Well, let's do a little analysis of this election. A President is expected to campaign for the incumbents that are of his party, even when he knows that their defeat is likely. In fact, if he fails to do this, he loses credibility within his own party.
When you have a lockup district for your party, you don't endorse a third party candidate and throw that district to the other party. Not if you expect to have a viable party at the next election cycle.
It looks to me like the Republicans will need a very big tent for the next meeting. Going to be lots of daggers and claymores in action.
We're already seeing the glint of the knives stabbing 'round the back area in a few places. I reckon eventually the GOP's "leadership" (whoever the rank and file eventually decide to follow, when some decent choices arise) will ultimately steer the party back towards the middle on social issues, and try to re-brand a bit as socially-tolerant fiscal conservatives.
Sorta like, "compassionate conservatism" without the bogus compassion bit, and some genuine pragmatism thrown in. America is, after all, becoming steadily more socially-liberal: desegregation of schools was "controversial" once... Then the last ban on inter-racial marriages was struck down in 1967 - and rate of mixed-ethnicity marriages has been doubling every decade since. We've gone from an outright ban on gays in the military to "don't ask, don't tell", and probably within a year, it will no longer even be that. In 1980, the idea that conservatives would even be fighting against same-sex marriages - much less the idea that they'd
lost the fight in several states - only a generation or so later would have been deemed crazy.
I actually remember Republicans vowing to tear down Medicare, and more recently to privatize Social Security - both efforts failed, and GOP Senators now are left to attack Democrats' health-care proposals by hinting darkly that the plans will "destroy medicare" - the very system they were
promising to dismantle a generation or two ago.
In 1990, the idea that either political party would run, as their two main primary candidates, a woman and a black man, would have been so ridiculous that I'm pretty sure a few comedy movies starring, oh, say Eddie Murphy, or Chris Rock, would have played in theaters making fun of the idea (and "Head of State" was in theaters in 2003... doh!)
Even abortion, the one issue that seems to galvanize social-conservatives even more than the idea of two women legally shacking up, remains legal, despite almost 35 years of social-conservatives doing everything from fighting it in the courts, with legislation, or occasionally murdering somebody, to try to stop it. Wherever you come down on the issue, it's clearly not one that the GOP has managed to actually win.
All of these issues - whichever party championed them at the time (and principled Republicans helped pass the Civil Rights Act) were, at their core, liberal issues, being pushed by liberals, in pursuit of personal liberty.
Maybe I'm just totally mis-reading history, but I'm left with the distinct feeling that
the GOP is going to have to regroup under fiscal conservatism if they want to remain relevant. Right or wrong, Americans seem to be slowly, with two steps forward for one step back, moving to social liberalism.
