CON GAMES: The Conservative Party Wants You!

May 6th, 2009 at 06:58am Michael Conniff 2

Out with the old brand, in with the new.

At a time when the pathetic, peripatetic National Council for a New America—yes, another conservative puppet show—the answer to the salvation of the Republican Party is staring the punditocracy square in the face.

Want a new brand?

How about killing the Republican Party and replacing it with the far more powerful Conservative Party?

The Grand Old Party is dead as a doornail anyway: an elephant with elephantiasis. At worst, polls put self-identified Republicans at 21 percent; at best it’s 31 percent. In either case the decline is terminal. As Gerald Seib writes in The Wall Street Journal: “More important, a larger share of Americans now call themselves Democrats than Republicans in every region of the country, including the South, which the GOP likes to think of as its remaining bastion. Democrats also outnumber Republicans in every age group.”

Bad news for the Right, right? But not nearly so bad as you think. The salvation of the Republican Party lies in its imminent death: only then can it be re-born as “The Conservative Party.” Some 35 percent of people call themselves “conservative,” according to The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, compared to 24 percent who say they are “liberal.” Forty percent of those who say they are conservatives in the poll are not Republicans. Another chunk of 35 percent call themselves “independent” according to the poll.

When Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania defected to the Democrats, the last of the Republican moderates this side of Maine was given the heave-ho by the party faithful. Olympia Snow and Susan Collins of the great state of Maine are the only ones left. So why bother with the Republicans when the label is politically bankrupt and permanently disfigured by eight years of Bush-Cheney producing nothing but empty calories?

It’s time for conservatives to move on by moving forward into a Conservative Party based on lower taxes, smaller government, and what is euphemistically known as “a strong national defense.” But that’s not nearly enough. For this to go anywhere the Con Party has to revise conservative thinking on health care, the environment, empire building, and maybe even American exceptionalism. The remnants of the Republican Party will have to move as Conservatives to the real world where real people live. Time to jettison the rhetoric and the sound bytes….but only if the want to win.

Can the remnants of the Republican Party suck it up and get it done? Probably not just yet: there are still too many elections to be lost.

Entry Filed under: Politics, Con Games, United Post