Jonathan Bernstein at Salon made this observation about today’s Republican party:
“We just managed to get through a campaign in which the Republican candidate’s idea of innovation was to hold a convention themed around an out-of-context quote from his opponent. But we knew Mitt Romney was at his heart a manager, not a policy innovator. So maybe it will be better next time, with new candidates such as Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. Right?”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”
“… there’s very little incentive from conservative audiences or conservative voters for policy; what gets them excited (and reaching for their wallets, in many cases) is partisan rhetoric, not policy. For the last several years, the way to get a big reaction in conservative circles is to make a teleprompter or a birther joke, not to bring up unsolved problems in the nation. Just as Swift boats and flip-flop jokes were all the rage before that, and Whitewater, Travelgate and the rest of the nonsense they threw at Bill Clinton was popular in the 1990s.”
