democrats are about finding ways to share it.

That, it seems to me, is a central contradiction of today's GOP, and while it might have been a winning formula during the Reagan Revolution, that political movement was never what it was cracked up to be and has long had a stake through its heart despite the frequent evocation of the Gipper by party elders longing for the good old days. In other words, winning elections.

I would take things a step or two further than Gates and suggest that today's GOP is not just about generating personal wealth, but about keeping it from anyone who does not march to its own beat. These include a strangled middle class, people who lack the resources to get well when they fall ill, and that rising immigrant class, many of them illegals.

The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has revealed the Republican Party at its most crass, hypocritical and vulnerable.

According to the Republican calculus, while right-wing Justice Samuel Alito has an up-from-poverty story not unlike Sotomayor's, he is white and earned his stripes the hard way, while Sotomayor, despite being a top student at Princeton (Alito's alma mater) and Yale Law (ditto), was the beneficiary of affirmative action and so is less than whole. In other words, and in a manifestation of a particular GOP obsession, she is not American enough.

Factor in her ethnicity and she is even less than that by the GOP's lights. Because even beyond the racist wingnuttery of Rush Limbaugh, one of the party's three loudest voices, it has worked hard to drive people of color and Hispanics in particular from its temple.

In one of the more stunning electoral reversals of the 10 presidential elections that I have covered as a reporter, editor and blogger, Hispanic voters fled the party in droves in 2008 and voted by a 2-1 margin for Barack Obama despite the inherent cultural and religious conservatism that had figured them as one of the few growing segments of a party that needed to attract voters who were not grouchy old white men like Newt Gingrich, another of the party's loudest voices. His keen intellect could be an engine for change but is subsumed by his gutter instincts.

Wait! It gets worse. The Republican core consistently names abortion as the most important issue while the voter mainstream is focused on affordable health care, decent education for their kids and other issues not even on the GOP's radar.

Dick Cheney is the third of the party's loudest voices and has managed the neat feat of keeping fresh in voters' minds the failures and grotesqueries of the last eight years of which he was so big a part through a campaign of willful obfuscation and demagoguery that kicked off within hours of Barack Obama's inauguration and continues full bore.

It is not just that Limbaugh, Gingrich and Cheney are poster children for the Republican Party's failed policies. They are grouchy old white male chicken hawks whose ages average out at 65 at a time when the median voting age is 25 years younger and is likely to become younger still.

The GOP's only hope of getting back on its feet is to attract moderate candidates.

But if the defecation on the Senate campaign of popular Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who has dared to question whether those loud voices should be determining his party's future is any indication, and it is, the party's shriveled core is much more concerned about purity than popularity.

Then there is former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, who won the party's New Jersey gubernatorial primary yesterday and has a chance to unseat the unpopular Jon Corzine in the fall. That task may be easier than being accepted by the party's national establishment since Christie is a moderate on social issues and cannot win in this most liberal of states if he hews to the conservative Republican playbook.

Let's see: Looking out for the rich while marginalizing the middle class and poor. Preferring personal rights to civil rights. Seeing multiculturalism as a pox on the national house. Engaging in flaming bigotry as Americans move into a post-racial future with the election of the first African-American president. Blaming that president for their own sins. Insisting on refighting culture wars long ago lost.

A losing formula if ever there was one.

Image by John Lund/Getty