"How Obama’s nomination of republican Chuck Hagel could trigger the demise of the republican party" [View all]

[applegrove]

How Obama’s nomination of republican Chuck Hagel could trigger the demise of the republican party

Stabley Times

http://www.stableytimes.com/featured/how-obamas-nomination-of-republican-chuck-hagel-could-trigger-the-demise-of-the-republican-party/1157/

"SNIP............................................

It’s not that Obama necessarily set a trap for republicans by nominating a republican for Secretary of Defense. In fact it’s not the first time he’s done so. But the nomination of Robert Gates in 2009 met with rubber-stamp approval from republicans in congress because not only was he a republican, he was already the Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush and had already proven himself on the job. But Gates retired, and now the appointment of Hagel presents republicans with a no win scenario: either they support one of their own and allow Obama to boast of a bipartisan cabinet, or they fight against a democrat president’s nomination of a republican cabinet member. If it’s the latter, republicans in charge risk being seen by the public as not merely petty or obstructionist, but instead as downright maniacal. And while the Tea Party might love that, it could cost the party its moderate voters. And history has shown that any political party which loses its middle tends to fade from the American landscape shortly thereafter.

The Whig Party was the last major U.S. political party to go by the wayside, but not the first. In each instance of an American party’s demise, the beginning of the end came when the party pivoted to a sufficient extreme that its more moderate supporters became too apathetic to vote, switched sides, or started a new party of their own. The extremists who remain end up taking the party to even more of an extreme, and in doing do they lose their ability to win a national election. And each time a party has fractured to where it no longer even has a chance in the presidential election, support and funding tend to dry up in congressional and gubernatorial elections thereafter. If the republicans publicly oppose the nomination of republican Hagel, moderate conservatives may decide they’ve seen enough, and that they’d rather switch to the democratic party and try to steer it in a moderate direction than stick with a republican party that’s gone so absurdly extremist that it’s objecting to the idea of a republican Secretary of Defense. Without that middle, the republican party could end up nominating an extremist like Rick Santorum or Rand Paul in 2016, whose publicly stated views are so far outside the American mainstream that they’d have no chance of being competitive against the likes of someone like Hillary Clinton. And a blowout victory in 2016, which would be the third democratic presidential victory in a row, would be a body blow which would leave most members of the party – from elected republican officials to republican voters – abandoning ship…

Nature abhors a vacuum, so even if many moderate republican politicians did jump to the democratic party for safety, another party of some type would rise up to take the place of the republican party, which would still manage to elect some congressmen in severely conservative states, but not enough to hold up the agenda of the majority. Within a decade thereafter, there would be no republican party on a national level. And the fight against Hagel, if there is one, could go down in history as the ripping point which signaled the impending collapse.


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