David Ignatius: How the Republicans Let It Slip Away

[highplainsdem]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/11/AR2005101101321.html


How the Republicans Let It Slip Away

By David Ignatius

Wednesday, October 12, 2005; Page A17

Watching the Republicans floundering over the past week, I can't help thinking of a school of beached whales. The leviathans of the GOP have boldly swum themselves onto this patch of dry sand, and it won't be easy for them to get back to open ocean.

The Republicans come to their present troubles from different directions: President Bush thought he was making a safe, pragmatic choice in nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, but this soulless maneuver enraged the party's right wing and set it on a fratricidal binge. Tom DeLay thought he was ramrodding a permanent Republican government, but he managed to get himself indicted and, well before that calamity, had angered House Republicans who concluded that "The Hammer's" leadership style was marching them off a cliff. Looming over all these little problems is the crucible of Iraq.

What's interesting is that most of these wounds are self-inflicted. They draw a picture of a party that, for all its seeming dominance, isn't prepared to be the nation's governing party. The hard right, which is the soul of the modern GOP, would rather be ideologically pure than successful. Governing requires making compromises and getting your hands dirty, but the conservative purists disdain those qualities. They swim for that beach with a fiercely misguided determination, and they demand that the other whales accompany them.

<snip>

What you sense now, as conservative and moderate Republicans alike take potshots at their president, is that the GOP is entering the post-Bush era. A war of succession has begun, cloaked in a war of principles. The cruelest aspect of Bush's predicament is that the conservatives are treating him with the same disdain they showed his father. What a denouement to the West Wing Oedipal drama: A son who did everything he could to avoid his father's humiliation by the conservative wing of the party is now under attack by the right himself.

<snip>

[AX10]

1. The GOP will never be able to govern this nation of ours.

The Democrats are the proven leaders time and time again. In the near future we will see a shift back to Democratic dominance in our government.

[yorkiemommie1]

2. ohhhh... the chickens are coming home to roost

all that ' political capital ' was just chickenshit.

how quickly these folks have gotten themselves hoisted by their own petard!