Republicans Must Learn: What Goes Around Comes Around

Wally has seen his share of elections and with each cycle they seem to get worse.  And now that we have a black president, things have really gone over the top.  And instead of working together towards common goals, a few politicians have turned things into “us vs. them” and boiling everything down to simple black and white.  Only problem is, according to Wally, “that old fashioned politics don’t work no more.”

Ever since Nixon’s successful use of evangelicals in his presidential campaigns, Republicans have catered to them and their issues, such as abortion, contraception and gay marriage, which often swept them into office.  As a matter of fact, Wally remembers how Republicans worked hard to get abortion and gay related issues on the ballot most every election.  If nothing else, it brought the evangelicals, along with some other very angry people, out to the polls and they were usually single issue Republican voters.

In 1988, the George H.W. Bush campaign discovered that racism, if subtle enough, was another way of getting very angry people to the polls and Willie Horton became the face of the Bush Campaign. Between the evangelicals and xenophobes, the Republicans had grabbed most all of the voting public, and Wally was highly pissed about it.  On the other hand, and he knew neither how nor why, but they were practicing bad medicine and bad medicine will eventually guarantee a bad outcome.

And with the exception of a glorious eight years which ended with a significant budget surplus and economic growth, things pretty much sucked.  But Clinton was an exception to the rule and Wally saw the second Bush elected.  This time, however, the Republicans added a new paradigm with their image, “compassionate conservatism,” which itself, became an oxymoron.  But few, including Wally, could actually have defined compassionate conservatism, until George W. Bush’s response in Hurricane Katrina of 2005.

It was with heavy heart that Wally lived through the Bush era, but a financial meltdown brought a new Kind of president to Washington.  What will this new kind of president be like, people asked?  “Just like the old kind,” Wally loved to say.

But things are changing.  Even the evangelicals are now insisting, “God don’t make no trash,” and are seeing gays as actual children of God.  “And besides,” sez Wally, “Jesus loves them.”  And as many evangelicals come to accept things like global climate change and gay and lesbian marriage, they are leaving the GOP and shrinking its base even more.  No longer can local, state or federal elections be won by simply putting gay marriage on the ballot.

Even President Obama, of late, has been acting like a new kind of president and a lot less like the old kind.  And although Wally wishes he would do more to even out the economic inequality situation, Wally is starting to hope again.  And it seems like the bad medicine of divisiveness and negativity practiced by the GOP for the past forty years, is coming back around and biting them in the butt.  And the pox is now upon their own house.

And what was once hidden is now being revealed and Wally wonders what else will come to light before the November Elections.  “If the past year or two is any indication, we’re all in for a very revealing, but ugly ride,” Wally is rumored to have told the GOP fund raiser who phoned him.  "After all, what goes around, comes around and God still don’t like ugly.”  But Wally still can’t understand how his name and number got on a GOP fund raising list in the first damn place.