Election '08: The Doom Is Not In the Details

What a bizarre article in the LA Times about the Republicans’ awkward torment: the first half is a quick survey of the disarray, confusion, and bad karma that’s plaguing the national party, while the second half is a long transcription of Republican squabbling over cap-and-trade.

Let me go out on a limb and suggest that cap-and-trade is totally irrelevant to the viability of the Republican Party. The GOP should waste zero time on this issue. Republicans are bogging themselves down in cap-and-trade because the other issues all appear intractable, and all of them boil down to Republicans’ inability to stop spending. Social entitlement spending. War spending. These things are, insanely, off the table. And the things that bring in the money to sustain that spending — if only year by year — are off the table, too: free-flowing immigrant labor, tax rebates designed for no other purpose than to redistribute money from citizens’ savings to businesses’ bottom lines. And so:

This kind of tension demonstrates how difficult it may be to develop a policy consensus, even though there is widespread acknowledgment that the party may face significant losses in November without it.

I’ve got news for you: the party will face significant losses in November even with a policy consensus, whether it’s a continuation of the irreparably fatal Bush consensus or the new set of flaws known as the McCain consensus. Best-case scenario: McCain wins and governs with a massively Democratic congress. Governs how, you ask? It’s this despair that’s causing the party to freeze up: if we’re doomed either way, why waste the energy actually convincing ourselves of the merit of a losing platform?

(Dismantled Dumbo courtesy of Flickrer Vic.)