This is what they fight about… what to call the opposing party.

From the Associated Press:

By BEN EVANS, Associated Press Writer Ben Evans, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – Republican Party leaders are trying to avoid a public confrontation over a GOP-led effort to rename the Democratic Party the “Nationalist Socialist Democrat” party.

The Republican National Committee is slated to vote on several resolutions Wednesday. Leaders already have softened one that would have pointedly criticized Republicans who supported recent billion-dollar bailouts.

Party Chairman Michael Steele and others say the party should also drop the renaming resolution and focus on more serious problems. To avoid a party dispute over the renaming, they were trying to compromise on milder language that would simply criticize Democrats for what they call socialist tendencies.

The fight reflects a divide between Republicans who want a more centrist message and party hardliners.

Rush’s latest theory?  That the whole objective of Obama’s economic plan is unemployment.  According to Limbaugh, de facto leader of the GOP, this is President Obama’s master plan to get reparations for the whole slavery thing.

“This is the objective. The objective is unemployment. The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. And the objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return to it to the nation’s quote, “rightful owners.” Think reparations. Think forced reparations here if you want to understand what actually is going on.”

And this is the guy Dick Cheney believes is representative of the real Republican Party.

No, not that McCain.

The San Francisco Chronicle features an article about Meghan McCain today.  I’m a fan of hers, and do believe that she’s a step in the right direction for a struggling GOP.

The 24-year-old daughter of U.S. Sen. John McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential candidate, is a regular political blogger and most certainly not her mother Cindy’s serene, St. John-suit-wearing stereotype of a Republican woman.

In brash blog posts on the Daily Beast – “The GOP doesn’t understand sex” – and outpouring of posts on Twitter, she has described herself as a pro-sex, “pro-life, pro-gay-marriage Republican,” one who experts say may be at the forefront of a new GOP breed: the “Meghan McCain Republican.”

That GOP faction is younger and interested in fiscal responsibility and less government involvement in people’s lives, while supporting environmentalism and civic engagement. They’re part of the millennial generation, the largest and most diverse generation in American history, whose voters – born starting in the early 1980s – cast ballots for Barack Obama by a more than 2-to-1 ratio.

Lately, when you think of the Republican Party, what names do you see in the news?  Newt Gingrich?  John McCain?  Dick Cheney?  Rush Limbaugh?

Not exactly a group of young upstarts.

Imagine you’re a 20-something and you’re just now beginning to show interest in the political process.  One one hand, you’ve got a young, vibrant President who seems intelligent, logical, calm, and current.  But maybe you don’t agree with some of his policies.  Maybe you find the price tags of his budget proposals outlandish (at best), or downright dangerous (at worst).  Maybe you don’t believe that government has any place in private enterprise.  Maybe you’re looking for another solution to the problems facing our country today.

So you look across the aisle, and what do you see?

To put it bluntly, you see a bunch of old white guys who seem to enjoy complaining about shit:

Dick Cheney, who seemingly is incapable of shutting up about torturing people to keep America “safe.”

Newt Gingrich, who appears on any tv show that’ll have him, even though he hasn’t held office in ten years.

John McCain — who I still find to be an honorable man — but who got swept up in the presidential campaign playbook laid out by Karl Rove and George W. Bush.  I remain convinced that the 2000 version of John McCain gives Barack Obama a run for his money in 2008.

Rush Limbaugh.  I have no comment here.

But I believe a case can still be made for the return of the GOP.  To do so, they’ll need to resurrect the ghosts of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and polish up their ideologies a little to jibe with the 21st century:  Emphasize individual liberties without government intrusion, something the modern GOP has seemingly abandoned.  Reduce the role of government in the everyday lives of its citizens.  Make the case that though government shouldn’t be the solution to your problems, it can be there to lend a helping hand.  Reduce the theological overtones and emphasize the freedom to celebrate one’s religious choices.  Eliminate the litmus-test of abortion.  Accept the voices of science and intellectualism, and understand that sometimes those voices will say things you don’t want to hear.  And make it crystal clear that the way you defend The Constitution is just as important as the act of defending it.

