Is the immigration debate tearing apart the Republican Party? It seems so:
The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors’ rebellion over President Bush’s immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Friday in The Washington Times.
Faced with an estimated 40 percent fall-off in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee’s chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff last week and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, the fired staffers told The Times…
There has been a sharp decline in contributions from RNC phone solicitations, another fired staffer said, reporting that many former donors flatly refuse to give more money to the national party if Mr. Bush and the Senate Republicans insist on supporting what these angry contributors call “amnesty” for illegal aliens.
At the center of the storm is GOP Chairman Randy Pullen — who edged out 38-year-old fundraising machine Lisa James by only four votes during that January election. He made national news this week for standing up for the party’s grassroots rather than the state’s two U.S. senators…
Pullen publicized the concerns about Kyl, in response, he said, to a flood of calls and letters from angry Republicans.
His critical remarks drew the attention of the national media, and by Wednesday he was playing hardball with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. On the Fox News Channel, anchor Brit Hume declared: “That battle in the Senate over immigration legislation seems mild compared to the fight in Arizona between state GOP conservatives and Arizona’s two Republican senators.”
Hot Air’s Bryan comments:
I’m not saying anything here that most of our readers don’t already know, but I do know that we have readers in the White House and in Congress. I hope they’re watching what’s happening to the AZ GOP, and realize that smearing the base while pushing legislation that the base despises could very well destroy the party as we know it. I wouldn’t be shocked at all to see the next opinion polls put the president’s approval rating at 20% or less, which would be yet another historic low.
What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker–”At this point the break became final.” That’s not what’s happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.
The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.
This entire immigration debate will hurt Bush more than I initially anticipated. Bush seems to alienate the conservative base, the very ones who brought him into power. Now, Bush and McCain et al. are effectively labeling those who do not support the immigration bill racists. One problem: the conservative base does not support the immigration bill. This means that Bush calls his most loyal supporters, the ones who stood by him during his entire presidency, even when it was obvious that he screwed up Iraq tremendously, racists.
The conservative base is now distancing itself from, or breaking with, Bush. Bush, it seems to me, has squandered it. There was a conservative coalition that brough him to power. If the coalition falls apart, Bush himself is severely weakened. GOP Senators will, in the end, do what is best for their political career, not what is best for Bush. This means that if the conservative base truly raises its voice in objection to the immigration bill, more and more Senators will refuse to support it.
One might wonder, who will benefit from this? My answer:
- people like Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson who reject the immigration bill
- the Democrats: if the conservative base is not motivated, it will not vote
More at Wizbang, Blue Crab Boulevard, Right Wing News and Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler.
I have to agree with Peggy Noonan in part. The White House has indeed been a poor example of leadership for the party. Bush has pretty much said this is where we are going, hitch up your seatbelt and close your eyes.
After the debacle in Iraq and the loss of an election by voters that abandoned the Republicans because of the war not because of other issues, we are now seeing a grand scheme hatched in party by the libertarian wing of the conservative party and in no small part aided by Democrats for the Repbublican party to reinvent themselves.
This is classical because the Democrats could not make any inroads into their bastion of strength by any other means other then becoming antiwar.
On almost all the things that matter the conservative values of the Republican party are at the heart and soul of what a majority of Americans believe. Even many Democrats hold dear many of the principals of the conservative way of life.
Yet here we have this call to reinvent themselves. Okay I take great exception to that. I do not take exception to the fact that the Republican party is in disarray but that they do in fact need to reinvent themselves.
The party simply needs to embrace once again those values that made them a powerful force. A force Democrats could not defeat at the polls on a national level.
Instead we have a call to change, to moderate and the leading candidate in the party is ANTI gay, ANTI abortion, PRO gun control. With the lefts continual pounding and help the right is being asked to throw off its greatest supporter. The religious right.
Led by a party that has a Godless Agenda in which the throwing out of God and all his values so that we can have Godless laws is at the heart and soul of its leadership, how can we as Americans stand by and ask that the Republicans moderate when what they really mean is to throw off God, throw out religion and become like us.
