Republican Party Identification Nears the Mendoza Line
Tommy Christopher
Contributor
Posted:
04/30/09
Things are bad for the Republican Party. How bad?The Mendoza Line, the low-water mark for a major league baseball player's batting average, is .198. Expressed as a percentage, that translates to 19.8%. In a recent Pew study, the portion of voters who identified themselves as Republicans was 22%. That's not a lot of daylight between the GOP and the visitor's clubhouse in Spokane.
How bad are things for the Republican Party? The Whig Party is taking shots at them. That's just embarrassing, like being taunted by Sanjaya Malakar at the American Idol finale.
There's little mystery in what has gone wrong with the GOP. In fact, a better analogy would be a cross between Mendoza and Dave Kingman. A Dave Kingman who never hit a home run. The Republicans have been taking a huge swing at every pitch that comes near them, resulting in a lot of wind and little else.
I went over some of this in my piece about the Republicans' 1st 100 days under President Obama. Not content to work with what they've been given, like the President's problems filling his cabinet, they have tried to manufacture points where there were none. Most glaringly, they tried to trash his conduct of the Somali pirate crisis, then accused him of trying to take credit for the supposed failure.
While the Whigs are probably not ready to become the next major party, the Republicans' position as the #2 of 2 political parties in this country is ripe for the picking. Ron Paul Revolution, anyone?
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