As it stands now, there is no room in the GOP for people who believe in those things (just ask Limbaugh or Cheney).  The Libertarian Party seems to be the ideal fit.  But like it or not, we live in a two-party system, and third-party candidates tend to end up being nothing more than spoilers.

The GOP needs a reboot — badly.

Adam Mendelsohn, who was a spokesman for John McCain’s presidential campaign and is a California-based GOP strategist, said such concerns underscore what may be the GOP’s most critical “rebranding” problem: younger voters.

“The party and its leadership has become totally out of touch with where voters under 30 are,” he said. “Typically, when … you talk to Republican pooh-bahs, they dismiss them. They say, ‘Wait until they get older and understand taxes.’

“But they don’t realize these voters are those whose positioning is hardening,” he said. Millennials “don’t see the world like a 65-year-old whose opinions were formulated during the Cold War. … The Republican Party has to start actually talking about ideas and issues that resonate with these voters.”

As previously documented in this blog, Rush Limbaugh doesn’t agree with Colin Powell’s desire to reform the Republican Party.  In fact, Limbaugh wishes Powell would leave the GOP altogether.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has chosen a side.

“If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh. My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican.”

A running theme on my blog has been the self-destruction of the GOP on an intellectual level — the party of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon has become the party of George W. Bush and Sarah Palin.  Intellectual incuriosity has been branded as “realism,” and science has been branded as “elitism.”

The Economist weighs in:

The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. Ha ha. During the primary debates, three out of ten Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution.

The Republican Party’s divorce from the intelligentsia has been a while in the making. The born-again Mr Bush preferred listening to his “heart” rather than his “head”. He also filled the government with incompetent toadies like Michael “heck-of-a-job” Brown, who bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr McCain, once the chattering classes’ favourite Republican, refused to grapple with the intricacies of the financial meltdown, preferring instead to look for cartoonish villains. And in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics.

Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.

This is happening at a time when the American population is becoming more educated. More than a quarter of Americans now have university degrees. Twenty per cent of households earn more than $100,000 a year, up from 16% in 1996. Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster, notes that 69% call themselves “professionals”. McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the number of jobs requiring “tacit” intellectual skills has increased three times as fast as employment in general. The Republican Party’s current “redneck strategy” will leave it appealing to a shrinking and backward-looking portion of the electorate.

Why is this happening? One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal. Many conservatives—particularly lower-income ones—are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders. They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity. And they regard Mrs Palin’s apparent ignorance not as a problem but as a badge of honour.

Conservative Congressman Ron Paul lays it down.

Some highlights:

In the rise and fall of the recent Republican reign of power these past decades, the goal of the party had grown to be only that of gaining and maintaining power — with total sacrifice of the original Republican belief in shrinking the size of government.

The Republican Congress never once stood up against the Bush/Rove machine that demanded support for unconstitutional wars, attacks on civil liberties here at home, and an economic policy based on more spending, more debt, and more inflation — while constantly preaching the flawed doctrine that deficits don’t matter as long as taxes aren’t raised.

But what the Republican leadership didn’t realize was that ALL spending is a tax on middle-class Americans through price inflation and that eventually the inevitable consequence is paying for the extravagance with a financial crisis.

After eight years of perpetual (and unnecessary and unconstitutional) war, persistent and expanded attacks on our privacy, runaway deficits, and now nationalization of the financial system, Republicans are going to have a tough time regaining the confidence of the American people. But that’s what must be done.

“War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.”

– George Orwell

One of the running memes, I’m finding, among conservatives is that the anti-intellectual movement that the GOP has run with for the past decade has come to a head.  George W. Bush was the poster boy for ordinary, folksy charm… until Sarah Palin was introduced to the world stage and blew it wide open.  Here was a woman who took pride in being intellectually incurious, as she famously displayed during her controversial interview with Katie Couric:

“I’m not one of those who maybe come from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduated college and their parents get them a passport and a backpack and say, ‘Go off and travel the world.’ Noooo. I worked all my life. In fact, I  usually had two jobs all my life, until I had kids. … I was not part of, I guess, that culture.”