That is certainly reshaping the party in the Democrats image.
This is why the entire party is waiting for Fred Thompson to step into the fray. Because he offers conservative values that are not Democratic talking points. He offers to lead the Republicans back to the roots that made them strong.
He offers hope. He probably will not win the election unless Bush steps up to the plate in the next year and LEADS the party once again. But he will help the Republicans restore their roots, their core values on a reexamination of who and what they believe.
This is why Fred Thompson is getting so much Attention by the Democrats. Their grand hope is that this won’t happen and that the party remains in disarray. They know Thompson will bring them together.
[...] Bruce, Right Wing Nut House, MyDD, Wonkette, Michael P.F. van der Galiën, Flopping Aces, My Left Wing, Six Meat Buffet, Moonbattery, CorrenteWire, Outside The Beltway, Hot [...]
It’s quite simple: immigration is the main issue where the religious right and business interest factions of the GOP disagree. Hence, conflict. There is no possible way to resolve this issue without a firestorm within the GOP.
Also, Michael:
Very nice site design… except for the long list of categories which makes the page extremely long!
Well it must be too early for me because I see that I said
Instead we have a call to change, to moderate and the leading candidate in the party is ANTI gay, ANTI abortion, PRO gun control.
I meant to say is PRO gay, PRO Abortion and PRO gun control.
[...] This entire immigration debate will hurt Bush more than I initially anticipated. Bush seems to alienate the conservative base, the very ones who brought him into power. Now, Bush and McCain et al. are effectively labeling those who do not support the immigration bill racists. Continue reading this. [...]
“Godless agenda?” What are you talking about? Democrats believe in the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Politicians are manipulative enough without adding religion to the mix. Once you do, you get people like Tom DeLay, who said this week that God had spoken to him about reviving the Republican majority. (Of course its a shame that God didn’t speak to him about all of those ethics charges and TRMPAC money-laundering, lol)
I have a semi-long rant riffing on sweet Peggy’s demure piece entitled “PN sees Bush Deranged” which exaggerates her ire:
“Peggy is being too kind. GWB has the lack of depth and perspective a C-student at Yale who never cracked a book might be expected to have. Although his reasons for invading Iraq were not ironclad, we gave him the benefit of the doubt. But he devolved the peace after the war into the hands of a total arrogant incompetant named Rumsfeld, who grabbed the development of democracy from seasoned “professionals like Jay Garner and his team, and gave it to a loyalist hack named Bremer. And GWB was somnambulent as Ken Lay was at Enron, allowing “experts” like Cheney and Rumsfeld to overrule Shinseki and do a peace on the cheap. Of course, it was new wine into old wineskins and the seams broke.”
“Peggy does a somber sum-up that reflects my own misgivings—especially about Poppy Bush and his singular insouciance about taxes and the economy that led to Perot. Then his son squandered trillions with a Republican Senate resembling Ali Baba and his forty thieves. GWB is now realizing that the Dems write the history books and is trying to salvage his reputation by serving as Teddy Kennedy’s tea-boy, the same Kennedy who in ‘65 promised that that Immigration Law would “not allow a million immigrants a year nor change the ethnic composition of the country.” both of which it eventually did. [ditto '86]”
“Now REAL conservatives will have to latch onto a real Republican of the Reagan/Goldwater stripe—not transplanted Rockefeller Easterners affecting drawls and down-home cowboy charm. Like Fred Thompson or Romney. Peggy continues with a sad summary of the Bush Betrayal Family Tradition, both father and son wobbly and spineless…”
But to keep the SCOTUS from turning us into a Eurabian dystopia, I’ll hold my nose and vote for Giuliani, as long as he has Fred or Mitt on the ticket.
It all comes down to Iraq.
Huge massive blunder that the American people have turned agaisnt, after giving provisional support to based on their inherint wish to trust the Presidency.
Now that it has gone so badly, the Republican party, and its candidates for ‘08 understand, on an existential level, that the only way they can have a prayer in the next elections is to distance themselves as far as possible from the rotting corpse of the Bush administration.
