Ed Rollins, Huckabee's campaign chairman and one-time Reagan political director, has announced the end of the Reagan coalition. In this quote of the day, he is admitting what I have suspected since Bush was elected (and have known for a fact since this primary season opened to a Giuliani lead): The Republican party we have come to know is over.
"It's gone. The breakup of what was the Reagan coalition — social
conservatives, defense conservatives, antitax conservatives — it
doesn’t mean a whole lot to people anymore,"
And for the first time, I find myself agreeing with someone at the Huckabee camp.
The division today in the Republican party is quite deep, and the only real unifying theme is a distrust of the Democrats - even while we disagree on why the Democrats are a bad choice!
As a libertarian/anti-tax conservative, I don't have much excitement for the trillion dollar army or the social conservative's agenda. If the hawks wanted to be moderate on fundamental issues like pre-emptive war, torture, and occupying more than a hundred nations world-wide, I could support a strong defense. If the social conservatives wanted a stronger 10th amendment to push their social experiments, I could support that. Giuliani's "Nuke 'em all" platform doesn't strike me as such a compromise, and neither does Huckabee's pro-life liberalism.
Matt Lewis at Townhall argues that Romney has shown himself as the compromise candidate, but the only way Romney achieves that is by taking a different position every few years - eventually backing something that everyone likes. What some see as flexibility, I only see a fast-talking, self-serving politician with no particular beliefs aside from how to acquire power & wealth. I'm more inclined to the view at Publius Endures: The aims of each faction have become so contrary that claiming to hold all the views simultaneously is an admission of hypocrisy.
I won't even pretend that Ron Paul is that compromise candidate. I'll just say that he never would have made it this far if the other branches of the Republican party weren't being so stubborn and dogmatic as he is.
A similar fracturing pattern is emerging in the Democratic party, but it is still early and hard to say when it will come into play. I hate to make predictions, but I think it would be easy for any non-Clinton Democrat to win the coming general election.
