I almost wish I believed this. I’ve never seen the GOP leaders show the slightest interest in catering to any of the voting blocs which make up the party.

Say what you like about the Democrats, but they do their best to deliver something for their constituencies.

Maybe I’m just using bad terminology. I said “rely on” but you heard (er, read) “cater to.” Not the same thing at all. Here’s the gist of my theory about why the GOP leadership has gone down a rabbit hole. I said before they were really career politicians trying to market themselves to Conservative (fiscal and social) voters. The problem for them is that fiscal conservatives are small-government types, and small government is bad for career politicians. After a while marketing themselves as small-government types without doing anything to shrink government, folks started to see through them and they needed a new marketing strategy.

Without the fiscal conservatism, the Libertarians in the Reagan coalition were gone. The GOP could still appeal to Conservatives on social issues (and social issues, as Huckabee and a few others demonstrated, can be used as rationale for new government spending – yay! a two-fer for our beloved incumbocrats), but needed votes to replace the Libertarians they lost. Bingo, Populists (or Big Goverment Moralizer if you perfer). So they started talking lots about God, guns, gays, abortion, etc. They didn’t mean it – it was still just a marketing ploy. At any rate, catering to them would have been mostly hopeless anyway – government is far better at undermining morality that at preserving it. The more social issues we’ve allowed the government to play a role in, the worse our civilization has gotten.

Now, if you’re still blaming Wall Street types for this, I think you’re nearly a generation out of date. Wall Street has become a Democrat bastion and Obama is confirming that with his payoffs to them. Sure, Bush fell for (or maybe knew all along, depending on your view of the man) the TARP crap, but the big players in the D.C-to-Manhattan money shuffle have been mostly Dems since the Clinton administration. The Democrat party likes to use positions in those firms as rewards for loyal party soldiers.

In any event, getting back to my original post agreeing with James, I think the best way forward is to re-establish a strong small-government, fiscal-responsibility platform. It’s not that social issues don’t matter – they do immensely, but they’re awfully difficult to address effectively with political action. At least in a positive sense. Government is good at undermining morality – inherently corrupting and all that. Civil society is good at preserving and strenghening morality. The best bet is to return as many social issues to the civil rather than government sphere as possible. Yes, I know, much damage has been done to that aspect of our civilization by the liberals and you’re probably worried it can’t support decent morals any longer. It has to – nothing else can do the job. As a boss of mine once said “This is your A-plan. You need to focus on it.” Reviving all the important civic (as in public but not government) institutions is the key to restoring our civilization. Banning Gay Marriage is a distraction from that task. Which is one reason why, I’m pretty sure, gay-bashing liberals like Obama push it so much.

Anyway, good news from MA tonight so far.