Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Whatever happened to the GOP?

My column in the Sky Hi News March 6, 2012
For a political junkie like me, this Republican contest for the presidential nomination has been like watching a hard fought game to determine who goes to the Super Bowl, yet the players do not resemble any team members I recognize. I wonder whatever happened to the GOP I used to know.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) concluded there is no middle road and has announced she will not run again. It appears the Senate has no room for a moderate Republican. Republicans are not my late father's party, either. There are new meanings attached to the GOP, the Grand Old Party's initials.

To my father, the Republican party was indeed Grand and that was his team. To him conservatism was looking at any extreme deviation from a policy he perceived had been successful, with skepticism and a “show me the policy will make things better” attitude. He supported the interests of private enterprise and promoted fiscal and self-responsibility, but not to the extent that he failed take into account societal and national needs. He voted for FDR twice and accepted Medicare as a necessity. He was solidly pro choice and he resented religion using the political process to advance theological missions.

Compromise was not a dirty word; it was what a rational democracy should do. Sen. Snowe and he would have been mostly on the same page.

The Grand Old Party is no longer constructively working with opponents to solve the nation's problems in the most economical and rational way. It has become the “Get Obama Party.” After all, the GOP opines, Obama alone is responsible for the size of the debt and he has failed to fix the worst crash since the Great Depression that George W Bush left him. The answer to all is to repeal Obama.

The reason they give is that the Obama future is causing the present woes. Their irrational position: We need to roll back the future to solve our current problems. They blame high unemployment and the faltering economy on Obama's health care plan, which will be implemented in 2014-2020, and Wall Street reform, which also not yet been implemented. The low tax structure carried over from the prior administration is not yet revamped and the Keystone pipeline (which Obama signals future approval) is years away. Funny: Somehow the jobs and GDP are mysteriously improving in spite of a president who the GOP claims is clearly a failure.

Mitt Romney, who sees himself as the Good Ol' boys Party standard bearer, just threw fiscal responsibility under the bus in his rush to dominate the Get Obama Party. His retooled tax plan is a tax cut chicken for every income bracket's pot. Unfortunately he failed the “show me” test of what government programs would be cut to pay for it, which loopholes would be closed, or how much revenue would be generated.

The rest of Romney's proposals are changes for the worst, not for the better. His panacea for 30 million unable to afford health care: Shove the responsibilities to states, which have not even the wherewithal to pay for traditional responsibilities of education, crime or infrastructure. To deal with the excesses of Wall Street that led to the biggest financial sector failure since the Great Depression, Romney wants to gut our protections provided us in Obama's reform legislation and to return to the practices that caused the crash of 2008. Like gas prices now? He advocates aggression and intervention in Iran, jeopardizing the straits of Hormuz, and most of the world's oil supply.

At least Romney is not trying to change the GOP into God's Own Party, as Rick Santorum wants, nor is he rocking the boat as Ron Paul proposes in his version of the GOP as Go On-Your-Own party with wacky economics, nor does he share the nihilism underlying mischiefmaking Gingrich's Ornery Party.

Nonetheless, I liked my father's version of the GOP better.

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