A growing trend of people gettting fed up.
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By: Kevin Tuma
The Republican Party has been taking ideological conservatives for granted
for a long time. For years, the party elite has done so with no small measure of arrogance or disdain. "Where else are they going to go to vote?"
they have privately snickered, martinis in hand, "..To the Reform Party?"
The chickens are coming home to roost. The GOP needs votes now, badly, and the only strong vote-polarizing element on the political landscape, William Jefferson Clinton, is retreating into the fuzzy shadows.
The balance of power between Republicans and Democrats in Washington is razor-thin. Twenty GOP Senators are up for re- election, versus only fourteen Democrats. The party of the sitting President typically loses seats
during such midterm elections. The Republicans may well lose the Senate. And
in the House, the GOP precariously clings to a five-seat majority there as well.
What that means is that by 2004, the Republicans stand a very good chance of
losing the Executive Branch, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.
This would represent a unprecedented loss of power for the Republican Party, and, with the state of political bias being what it is in the news media, possibly one that would have teeth for quite awhile.
The biggest problem is that the Republican Party has begun, more and more in recent years, to live up to its reputation as 'The Party of the Rich'. The GOP rich are not right-wing zealots; they are cosmopolitan and 'enlightened'--and they control what passes for conservative policy. The
ones who stuff their war chest come first; the populists and the gun owners and the constitutionalists ride in the back of the bus. Party elitists like to pretend that this exclusion isn't taking a toll, but they are in denial.
Like erosion, attrition grinds away slowly and steadily, until its afflicted target no longer has any foundation. The middle-class conservative base is walking away, and voting with its feet. This is the state of the current Republican Party that has turned its backs on the likes of Barry Goldwater,
not to mention the Founding Fathers. Only Third Party activists fret over constitutional principles anymore; the post- Reagan GOP ran off such rude philosophers a long time ago.
The Libertarian Party isn't much of a threat to the GOP now--but it could become one at any time. Right now the Libertarians are essentially a think tank as much as a political party, but much of what they think is close to the heart of what most real conservatives think. Libertarians believe in the sanctity of the Second Amendment--along with the rest of the Bill of Rights
in general---abolishing the Income Tax, and ending the War on Drugs.
How appealing is the relative wimpitude of a measly $1 trillion dollar tax cut, phased in slowly over a decade, versus the idea of abolishing the Income tax altogether? It can be done--but to abolish the current tax system would require courage---something that's in very short supply in the Republican Party these days.