{"id":11188,"date":"2008-05-28T17:40:46","date_gmt":"2008-05-28T21:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/05\/28\/11188.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:40","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:40","slug":"the-future-of-the-party-but-no","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/05\/28\/the-future-of-the-party-but-no\/","title":{"rendered":"The Future of the Party (but not my Party)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mark Schmitt, who as Gentle Readers will recall is the utter cat’s pyjamas in the eyes of YHB, has an article in The American Prospect<\/i> called Can Identity Politics Save the Right?<\/a> It’s a fascinating piece, largely because Mr. Schmitt’s understanding of the history of American party politics is broad enough to keep him from getting too much caught up in the moment-to-moment vagaries. He can take his eye off the Presidential race and look at the condition of the national parties, which means the conditions of the state parties, and then look back to the Presidential race in that light. And he points out that the reason why the Republicans are so unpopular right now is because of all their failures<\/I>. You know how I like to see that.
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I do, however, wonder whether Mr. Schmitt is overstating the Republican Party’s problem. I think his point about the handful of successful “moderate” Republican governors with Democratic legislatures is interesting, and may possibly constitute a pattern, but really, there aren’t that many of them. And, of course, the obvious pattern for that is Mitt Romney, who Mr. Schmitt dismisses. I think Gov. Romney has got to be considered the favorite for the 2012 nomination, no? Whether or not Sen. McCain puts him on the ticket this year.
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Mr. Schmitt also states that \u201cFuture governors, members of Congress, and policy initiatives will emerge from state legislatures\u2026\u201d I wonder how true this is. Y’all know that I like my Governors and Senators to have state legislative experience, but I wonder whether the trend toward statewide nominees from the business world, as well as state Attorneys General, prominent mayors and other non-legislative figures will mean that Republicans (perhaps particularly Republicans) will have other options available to them. For a long time, the state legislatures were seen as a farm team, but now\u2026 I really should do the research on that, and look at the last four or six years of nominees for Senator and Governor, seeing if they have legislative experience. See if there’s a difference between the two parties, as well. The information is all available, I just need to, you know, set down and do it. Maybe next week, right? Meanwhile, in the absence of relevant facts, I will opine that the trend is the way I sense it is, and if you don’t like it, do your own damn research, Pomeranz.
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Anyway, perhaps it’s just my natural skepticism. Perhaps I am, as Mr. Schmitt accurately describes my Party, a trifle too risk-averse, a trifle too “easily spooked by the confident swagger of the Republicans”. I am inclined, when my observations and Mr. Schmitt’s observations differ, to yield to his.
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I will say this, though. Mr. Schmitt quotes David Frum, in Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again<\/a>, as saying that Democrats are “people who identify with the ‘pluribus’ in the nation’s motto, ‘e pluribus unum.’” Oh, yeah. That seems like another way to say the thing I’ve been saying for a long time, you know, about people being different, one to another, and that’s what makes the world interesting and fun? And how my Party is the Party that believes that, and that the Republican Party seems to believe that people being different, one to another, makes the world scary and dangerous. Well, my Party is the Party that identifies with the pluribus<\/i>, that thinks that the pluribus<\/i> is the important part. The Republican Party is focused on the unum<\/i>. Now, different people will have different takes on the motto (for instance, I think that the motto should refer to a constant process of becoming rather than a past-perfect state of became), but I think that if you were to ask people which Party was the pluribus<\/i> and which the unum<\/i>, they wouldn’t have much difficulty choosing. The question Mr. Schmitt asks, and I think it’s a good one, is whether being the unum<\/i>, in the absence of any conspicuous policy success, is enough to win elections.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which it’s the other fellow’s Party, and YHB will cry only if he wants to, which, frankly, I’m thinking, not so much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18378,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11188\/revisions\/18378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}