A Brief One

Most of my posts are nigh unbearably long-winded, so enjoy this brief one. It's actually a cut-and-paste from the D2 football message board I frequent, in response to someone asking if now was the best time for a viable third party.

My short reply was that now would be an excellent time for a viable first or second party.

The thread went on with the token liberals saying the GOP has become irrelevant, and will stay irrelevant forever.

So they hope.

I responded with this summary of the political picture, which I think is pretty accurate:

With all this talk about the demise of the GOP, we've heard this before. We heard it when Nixon made a shambles of his presidency (after LBJ squandered the Dems' political capital, opening the door for the Republicans to get Nixon the W). That paved the way for Carter's win. And when he turned out to be a Frenchman with a Georgia accent, Reagan got elected. Bush I capitalizes on Reagan's political capital, then squanders that with the one-two punch of the infamous "read my lips" flip-flop and a too-slow jobs recovery after a recession (more Greenspan's fault than his, but still a catalyst for Clinton's copying the Reaganism, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"). And again we heard of the death of the GOP. After Clinton made the White House a National Enquirer cover story, that opened the door for W, and a succession of totally lame candidates to run against him both times got him in, until the country reached the point of "let's elect anybody, so long as it's not a Republican." So in waltzes Obama, and all we hear about is that the GOP has become irrelevant. Well, it's happened before, and it'll cycle back. In four, eight, twelve years the country will be sick of what the Dems have done, and it'll open the door for a Republican candidate.

In saying this I'm not defending the Republican party. I'm simply recounting the irrefutable pattern of American party politics over the past several decades. The fact of the matter is that both parties suck, and both parties generally succeed in mucking things up until we're ready for something different. So we vote for the other party, and find that there is no change we can believe in from the current system. There are just different letters after the schmucks' names.