Forgive the melodramatic exposition but on Nov. 4 the American public will effectively guillotine the GOP’s beloved elephant.
If the polls are to be believed Barack Obama will take the White House in a landslide victory and claim a mandate for wealth redistribution socialize Medicare and spend $850 billion in new policies. The Democrats could take 60 seats in the Senate killing the potential of effective Republican filibusters and will likely take an even larger majority in House.
The ramifications will be dramatic. “Sharing the wealth” could become the defining principle of American economic policy overriding capitalism in a pseudo-Marxist sponsored guilt trip toward perfect financial equity. American exceptionalism along the standard of U.S. foreign policy will be left by the wayside like a discarded Furby as America tacitly enters a new era of global egalitarianism following the whims of the ever-effectual ever-efficient United Nations.
Domestically the government will grow like a pre-prom zit. Tax hikes will be as fashionable as Sperry Topsiders. Union power will bloat like Michael Moore trade rules will constrict and healthcare will become the bureaucracy to end all bureaucracies. Also a veritable inquisition may arise from the Democratic monopoly on power. After years of agonizing beneath the yoke of the Bush Administration the Democrats will be out for blood. But certainly the GOP has no right to complain. After all it is responsible for its own demise.
With the spend-and-pray neo-conservative belligerents at the helm the GOP ship ran aground fostering the malignant displeasure of the Iraq War. Couple this resentment with the massive accumulation of national debt the shoddy handling of the credit and housing crises the downturn in GDP growth the deplorable management of Katrina recovery and you have got a party with a ‘heckuva-lotta’ egg on its face.
But to be frank it was not conservatism that failed America. It was the interventionist neo-conservatism of the fiscally decadent Bush Administration that failed America casting a pervasive shadow over every Republican candidate running for public office this fall. How big a shadow? Well the Democratic-controlled Congress of the past two years (the one with the 14 percent approval rating) is slated to gain even more Democrats despite its failures inefficiency and partisan squabbling in the midst of the present economic crisis. Congress is sick and the American public has decided that the best medicine is fewer Republicans.
The fact that John McCain – the least Republican of the Republicans – was chosen as his party’s candidate is a testament to the state of things. But after a campaign of discordant messages polarizing political gambits (Sarah Palin) and poor fundraising efforts the GOP deserves to lose. But do the Democrats deserve to win? Maybe. Maybe not. Either way the American public is about to make its choice. I just hope they read the fine print.
In the end this election will not only change the country it will change the GOP – perhaps for the better perhaps for the worse. It will be up to the GOP to make that choice. Will it be the polarizing party of Sarah Palin? Or will it return to the unifying conservative roots of the Reagan era? The former may make them irrelevant – a caricature of rustic backwater politics – while the latter may actually allow Americans to once again vote as they are so disposed: to the center right.