Devout Democrats

The Republican Party’s three-legged stool has collapsed. Younger voters find the Republicans’ social agenda too “shrill.”  But why haven’t Democrats been able to get anything done in Congress?  “In the euphoria of 2006, [Rep. Tom] Cole believes, Democrats made promises that were too grand to deliver: ‘Nancy Pelosi said, Put the Democrats in Congress and we’ll get you out of Iraq, and they didn’t do it. They ran against the culture of corruption, and they’re absolutely killing us in raising money from PACs. The president would have signed any bill the Democrats would have handed him on immigration, and I think they could have got S-Chip [the State Children’s Health Insurance Program] done too. But they had the same problem with George Bush we had with Bill Clinton. They hated him too much to get it done.’
Part of the problem, for a Republican Party that wants to get back to basics, is that George Bush and Karl Rove’s party was not theirs alone but a pretty precise articulation of decades of post-’60s Republican strategy. ‘You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend,’

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