But they can’t very well do that on the Iraq issue itself - since they were fully part of the howling mobs that spent the past few years demonizing the liberals, who, of course, turned out to be right.
So along comes the immigration issue. An ideal medium through which to stoke all the nativist, and yes, racist tendencies of the narrow-minded, and to paint the Bush administration - which is actually trying to address the issue with some intellegence - as not being sufficiently “strong”.
I realize that an effective solution to the immigrant problem would always have been difficult for the GOP base, because it requires so much pragmatism and wisdom. But they could have been led on this issue by a respected president. Bush, however, is a president that they have other reasons to run away from. Hence the depth and bitterness of the reaction.
The American people have seen the conservative ideal and they’ve had enough. Tax cuts for the rich have given us a $9 trillion dollar debt and an economy that doesn’t match the results of Clinton’s higher tax, balanced budget economy for most of us. To solve that debt problem the Republicans threatened to dismantle Social Security, a solvent program with dishonest fearmongering. Instead of seriously reforming Medicare and our healthcare system they gave us the Schaivo debacle, threatening to federalize end of life decisions and a huge boondoggle of taxpayer cash for big pharma and insurance cos. in the drug plan. Government intrusion where it had no business and attacking judges who aren’t activist enough for them showed us their true colors.
Then we have the Katrina, FDA, DOJ and Iraq disasters. There’s nothing about the modern conservative movement or the Republican party that’s worth saving. There never really was. It was always a con game built on smear and fear.
There’s nobody on the left who likes the immigration bill either. Just try breaking into the construction trades as a union worker these days. If you’re a programmer try getting a raise when your boss can hire indentured servants from India. But thanks to the race baiters the Republican party has bred none of those concerns will be addressed. They’ll be drowned out by the Tancredo/Minuteman morons.
There’s very little left you could do to destroy America’s
international reputation after what George Bush has done to it but ethnically cleansing 12 million Mexicans would make
us pariahs for decades to come. Building a 2000 mile Berlin Wall on the border to separate families and devastate local businesses and farms comes close.
Never, repeat never put government in the hands of people who hate government. Republicans have told us since 1980
government doesn’t work and when given the keys set out to prove it by privatizing everything in sight to the likes of Ollie North, Halliburton and Mitchell Wade.
You don’t need new framing, you need to clean house, you need new leaders. That doesn’t mean another lobbyist/actor, or the mayor who put NY’s emergency preparedness center in the WTC complex against everybody’s advice and spent 9/11 looking for one more TV camera. It doesn’t mean an unprincipled empty Brooks Bros suit who promises to work for free and wants to double the size of Gitmo. It doesn’t mean a man who thinks he can regain the “honor” the Vietnamese tortured out of him by “winning” in Iraq.
You have no savior because you have nothing worth saving.
Your right what have those Republicans ever done. What do they believe.
Republicans dont stand for nuthing. I bet if you asked one they cant even tell you what they stand FOR.
They can only tell you they are opposed to this or to that.
Well lets give them their report card:
Personal Responsibility F
Fiscal Responsibility F
Small Government F
Promotion of personal liberty and individual rights D-
Respect for the rule of law, both internationally and domestically F
But what have they managed well? Award lucrative contracts to big donors, promote loyal cronies to positions of influence for which they have little or no qualifications, stifle dissent in their own party, cow the oppostion party and use the press as gullible stoolies. Enlarge the power of the chief executive even when he couldn’t handle the additional power competently, and veil the WH in layers of secrecy to prevent anyone from finding out. Erase massive amounts of WH emails. Fill the attorney ranks in DOJ with young, inexperienced loyal Bushies- who are willing to attack Democrats on demand.
So they have a balanced record of achievement, lol.
Well, this certainly has become a bash the Republicans thread, hasn’t it?
One thing about that: I applaud you all for commenting, but I would enourage y’all to treat the RR and conservatives with respect. The notion that conservatives are just a bunch of idiots is not well spend on this blog.
MvdG-
Well, I was certainly not referring to all conservatives, just the ones in power currently. But its not a good sign that they have sat idly by for 7 years, without much criticism until President Bush recently attacked their patriotism and character over the immigration bill.
