The Wages of Suck

Republican pollster and consultant Frank Luntz thinks the Republicans are in for a drubbing akin to that received by the Dems in '94:

"This is 1994 all over again," Frank Luntz, a famed Republican communications consultant, told The Huffington Post. "I was there. I saw it firsthand. The Republicans of 2008 are behaving exactly like the Democrats of '94 and making exactly the same mistakes. It's pathetic."...

"Really the mistake they have made is to nationalize these [recent open-seat Congressional] elections when the national image is poisonous for Republicans right now," explained Craig Shirley, a Republican strategist with Shirley Bannister Public Relations...the GOP tried as best it could to tie Childers to the "liberalism" of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Barack Obama. And yet, victory remained elusive...

"What has happened with the Republican Party over the last eight years is that some of the consultants have decided it is too hard to define what we stand for so we are just going to paint Democrats as worse than us," [Shirley said].

Well, surprise surprise. That's what happens when you run on 1980s issues in a 2000s world. The Republicans found a model that worked - low taxes, deregulation, strong military, race-baiting, and using religion to restrict sexuality. And now low taxes caused a massive deficit, deregulation cause massive bubbles, a strong military led to a weak military, etc.

There's always a long delay between when a party's model goes bad, and when the party realizes its model has gone bad. That's why there's a political "pendulum." And the pendulum is swinging back our way, because the Republicans haven't yet realized that "conservatism" as currently defined is a square peg for a round hole.

Attention die-hard "conservatives": You're only fooling yourselves.