I read it this morning and all I could think was, this is what passes for thoughtful in the modern-day Republican Party? Really?
For starters, the authors maintain that:
...the resounding Republican midterm victory in 2010 now seems more like an aberration—a temporary backlash to presidential overreach—than evidence of an upward trend.
Really? Overreach? Is that what that was?
Or were Democrats punished because they were in control of the White House and both houses of Congress when the worst recession since the Great Depression kicked in, in 2009 and 2010. If you lost your job during that period, or saw your 401k and/or house decline in value, or whatever, wouldn't you naturally blame the party in power and want to "throw the bums out?" Or would health care reform -- which polled so well leading up to the 2008 election (and doesn't even fully take effect until 2014!) -- really drive everyone to the polls to vote Republican? I just can't see that.
As for Gerson and Wehner's "prescriptions" for the GOP, the two recommend -- for starters -- that it turn its back on the rich, large corporations, banks, xenophobes and the anti-science crowd -- in other words, the Republican Party base. Whom do they think will be left to vote for them?
About the only "thoughtful" thing I found in this piece was the following:
And it is no wonder that Republican policies can seem stale; they are very nearly identical to those offered up by the party more than 30 years ago. For Republicans to design an agenda that applies to the conditions of 1980 is as if Ronald Reagan designed his agenda for conditions that existed in the Truman years.
And they're right about that. One of the biggest problems Republicans have is that for them it's always 1980. They don't seem to realize that the world has changed, today's problems are different from the ones Reagan faced in the 1980s, and that the GOP must come up with new solutions to today's problems.
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