January 29, 2013--The Beginning of the End of the Stupid Party
Bobby Jindal is not going to be the Republican candidate for president in 2016, but he has been the GOP truth-teller since Mitt Romney lost the election to Barack Obama.
A day or two after Romney's defeat Jindal spoke forcefully about what the Republican Party needed to do in order to again be able to contend successfully for the presidency. Forget all his own positions on immigration, guns, climate change, and science (he's in favor of eliminating the teaching of evolution in public school), he called for the GOP to stop being the "dumb party."
Mind you, he was not speaking out of conviction, but as a well-educated fellow (he went to Brown and then Oxford) he knew how to count.
As a South-Asian himself (his actual first name is Piyush), he read the demographic tea leaves and by projecting the numbers into the future figured out what the Obama folks had already figured out--that this country is fast becoming a minority-majority country, with people of color inexorably coming to control national politics.
Republicans, he at the time said, and has reiterated subsequently, need to stop saying all those "stupid" things about the climate, women, the poor, taxes, immigrants, entitlements, and minorities and get with the 21st century.
And, lo-and-behold, in recent days the Republican Party has started to sound reasonable. Yesterday a fully bipartisan group pf senators introduced legislation that includes a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, over the weekend Eric Cantor told other Republican leaders that it is time to stop talking only about cutting domestic programs, and others have been attempting to reposition themselves as friends of the poor and disenfranchised.
These are not just attempts to repackage old regressive policies in new rhetoric. That would have been expected if Republicans could have convinced themselves that the reason they lost to Obama was only because they had a loser of a candidate--that it wasn't because of their fundamental positions and the felt need to pander to their rapidly shrinking Tea Party base. (Even Fox news said goodbye to Sarah Palin, not renewing her contract for next year.)
Perceiving that demographics is political destiny and that rigging elections by suppressing minority voter turnout and scamming the way in which the Electoral College works is not going to overcome these tectonic changes in the American population, Republicans are beginning to realize that if they are to have a future they have to chance in more than cosmetic ways.
Unless they do so, in a couple of election cycles, because of population changes, Texas could easily become a blue or Democratic state; and if and when that happens Republicans, as constituted, will never be able to amass enough Electoral College votes to recapture the White House.
Everyone, very much including progressives, should welcome this--if we care about the country we should want a robust two-party system and we should focus more on seeing good policies enacted and less on who does or does not get elected.
I am not naively suggesting that Republicans' hearts are changing, just that their behavior is. To adapt a vivid and vulgar quote from Lyndon Johnson, "If their behavior changes, their hearts and minds will follow."
A day or two after Romney's defeat Jindal spoke forcefully about what the Republican Party needed to do in order to again be able to contend successfully for the presidency. Forget all his own positions on immigration, guns, climate change, and science (he's in favor of eliminating the teaching of evolution in public school), he called for the GOP to stop being the "dumb party."
Mind you, he was not speaking out of conviction, but as a well-educated fellow (he went to Brown and then Oxford) he knew how to count.
As a South-Asian himself (his actual first name is Piyush), he read the demographic tea leaves and by projecting the numbers into the future figured out what the Obama folks had already figured out--that this country is fast becoming a minority-majority country, with people of color inexorably coming to control national politics.
Republicans, he at the time said, and has reiterated subsequently, need to stop saying all those "stupid" things about the climate, women, the poor, taxes, immigrants, entitlements, and minorities and get with the 21st century.
And, lo-and-behold, in recent days the Republican Party has started to sound reasonable. Yesterday a fully bipartisan group pf senators introduced legislation that includes a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, over the weekend Eric Cantor told other Republican leaders that it is time to stop talking only about cutting domestic programs, and others have been attempting to reposition themselves as friends of the poor and disenfranchised.
These are not just attempts to repackage old regressive policies in new rhetoric. That would have been expected if Republicans could have convinced themselves that the reason they lost to Obama was only because they had a loser of a candidate--that it wasn't because of their fundamental positions and the felt need to pander to their rapidly shrinking Tea Party base. (Even Fox news said goodbye to Sarah Palin, not renewing her contract for next year.)
Perceiving that demographics is political destiny and that rigging elections by suppressing minority voter turnout and scamming the way in which the Electoral College works is not going to overcome these tectonic changes in the American population, Republicans are beginning to realize that if they are to have a future they have to chance in more than cosmetic ways.
Unless they do so, in a couple of election cycles, because of population changes, Texas could easily become a blue or Democratic state; and if and when that happens Republicans, as constituted, will never be able to amass enough Electoral College votes to recapture the White House.
Everyone, very much including progressives, should welcome this--if we care about the country we should want a robust two-party system and we should focus more on seeing good policies enacted and less on who does or does not get elected.
I am not naively suggesting that Republicans' hearts are changing, just that their behavior is. To adapt a vivid and vulgar quote from Lyndon Johnson, "If their behavior changes, their hearts and minds will follow."
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:15 AM
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