These days, it can't be fun to be a republican. Not that I feel sorry for them, because they did it to themselves. And to think that these people were accusing democrats of having an identity crisis just a couple of years ago. It's clear that the struggle for the soul of the republican party is happening before our eyes.
In a brilliant essay in the Washington Post, Jonah Goldberg outlines the problem. The republican field is fatally flawed. Each candidate, in Goldberg's words, is "ill-suited to the times we're in." That has got to be the understatement of the year.
Many more republicans are "pro-government" conservatives, and are not particularly concerned with the staples of Reaganism being touted on the campaign trail. These folks actually care about helping people and keeping tax rates the same. But they want to do it with a Christian flare, which is simply unpalpable to the traditional base, who prefer to stick with the separation between church and state.
Goldberg's most hilarious analogy:
...there's a huge crowd of self-described conservatives standing around the Republican elephant shouting "Do something!" But what they want the poor beast to do is very unclear. And it doesn't take an expert in pachyderm psychology to know that if a big enough mob shouts at an elephant long enough, the most likely result will be a mindless stampede -- in this case, either to general election defeat or to disastrously unconservative policies, or both.
The traditional conservative believes that if you don't have a good idea for what an elephant should be doing, the best course is to encourage it to do nothing at all. Alas, the chorus shouting, "Don't just do something, stand there!" shrinks by the day.
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