Radly Balko of Reason magazine writes:

The Republican Party has exiled its Goldwater-Reagan wing and given up all pretense of any allegiance to limited government. In the last eight years, the GOP has given us a monstrous new federal bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security. In the prescription drug benefit, it's given us the largest new federal entitlement since the Johnson administration. Federal spending--even on items not related to war or national security--has soared. And we now get to watch as the party that's supposed to be "free market" nationalizes huge chunks of the economy's financial sector.

Ironically, David Kuo makes the same argument from the evangelical constituents point of view in his book Tempting Faith:

By 2008, we will have had a good conservative Republican in the Oval Office for twenty of the past twenty-eight years. Republicans have had outright control of both houses of Congress for most of the last twelve years.

Republican Presidents have appointed the vast majority of American judges and seven of the nine Supreme Court justices. In short, we've had almost everything we wanted politically.

But things are hardly better. Social statistics are largely unchanged. Divorces are rampant and more and more children are growing up in a home with one parent. Nearly a million and a half abortions are performed every year. There are more children in poverty today than there were twenty years ago. A great percentage of Americans lack health care than ever before. Educational achievement is hardly soaring. Millions of Americans live in what seems like utterly intractable poverty.

It is hard to find a constituency that the Republican Party has not alienated during their short time in power at the national level. It may be that the factions in the Republican Party lead to incompatible policy, which is true to an extent, but I don't think that is the main issue. Policy has been ad-hoc and the main goal has been re-election through media management. I suspect if governance was not so bad these refrains from the differing factions would not be so public. Yet the demographic for the Republican Party has changed and is non-urban, it may be that the factions that have given it democratic majorities in the past is no longer tenable.

Mitt Romney is a slick political operator who changes his political stripes with ease to suit the constituent's demands of the time. There is nothing really wrong with that, representatives are supposed to barter their electorate's demands in the legislative or executive under the boundaries of constitutionally limited government. It does cause voters to shy away though is it gives the impression of the politician being a phony. Not to mention the concern they are as morally and ethically malleable as they are politically. American evangelical voters need to take a hard look at themselves and what their pursuit of political power is achieving and doing. (more)

I am reading David Kuo's book, Tempting Faith . It is an entertaining read. Kuo is up and down like a dunny seat - running from radicalisation to disappointment to radicalisation again and then back to disappointment - but he is a good writer. It is also rare in that it is one of the first-person insider books to come out of the Administration. Paul O'Neill's book was written by Ron Suskind and was disembodied for it. (more)

US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld recently said at a news conference ;

"I just don't happen to believe that America is what's wrong with the world. And I know that's a fact," he said. "And these terrorists have been determined to dishearten the American people, and we simply must not let that happen."

Nice piece of conflation. (more)