War for the Soul of the RNC

I am all over the board on the issue of the future of the Republican party. I keep reading the idea that the brand is so tarnished that it is not worth trying to salvage it. Conversely, I know the dangers of third parties in this country. They tend to fracture the coalitions that build the parties, leaving the party still in tact to benefit. We saw it with the election of Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton never saw more than forty five percent of the popular vote. However, the injection of Ross Perot into the election gave him the room he needed to win the election, both times. Our elections are that close that any defection guarantees a Democrat win.

The cold hard reality is that the Republican leadership has been steadily drifting slowly to the left for well over a decade. With every issue that they have abandoned core conservative principles, they have lost more and more members and supporters. Like a a tree shedding it's leaves, the Republican party has been leaving voters in a political no man's land. Through the years, I have watched the chasm grow through immigration issues, nation building, spending, political correctness and nearly every other left wing idea that comes down the pike.

I have seen it on the micro-level on the barometer of the state of the Republican party and largest conservative website, Free Republic. Countless members have left. Lines were drawn. Sides were taken. Bad blood and animosity formed. We were fractioning and with every issue it seemed we were doing it more and more.

So many of us were placated during the Bush years. I am guilty of this myself. He was our guy and, hell, he was not Clinton or (shudder) Al Gore. We were making money and times were good. Sure he was spending like a drunken sailor, sure the border was open, sure he seemed a little unprincipled but we hung on to the things he did right. Meanwhile, the party held onto to their belief that their future was on the left and march left they did.

I also accept we have a healthy contingent of people on the right who will never be happy. Nothing will ever be conservative enough for them. No one passes their litmus tests. The founding fathers could be reborn and brought back down to earth and the malcontents among us would find reasons why they are unprincipled and not true conservatives. They are problematic but not an excuse to accept leftism without abandon.

In the next two years, the fight for the soul of the Republican party will be fought out. We see the beginning salvos at this point. The election in upstate New York is one such pivotal event. We have a bonafide conservative Republican, Hoffman, standing up against a more liberal than the Democrat Republican, Scozzafava. There is a civil war happening in the Republican party at this very moment. The first front on this war is against the unprincipled and soulless RINOs. We must purge the party of the coreless and cowardly who have time and time again capitulated to the Democrats and inturn turned the country over to a merry band of real, live communists.

In the coming elections we will know the direction of the party and if our future lies as a part of it. In upstate New York, if Hoffman wins, there will be many nervous establishment Republicans. If Scozzafava wins, it will only harden their stance that the liberal Republican way is the way to go. Most importantly, these watershed elections are a test of our might and ability to effect the future of the nation.