An encouraging result that reveals good prospects for further gains. From a distance it still seems that the GOP remains a damaged brand. In spite of the many good points of President Bush, his second term slogan was “cut taxes, increase spending”. The GOP wears that and many ordinary people think it’s goofy. The politicians in Washington have plainly subverted government to their own venal ends. The GOP is tarred with that brush too. Ordinary people think it’s disgusting.
In theory the GOP could go through some miraculous conversion which made them live up to the US Constitution. If this miracle made ordinary people think that Americans could be self-governing once more, and it could happen by voting Republican, then the GOP would take the 2010 and the 2012 elections by a country mile. In practice that’s a long shot because of the rotten condition of Washington politics and because the entitlement culture has the US in it’s grip, just like it does in Canada.
There are good prospects for the GOP but they can’t win simply by being “less worse” than the Democrats. They have to convince a big part of the electorate that a Republican government will at least resemble ordinary people exercising self government, according to the Constitution. Not there yet.
