The Loveshade Family Blog

The answer is, it committed suicide.  After the first resignation ever of a United States president, Republican Richard M. Nixon in 1974, the party had a serious image problem.  Vice President Gerald "Mr. Clean" Ford helped clean up the image, but still lost the election to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976.  So what was the Republican Party to do?

The answer was, recreate itself.  While still calling itself the "Grand Old Party," in fact it became a new political party with a very different agenda by the time Ronald Reagan won the U.S. presidency in 1980.  Now the American people were told that they needed more government, meaning more bureaucracy, to protect them in the War on Communism.  And they had to assist the wealthy, because by the Trickle Down Theory their wealth would fall to the middle class and the poor.  The government sunk America into a level of debt it had never seen.

Now it's a quarter of a century later, and after the government under Democratic President Bill Clinton finally got out of debt, America is buried in it again.  Now it's not the War on Communism (which died from economic collapse, not the U. S. Military--the Soviet Union couldn't keep up with America's overspending), it's the War on Terror.  It's not the Trickle Down Theory (which failed miserably), it's refusing to raise the minimum wage because it would cost business too much and they'd have to let workers go.  After all, by not raising the minimum wage, the money saved by the rich can trickle down to help the poor.  And if the wealthiest 7,500 families get a huge tax break, that will trickle down to help the poor and middle class too.  So maybe it is the same old thing--or the same new thing--all over again.

Where is the true Grand Old Party?  They are now just a memory, like Ronald Reagan, who was  viewed by even his enemies as a man who stood up for what he believed in, and truly believed in what he claimed he stood for.  How many of George W. Bush's enemies will say that of him? Ronald Reagan is gone, and the Republican Party has to be satisfied with a very poor imitation.  Perhaps it's time for the Grand Old Party to recreate itself once again.