The GOP's Platform

Nope. No way. Not gonna vote for it. Not gonna support it. Not gonna do it. Republicans are not gonna play ball with any Democratic bill, initiative, thought, proposal. House Dems could propose a resolution that “America is great” and Republicans would all vote “No” instead proposing a resolution stating “America is the greatest.”

That’s how Washington is working these days and it’s driving even some Republicans to warn the party is becoming the House of No to it’s own detriment.

Newt Gingrich told a group of Missouri college students that Republicans might be challenged by a third party of angry conservatives if they don’t figure out how to become both more fiscally conservative (remember that Bush and his GOP friends passed one budget after the next that spent far more than the government took in and even ditched the “pay as you go” rule Congress put into place a decade earlier) and more idea-oriented.

Gingrich railed on the GOP for becoming the Party of No in a cover piece last month in the New York Times magazine:

Most Republicans are not entrepreneurial. They’re corporatists. They like the security and the comfort of a well-thought-out, highly boring boardroom meeting in which they do a PowerPoint once. And it worries them to have ideas, because ideas have edges, and they’re not totally formed, and you’ve got to prove them, and they sound strange because they’re new, and if it’s new how do you know it’s any good, because, after all, it’s new and you’ve never heard it before.

So this week one of Gingrich’s acolytes, Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, wrote up a GOP alternative to Barack Obama’s budget. Sure enough Republicans held the line on the Obama plan — not a single Republican in either the House or Senate voted for Obama’s budget. Not one. (Their votes weren’t needed so it passed easily.)

It got better for the GOP after 20 Dems voted against their own President’s budget in the House. But party unity failed miserably when 38 Republicans voted “No” on Ryan’s alternative budget. That’s a much larger percentage of the GOP House delegation than the percentage of Democratic “No” votes on the Obama budget. So despite their best efforts, the GOP comes away again as the Party of No.

The problem for Republicans is that they really aren’t talking about any truly new ideas — or even ideas that the American voter might think of as being worth a try since the few ideas the GOP is pushing are eerily reminiscent of those promulgated by George W. Bush. That’s not the kind of linkage that helps.

A quick peak at the always-useful Real Clear Politics average of polls shows that Obama’s approval rating has stayed roughly the same for the past month at about 60%. Voters opinion of Republicans, on the other hand, has continued to sink (although there are far fewer polls asking this question so the trend is tougher to say exists with certainty) and hovers somewhere around 30%.

So despite warnings about, and even actions to stop being perceived as the Party of No, Republicans now own the label. The conservative blogs have been filled with passionate posts coming from all sides alternately lashing out at Democrats and perceived media favoritism and bemoaning the lack of party unity around anything other than “No”.

But the bottom line remains the same: Being perceived as against everything and for nothing is a losing strategy. Here’s an interesting read from Fox News about that very premise…from 2005…concerning Democrats.