If there’s a factual disagreement to my post, I welcome it. It may sound harsh, but that is what I see as their achievements in the last 7 years. Of course, what we have had is anything but true conservatism.
Surprisingly enough it is very easy to announce to the world what a Liberal stands for.
Liberals have defined the argument. The basis of the political discussion.
They encourage many things that would loosen the moral, social and economic fabric of a society that depends upon cohesiveness in which to bond, cement and work in maintaining a good semblance of order in a world that is prone to chaos.
Democracy is the hardest form of government on earth. Why? Because it is a government that goes against the very grain of what Mankind stands for. Man by his nature requires governing in order to get along. Man being a social animal is not all that social. He acts impulsively, selfishly and without compunction when confronted with choices that allow him this luxury.
Democracy allows man the ability to be impulsive, selfish and exculpatory. To this end the Governments commonly established in nations tend to reign in this type of behavior by the use of a common societal means of “We know whats best for you.”
This is the nature of governments. To establish a setting in which people of diverse, social, ethnic, moral, philosophical and spiritual backgrounds, wants and needs can all coalesce and live within arms reach of one another without automatically dividing and nationalizing along these same lines.
In democracy this is a much harder balance to achieve and requires two things. The desire to achieve this and an educated populace that drives the desire to overcome basic instincts of Greed, selfishness, and compunction to “get along”.
However even within the society such as America, in which man(government by the people) has ordained that we all will “get along” there are divisions that take place along many lines. Social.(Gay,Abortion rights) ethnic (Hispanic, Vietnamese) economic ( Rich, poor and everyone in between) religious (Christian, Muslim, Atheist). It is this very thing that makes governing in a Democracy much harder then say governing in a Fascist, or Socialist or Communist society.
Liberals stand for many things. They are for:
Gay rights, Abortion, Gun Control, Welfare. They are rapidly turning to secularism (being led by Europe’s democracies)because of a natural reaction to the religious war that is being waged by Muslims which makes it easy to reject all religion as evil because of the acts or deeds of one man, one group or one religion.
It is these things that Liberals proclaim they are for that I stated at the beginning of this post that makes it hard to govern them. They want to do things that are basically against the welfare that the government “of ALL the people” is instituted to protect.
Caution you are about to enter a no Political Correctness zone.
Gay rights for example is fine and dandy until you are a nation that depends upon having babies to maintain a growing population. This in and of itself is against the health of a nations welbeing. Not because Gay people are bad, but because Gay people quite simply cannot procreate. Therefore endorsing massive immigration to overcome the desire to have Gay rights and the accompanying lack of procreation is a natural progression for Liberals and does what?
Makes it harder to govern.
Abortion rights is fine and dandy but see the previous reasoning. Gun control is fine in and by itself until you have a nation that was founded upon gun ownership. Secularism is fine until you see a nation that was founded upon religious principals even though her founders secularized the land to insure that no ONE religion would dominate.
Makes it harder to govern.
It is this domination that is bad. No one Party or Ideal should be allowed to dominate the country. No one religion, no one ethnic group, no one economic group. The health, power and strength of democracy is found in her immense ability to diversify.
It is too this end then that Conservatives and consequently Republicans are defined by what they Oppose and not what they stand for.
Because Democracy demands balance and diversity to maintain its healthy state of tolerance. When one group begins to exhibit undue influence in the operation of the state or nations affairs then democracy by its nature springs into action and exhibits “Status Quo” balancing.
This occurs on either side. It is why you have seen the Democrats win the last election. Not because this country is democratic or Liberal. But because the nation as a whole demands “the status quo” of equalizing to maintain a healthy democracy in which everyone is given the right to thrive and survive.
The all wise and all knowing founding fathers understood one principal above all others when they penned the Declaration of Independence and later used that principal in writing the constitution.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
To this end conservatives will always be defined by what they are opposed rather then to what they believe. While not a bad thing, it has predisposed conservatives to limit tolerance in this regard as they have had to struggle harder and harder as this nation tips farther towards liberal values.