I cannot say that I am said to see the GOP encountering difficulties and internal infighting, particularly when it may be the precursor of the GOP moving to minority status for sometime, in part because of the sleazy and hubris filled actions of the Chimperator and Karl Rove. The party put winning before integrity and decency and it deserves to pay a high price for selling its soul. Of course, the GOP's demise also depends upon the Democrats not self-destructing, which is one reason I am disturbed by Hillary's dirty tricks campaign. Winning the nomination means little if the election in November is lost because of bad blood within the Democrat Party and/or voting blocks not voting out of protest. Here are highlights from an interesting blog article ( http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/24624.html):
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — The house that Ronald Reagan built is in danger of collapsing. The coalition of fiscal conservatives, national security conservatives, anti-tax activists and social conservatives that rallied behind Reagan in 1980 and has defined the Republican Party ever since is coming apart at the seams heading into the 2008 election. All the men running for the party's presidential nomination invoke Reagan's name repeatedly. But all of them offend at least one wing of the party enough that they'd find it difficult, and perhaps impossible, to pull the disparate elements of the old coalition together.
"It's gone," said Ed Rollins, who worked on Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign and now chairs the campaign of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. "The Reagan coalition is pretty much gone," added Karen Spencer, a Republican strategist in California who watched the Reagan phenomenon firsthand when her father served as Reagan's chief political strategist. "It's been 28 years. Maybe it is time for a change."
Fighting terrorism has created divisions where confronting the Soviet Union and rebuilding the U.S. military unified the party. Cutting taxes still elates anti-tax conservatives, as it did in Reagan's day, but runaway spending by the modern party has outraged small-government conservatives. And the much more religious tone of the party — Reagan was private about his faith — threatens to open a breach between social conservatives and country club conservatives.
Ultimately, though, the fate of the Reagan coalition — or any strong Republican coalition — might lie in the other party. It's important to remember that the rise of the Reagan coalition wasn't just an embrace of him, but a repudiation of Democratic President Jimmy Carter, as well as the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party. So, too, today's Republicans might swallow their objections to McCain, Huckabee or Giuliani if the Democrats nominate a candidate that leaves many people looking for an alternative. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is some Republicans' choice for a Democratic candidate. Said GOP pollster Whit Ayres: "When it comes to Republicans, Hillary Clinton is a unifier, not a divider."
Another article in the Washington Post likewise looks at the problems facing the GOP (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/11/AR2008011103123.html??hpid=opinionsbox1):
Much of this chaos is attributable to the fact that this is a very flawed field, or at least one ill-suited for the times we're in. If a camel is a horse designed by committee, then this year's Republican field looks downright dromedarian. This slate of candidates has everything a conservative designer could want -- foreign policy oomph, business acumen, Southern charm, Big Apple chutzpah, religious conviction, outsider zeal, even libertarian ardor -- but all so poorly distributed. As National Review put it in its editorial endorsement of Romney (I am undecided, for the record): "Each of the men running for the Republican nomination has strengths, and none has everything -- all the traits, all the positions -- we are looking for."
But conservatives should contemplate the possibility that the fault lies less in the stars -- or the candidates -- than in ourselves. Conservatism, quite simply, is a mess these days. Conservative attitudes are changing. Or, more accurately, the attitudes of people who call themselves conservatives are changing.
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