But I think the GOP is starting to recognize its shortfalls in championing the ordinary and vilifying excellence.  The fact is, the majority of this country, though not necessarily intellectually “elite,” consider themselves at the very least somewhat intelligent and well-versed.  The country knows all issues aren’t necessarily black vs. white, good vs. bad, pro-America vs. anti-America.  We recognize that there are subtle nuances to every aspect of our lives; and dumbing every issue down to “this” vs. “that,” without even the desire to thoughtfully discuss or debate the subject is inevitably viewed as short-sighted and overly-simplistic.

Kathleen Parker, conservative columnist who famously pleaded the case that Sarah Palin should’ve withdrawn from the ticket, has added her voice to the chorus of many conservative pundits yearning for a shift away from the dumbed-down populism that has taken over the GOP (emphasis mine):

But something else also caused many to jump ship even though, philosophically, a leap toward Obama carried significant risk. Despite conflicts of self-interest, many conservatives shifted away for what we might call the “P Factor”: Sarah Palin. It wasn’t only her selection as McCain’s running mate, which becomes more unbelievable each day as previously off-the-record tidbits are surfacing. More important is what the “P Factor” revealed about the party itself.

It has become angry and ordinary.

And, oh, by the way, proud of it.

We saw that starkly as Palin whipped up crowds, winking her way through attacks against Obama that telegraphed, “He’s not one of us.” We saw the cackling white man toting an Obama monkey to a rally and listened slack-jawed as country singer Gretchen Wilson belted out “Redneck Woman” while Palin clapped and lip-synched her favorite song.

Palin was the embodiment of ordinariness, despite her comely packaging, and managed while invoking the Christian God to repel our better angels.

What a great many others saw was someone out of her depth, whose lack of knowledge—and apparent lack of intellectual curiosity—was a bonding agent with the Republican base. To concern oneself with trivial details such as what countries are part of NAFTA was to be derided as elitist. And everybody knows Republicans hate elitists.

Well, nobody likes elitists, really. But we certainly do aspire to become elites in our various fields of endeavor. Joe the Plumber undoubtedly considers himself an elite among those who keep the water flowing. Would a self-respecting Republican fail to acknowledge the desirability of military elites such as the Force Recon Marines, Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, Army Rangers, or Air Force Commandos?

Might we not also want the country to be led by equally elite folks, well-versed in history, geography, foreign policy, and economics? It isn’t necessary that a vice president be able to pass the Foreign Service exam, but she ought to be able to demonstrate that she has read a newspaper in the past year or so. Among new information surfacing from inside the McCain campaign is that Palin didn’t know that Africa is a continent rather than a country unto itself. Is it mean and cowardly for anonymous campaign aides to whisper these anecdotes to the media, as Palin defenders insist? Or shouldn’t we, without snickering, admit that such things matter?

Palin covered her inadequacies with folksy charm and by drumming up a class war, turning her audiences not just against elites but against the party’s own educated members. The movement created by that superelite, but never elitist, William F. Buckley Jr. was handed over to Joe Six-Pack. Know-nothingness was no longer a stigma, but a badge of honor.

Mark Lilla writes a fantastic article about the fall of intellectualism in favor of “Populist Chic.”

Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders’ intellectual virtues — indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

The chairman of the Virginia GOP links Barack Obama to Osama Bin Laden.

According to a report in this week’s Time magazine, the Virginia party chairman, Del. Jeffrey M. Frederick (R-Prince William), told Virginia volunteers working for GOP nominee John McCain that Obama and bin Laden “both have friends that bombed the Pentagon.”

“That is scary,” Frederick said while providing talking points to GOP volunteers in western Prince William County as they prepared for a door-to-door canvass.

Several McCain surrogates have blasted Obama for his association with Ayers, but few, if any, have invoked bin Laden.

Considering that for the first time in a long time Virginia is being called a “battleground” state, the GOP hasn’t exactly handled the Commonwealth well.

First, Bobby May, McCain’s GOP campaign manager in Buchanan County, drops a racially-tinged article in the local newspaper.  Then, McCain’s brother labels Northern Virginia as “communist country.”

I mean, the GOP understands that they’re trying to win this state, right?