The Grand Old Party is hoping to keep its image polished this week when delegates descend on the Twin Cities to nominate Arizona Sen. John McCain for the presidency. But their challenges are daunting – rival Democrats, polls, even Mother Nature.
Republicans assembling in the Twin Cities are faced with a sobering reality check: The GOP has never confronted such steep political odds in modern times.
Um, the biggest challenge the Republicans face is themselves. All of their problems were self-created. They’re running against themselves.
Everyday I read some quote from a Republican operative saying, without a hint of irony, that the Republicans are the party of change, that only the GOP can make people’s lives better, all but asking “Are you better off now than you were 8 years ago?”
For instance:
“Campaigns are about substance,” said Adam Mendelsohn, the former communications director for Schwarzenegger who is now a senior adviser to the McCain campaign. “You can have all the pomp and circumstance and Greco-Roman temples that Denver will allow. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t mean the American people will believe their lives will get better.”
Love that. After all those years of Republicans running Congress and 8 years of the Bush White House, the American people don’t believe their lives will get any better. And that’s what the Republicans are running on? They might as well say, “Yeah, we didn’t do anything for you in the last decade, but this time we promise we will.”
The most common element of the Republican mindset is the ability to hold mutually exclusive concepts in their head at once, somehow reconciling them in such a way that they can ignore reality and pretend that anything they don’t want to hear about doesn’t exist. And that’s what they’re doing with the last 12 years of Republican rule. For more than a decade the Republicans have held power in our government, raping and pillaging, bringing us to today — today, when the Republican campaign is pretending that the past 12 years never happened.
