Political parties, especially the Republican Party here in the US can learn valuable lessons from Astronomy. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about Nancy Reagan style Astrology but the actual science of astronomy. Like anything else, stars have life cycles. They form from dust and gas out in the cosmos, they ignite and begin billions of years of healthy nuclear fusion, until they eventually either explode in a supernova or swell up before finally fizzing out into a tiny shell of its former self. The Republican Party has been extraordinarily successful in American politics. Perhaps their greatest recent achievement is getting that great American lemon of a president George W. Bush re-elected in 2004, despite the unpopularity of his policies.
Since spending massive amounts of political capital during the Bush years, the party has been bereft of new ideas and strong leadership. Like a dying star, it is shrinking down to its unstable and burned out core. The Republican party is now catering exclusively to its base, that loud and rabidly ideological corner of the party that compromises maybe 25% of the American electorate. This may be good short term politics, but once you have made questioning Obama's citizenship, deporting millions of illegal immigrants, repealing the 14th amendment, eliminating Social Security, and generally endorsing a blanket "Just Vote No" policy, it will be hard to actually pivot and embrace the mainstream centrist positions that one needs to win a national election without looking like the worst kind of flip-flopper.
Poor John McCain, who won the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008, and, who rightly made Mitt Romney's various outrageous policy reversals a cornerstone of his primary race against the former Massachusetts governor, is now in a Senate primary race against a Tea Party endorsed candidate and has had to do a series of uncomfortable reversals on what had been his signature issues, Campaign Finance Reform and Comprehensive Immigration Reform, of which he had been a champion as recently as 2007. During the Presidential campaign, McCain spoke eloquently about undocumented immigrants who came to this country and ended up fighting in Iraq and Afganistan because they loved and believed in America. Now he has embraced Governor Jan Brewer's reprehensible Arizona immigration law.
In some states, these Tea Party candidates have already won primaries and have proven to be unsavvy, gaffe-prone, candidates with extreme views that are an anathema to independent voters. Republicans were hoping to do to Nevada Senator Senate Majoirty leader Harry Reid what they did to former leader Tom Dashle and win his seat but candidate Sharon Angle messing up what should have been a relatively easy win for her, losing an 11 point poll lead in a matter of weeks. Like other Tea Party candidates, Angle doesn't seem to know what to do with the media. This past week during an interview with Fox News, she wondered out-loud why the media didn't just ask her the questions that she wanted to answer.
If the Republicans don't win the House and or the Senate in November, we can only hope that there will be the serious soul searching that should have happened in 2006 and 2008. Unfortunately, it may take a 2012 presidential loss for them to put their noisy querulous base in its proper place. Hopefuly, a stronger and more moderate GOP will arise.
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