Dear Friends,
It seems to me… the republican party is in a death spiral of it’s own making. No political party can stab it’s base in the back, over and over, and survive as a viable party for long. That the republican party has gotten away with it for so long, and not succumbed to extinction, is testament to the hope of the American people for limited government. This trend has been happening for a long time but has accelerated of late. This bodes ill for American democratic representation and Constitutional rule unless the trend can be stopped. The means are at hand however.
In the last Presidential election only a paltry 40% of the electorate cast a ballot. This historically low turnout means that Obama won the election with only 20-25% of the American people voting for him. A pathetic quarter of the people voted the president into office. If you think about it, 20% of the people also believe in aliens, ghosts and vampires! (I would argue they are the same people who voted for Obama). Low voter turnout has been a mainstay in American elections for decades. The thing that is pitiful however is that politicians blame the voters and not themselves.
No one blames themselves for their own problems. It is a function of human nature. We all prefer to point the finger of blame at someone else. That this goes on in political circles is not hard to understand. Politicians however have paid consultants that get huge sums of money to explain to politicians why they loose elections. These highly paid eggheads should have the ability to see beyond their own noses and mine the data as to why so few people turn out. In this they fall into a thought trap, or in other words, group think.
This group think permeates the highest echelons of the republican party. They believe the only way to win elections is to go after a smaller and smaller faction of the electorate. Romney won the highly touted “undecided” but lost the election. This is clearly because he was a fatally flawed candidate. Obama’s biggest weakness, Obama care, was taken off the table by Romney’s presidential bid. Obama care is only a symptom and not the disease however. Romney never went after the republican base. He instead ignored and even vilified them. As a result, they didn’t vote for him.
This is typical of republican politics. They despise their base as upstarts, who want more liberty and less government, when the “enlightened” republican elite want more government and less liberty. The only difference between the republicans and democrats is… who controls the tyrant’s power. Neither wants to limit the power, scope and role of government, both want to increase it. Republicans believe their base is so stupid they will fall into line even when the republican elite spit in our faces.
This is proven by the Bush presidency. The republican party controlled a plurality of seats in both houses of congress and the presidency. Did we see a diminishing of the scope of government? No. Did we see balanced budgets? No. Did we even see a walking back of entitlements? No! What we did see, was a new entitlement, prescription drug coverage. We got higher deficit spending and thousands more pages of regulation. The republican base is not blind, they are not stupid, they know a liar when they see one, and refuse to participate in the destruction of the United States, by giving these liars and frauds legitimacy by their vote.
This is why the Tea Party faction has grown so powerful, despite the vilification of us. The Tea Party, teabaggers as the elite call us, are a truly grass roots movement. Those who understand that the republicans, as well as the democrats, want unrestricted illegal immigration, ever increasing government, taxes and regulation, regardless of the consequences to the American people, want to change course, but we all know, to a man, that neither the republican old guard, nor the democrat party, will give us what we demand and OUR Constitution requires.
That is why the republican party is in a death spiral and the democrat party is joining them. They both stand against the will of the people, the dictates of our Constitution, and both lie to our faces. They go after an increasingly small lunatic fringe of the public for votes. We are standing up however, wiping republican and democrat spit from our faces, and making ourselves heard. Obama care is only the latest in a series of slaps of our faces and knives in our backs, we refuse to sit any longer. Once Tea Party people get more seats at the table, we will see more turnout of an electorate, that today, increasingly feels disenfranchised. Until then, the republican elite should be on warning, the jig is up.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
