It was easy for me to say that the conservative movement would come crashing down this year not once but twice. After all, the GOP primaries were a virtual orgy of anti-women, anti-gay, anti-immigrant and anti-responsible economic policies, so saying that the far right would implode was like shooting fish in a barrel of domestic oil.
Now that we’re in the general election, you’d think the Republicans would want to moderate their stances. Not a chance.
Over the past few days the GOP has managed to crystallize their reactionary agenda against women and college students by questioning President Obama’s commitment to lowering student loan interest rates as a campaign ploy, and then by tying the rate reduction to cuts in health programs that especially benefit women. What a curious move by a party, and nominee, that’s already losing the female vote by a score or more.
With that kind of thinking, you can kind of see the Republicans passing a burka law, then loosening it and claiming to be pro-women.
The party also continues to bash the health care law that is allowing families to cover their children through age 26 and is forcing insurance companies not to drop people with pre-existing conditions.Their argument? That the law is causing health costs to rise. Well, wrong again GOP. Health care spending seem to be slowing,
Mitt Romney is certainly doing his part to lose the race by alienating Latino voters in Florida during the primaries, and then trying to woo them back for the general election. As a famous Republican once said, “How’s that workin’ out for ya?” Not well at all, it seems, due to a combination of the recession, changing health industry habits, and the law itself.
And in case you thought the Republicans were ignorant of history, along comes Florida GOP Representative Alan West, who famously said that there were between 78 and 81 (curious set of numbers) Communists in the Democratic Party. Obviously, this is intended to lock up the elderly white male vote that’s the only reliable voting population the GOP has left, and to remind us that McCarthyite tactics will never go out of style.
What does this show? That the GOP is moving to the fringe at an alarming rate and is taking a great deal of accepted American values with it. The problem is not with both parties. It’s with an increasingly reactionary Republican Party that will oppose anything Obama says, even if it means opposing its own interests.
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