I continue to be fascinated to watch the historic realignment of the republican party, and finally I feel like I'm hearing a rational new voice: social wedge issues and bigotry will not win the party a meaningful share of the electorate in the years to come. Intolerance as the basis of party loyalty just isn't the direction we're headed, unless there's a spate of terrorist acts in the U.S. and the electorate reverts to the policies of panic.Steve Schmidt, John McCain's former top adviser, came out on Thursday (so to speak) and said that the Republican party risks becoming a strictly religious party if they continue to oppose gay marriage, or at least gay unions. Amen. Any connected progressive has got to want the Republican party to stop leaning on and fomenting hate as a tool for votes.
If they return to their roots - fiscal conservativism, federalism, isolationist trade policies - at least they will simultaneously bring their loyal membership into an alignment with integrity, respect, and honesty, too. These eight years have seen the total collapse of the party's core integrity, and they have got to recover that not only to continue to be meaningful, but to stop being just tragically ugly.
And if Obama continues as he has done to date, I just don't think fear is going to be a winning strategy anyway.
