BallotVox

Republicans v Democrats

With room to grow [MaxVelascoKnott / Flickr]

Ask the blogosphere to assess the health of the Republican and Democratic parties and you get wildly different answers. Citizen Haines, a Virginia native and self-described sarcastic polymath, is afraid that the Republican Party is in trouble because it’s diluting conservative principles to be more inclusive (via Misa Dayson):

[T]he Republican Party has a very deep and disturbing problem: not only are they becoming more and more indecipherable from the Democratic Party but they have effectively marginalized a huge constituency of people who believe in church and family and many of the limited government views held by Ron Paul. […]

The Republican Party has really hurt itself as a result of its “bigger tent” theory…allowing whoever and whatever issue to be included in this tent but not really understanding the consequences that this particular theory may have on its present members.

I think the conservatives want you to stand for something…have a set of principles by which you are guided and then go out and give the people your message and let them decide. […]

I really believe that if the Republican Party doesn’t turn it around very soon…that they will lose a very large amount of their core base of voters; in fact, it may already be too late.

Larry Hamelin at The Barefoot Bum has almost the opposite assessment — a pessimistic view that Democrats are failing precisely because Republicans do stand for something (via Ann Raber):

The Republican strategy is very simple, and very powerful: When they win an election, move the government to the right. When they lose an election, prevent the government from moving to the left. Sure, they’d like to win every election, but they know they won’t, and they have a plan in place for when they lose, and thus they can afford to lose on principle.

The Democratic “strategy” is precisely the opposite. When they win an election, they try (with diminishing success) to prevent the government from moving to the right. When they lose an election, they themselves move to the right to win the next one. […]

The conservatives actually stand for something, and even though it’s most people really think it’s kind of odious, at least it’s something. The progressives? Not so much. What little progressive ideology exists is all over the map […]

The failure of the Democratic party is so deep, so profound, that we must see its function as effectively part of the conservative movement. The Democratic party maintains the illusion that we have an adversarial political system, and they serve as whipping boys and scapegoats to take the blame for conservative practical failures.

Hamelin wins the doomster prize.