GOP “success” factors will be their eventual downfall

Thanksgiving Day table conversation got a little heated, particularly when my college-age cousin persisted in saying nice things about Sarah Palin – which got her mother, aunt and grandmother all worked up about what a “disaster” it would be if that woman ever got elected to a position of significance.

Personally, I think my cousin was just trying to stir up an argument for kicks, which is why I didn’t feel compelled to join in. I really don’t feel threatened by Palin, or any of these new people who managed to get themselves elected earlier this month and are now claiming they’re going to undo the accomplishments of the past two years.

IN FACT, I stumbled across a story published Friday by the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper that further reinforced my gut feeling that these kinds of people who are pushing conservative ideological beliefs as some sort of revolution are going to be the undoing of the GOP, and will ensure for the long run that people with sense prevail.

That newspaper account looked at the composition of the newly-elected Nevada state Legislature, and found that the Republican caucus is almost entirely a batch of white guys.

Only one of the 11 women who serve in the Legislature identifies with the GOP. Just about anyone in the Legislature who isn’t a white male is a Democrat.

This isn’t a surprise. It merely means the trends that began back when Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968 on a “Southern Strategy” of appealing for the votes of people who feel threatened by the trends of modern society has reached its natural peak.

THE PROBLEM WITH that strategy is that it ultimately has trapped the GOP into needing to over-rely on the voter support of a segment of our society that deliberately stands against trying to build any kind of coalition to the rest of the people.

And it is those “rest of the people” who are the growing segment of our society.

Palin herself might be a woman, but she’s trying to position herself as the choice of people who don’t like “pushy broads,” which is what I would guess is how the ideologues would describe the 10 female members of the Nevada Legislature who are Democrats.

Which ultimately makes the 2010 election cycle the aberration – a period in which people who were grossly offended by ’08 managed to milk the natural tendency to retract support for the president’s political party to its extreme. A recent poll by the Gallup Organization showed that only 27 percent of people really want those Tea Party types to have a strong influence over public policy; a figure that is bound to decline with the passage of time.

IT ALSO MEANS that the election cycle for 2012 is most likely to be the corrective cycle that knocks some of the fringier members of Congress from their posts.

The simple fact is that the United States is becoming an ethnic nation, with that mixture of ethnicities not limited to people who would appear from a distance to be white.

Which puts those conservative ideologues who persist in turning the Republican Party into a mirror image of themselves on a path to their own destruction. Without a change on their part, the Republican Party that once represented the ideals of Abraham Lincoln but now seems more interested in touting Ronald Reagan above all else is going to become the party of the past.

As it is, that Nevada Legislature Democratic caucus more strongly resembles the composition of our society than does the Republican caucus. And Nevada isn’t even unique. The idea that it was BIG NEWS that a couple of Latinos got elected as Republicans to positions in the Southwestern U.S. was significant because it is still far out of the norm.

ALL TOO OFTEN, non-Anglo people wishing to get involved in public policy wind up with the Democrats by default – scared off by people like Palin (who I honestly believe is all talk, although I do expect her to try for a run for president in ’12).

Because even though my cousin was plugging Palin, I couldn’t help but notice the nicest thing she really had to say about Sarah was how comical she looked on that reality-based television show she did – particularly in one scene where she was beating up on a fish she had just caught.

That alone is probably enough of an image to take down her presidential dreams.

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