What Is It That Attracts Joe Biden To The Republican Party So Strongly?

The Austerity Twins

On Tuesday, a day after the elderly Status Quo Joe, said he might pick a Republican as his running mate (he likely had fellow Social Security and Medicare hater Paul Ryan in mind, not Don, Jr.), Bernie told Fox News in Iowa: "I think it is fair to say that I will not have a Republican as a vice president on my ticket, as a vice presidential candidate. I will have somebody who shares my views. I am not aware of too many Republicans who do." Biden and Ryan both believe in Austerity-- the religion of both party establishments; Bernie does not.

Stuart Stevens was born in Mississippi at a time when being a Southern Democrat meant being an inveterate racist, still fighting the Civil War, hating Lincoln and likely destined for hell. So he decided to join the GOP instead-- which almost immediately flipped and flopped, changing places with the Democrats as the party of inveterate racism and hating Lincoln… and destined for hell. Has hell now arrived, or is the GOP still in purgatory? Just around the time Status Quo Joe was telling a small crowd in Exeter, New Hampshire that he might back a Republican as a running mate, Stevens, a Republican political consultant and #NeverTrumper, penned an OpEd for the Washington Post, Wake Up Republicans. Your Party Stands For All The Wrong Things Now.

Stevens began his missive with an inquiry: “Does anybody have any idea what the Republican Party stands for in 2020?” For most of us, of course, the Republican Party has stood for all the wrong things for our entire lifetimes-- conservatism: the party of greed in a marriage of convenience with the party of hated and bigotry. But let’s hear him out; after all this is a guy who not only worked for George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Thad Cochran, Bob Dole, Haley Barbour, Tom Ridge, Dick Lugar, Mel Martinez, Chuck Grassley, Roger Wicker, Jon Kyl, Bill Weld, Paul Cellucci, Bob Riley, Rob Portman, Roy Blunt and Dan Coats, but once skied the last 100 miles to the North Pole. If I remember correctly, he voted for Hillary in 2016 and I’d bet anything he’s hoping Biden wins this year.

He urges his readers to ask a friendly Republican, “preferably after a drink or two, as that tends to work as truth serum: ‘Look, I was just wondering: What's the Republican Party all about these days? What does it, well, stand for?’ I'm betting the answer is going to involve a noun, a verb and either ‘socialism’ or ‘Democrats.’ Republicans now partly define their party simply as an alternative to that other party, as in, ‘I’m a Republican because I'm not a Democrat.’” Funny-- more and more Democrats are the mirror image. My grandfather, a socialist, taught me when I was very young that the only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican. He was right-- and ahead of his time. But this column of Stevens’ is about Republicans, not the woes of our dysfunctional transpartisan elite ruling class.

In a long-forgotten era-- say, four years ago-- such a question would have elicited a very different answer. Though there was disagreement over specific issues, most Republicans would have said the party stood for some basic principles: fiscal sanity, free trade, strong on Russia, and that character and personal responsibility count. Today it's not that the Republican Party has forgotten these issues and values; instead, it actively opposes all of them.

Republicans are now officially the character doesn't count party, the personal responsibility just proves you have failed to blame the other guy party, the deficit doesn't matter party, the Russia is our ally party, and the I'm-right-and-you-are-human-scum party. Yes, it's President Donald Trump's party now, but it stands only for what he has just tweeted.

A party without a governing theory, a higher purpose or a clear moral direction is nothing more than a cartel, a syndicate that exists only to advance itself. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.

This is a sad fall. In Ronald Reagan's America, being born an American was to win's life lottery; in Donald Trump's America, it makes you a victim, a patsy, a chump.

Trump didn't hijack the GOP and bend it to his will. He did something far easier: He looked at the party, saw its fault lines and then offered himself as a pure distillation of accumulated white grievance and anger. He bet that Republican voters didn't really care about free trade or mutual security, or about the environment or Europe, much less deficits. He rebranded kindness and compassion as "PC" and elevated division and bigotry as the admirable goals of just being politically incorrect. Trump didn't make Americans more racist; he just normalized the resentments that were simmering in many households. In short, he let a lot of long-suppressed demons out of the box.

This paranoid element in the party has existed for decades, since the Joe McCarthy era, when some Republicans who saw dark forces threatening the country argued that only radical action by "true" Americans-- white, Christian, conservative-- could safeguard the nation. Barry Goldwater revived the theme in 1964, and George Wallace won five states with it as a third-party candidate in 1968. I worked in every Republican presidential campaign from 1996 through 2012 and assumed that those guys had long been vanquished and that optimism and inclusion had prevailed. I was wrong.

This impeachment moment and all that has led to it should signal a day of reckoning. A party that has as its sole purpose the protection and promotion of its leader, whatever he thinks, is not on a sustainable path. Can anyone force a change? I'm not optimistic. Trump won with 46.1 percent of the vote in 2016, while Mitt Romney lost with 47.2 percent in 2012; no wonder Republicans have convinced themselves that the path to victory and power lies with angry division. Having ignored the warning signs for years myself, I know the seductive lure of believing what you prefer while ignoring the obvious truth.

Which is this: We are a long way-- more than a half-century-- from 1968, much less 1952. The United States is now a diverse, chaotic collection of 330 million people, a country of immigrants and multiculturalism that is growing less white every day. It is not some gauzy Shangri-La of suburban bliss that never existed.

I'd like to say that I believe the party I spent so many years fighting for could rise to the challenge of this moment. But there have been too many lies for too long.

But Biden wants to pick one for his running mate and would absolutely and without question pick some for his cabinet. And, while we're the topic, God only knows what kind of "but he’s not as bad as Trump" judges we would wind up with if Biden was ever elected to the presidency.