Just as I finished lamenting the sad state of our nation's broken political system, and placing the onus on both parties, each of which has failed to govern responsibly, I was reminded once again why Democrats - despite their flaws - are the only viable option for running the government. I really wish that weren't the case. The absurdity of the Republican party has let Democrats become complacent, and so while one party is full of idiots, the other is stagnant, and neither is offering forward-thinking solutions.
But Republicans are actively trying to make America a worse place, envisioning a world that no longer exists and that isn't coming back, and then stooping to lies and cheating to compensate for their failure to think, lead, legislate, or govern. For the first four years of Obama's presidency, Republicans went with lying and obstruction, characterizing Obamacare as government-run healthcare, which it isn't, and refusing to work with the President on anything; Obama could have proposed a bill requiring Republicans to hold majorities in the House and Senate and they would have balked, we are talking about a group of people who totally and completely abdicated leadership. Of course it didn't work. The Republican base - the inmates - is a collection of un or undereducated fools, but the American public is not, and so we re-elected the President, recognizing that he has plenty of shortcomings, but seeing that there wasn't anything close to a viable alternative.
So the new Republican strategy is to cheat, to undermine the very democracy they purport to love, to undermine the values in the Constitution they worship. If most Americans vote for Democrats, the obvious solution is for Republicans to find a way to make the votes of the few count for more than the votes of the many. They are trying to gerrymander the electoral college! It is shameless and transparent tactic from a group of people who have ceded morality, integrity, and intelligence to the opposition which is sadly lacking in those categories as well. But imagine the audacity, this is quite literally un-American. So much for power of the people.
The tactic will probably fail, just as Republican attempts at voter suppression failed in November, but this is just one more desperate attempt by a group of morally and intellectually bankrupt people to impose an outdated ideology on our country. The nationwide distribution of electoral votes may not always reflect the popular vote - although the last person to be on the wrong side of this equation was Democrat Al Gore - but the distribution of electoral votes from a state DO reflect the popular vote of that state. President Obama received more votes in say, Ohio, which is why he received the state's electoral votes, gerrymandering those electoral votes is shameless ploy to grab power by a group that is incapable of doing it with ideas and solutions.
The tragedy of all this is that it doesn't have to be this way. It shouldn't be this way. Democrats are better in a comparative sense, but thoroughly mediocre in an absolute one. A forward-looking and tolerant Republican party would probably roundly trounce Democrats in a national election, and might even sway me. This of course, would force Democrats to adapt or face the same dilemmas Republicans themselves are now confronting, but the best of one party brings out the best in the other and Americans benefit, as it is now, the Republicans have hit rock-bottom, and so Democrats can sit around not doing much at all and still be a vastly superior alternative. Many Republicans recognize this. Just this week, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal admonished his peers: "We've got to stop being the stupid party." Scathing words from one of their own, but will Republicans heed his warning? I doubt it. The party marches in almost lockstep opposition to anything Obama does rather than thinking about their own solutions, and how to take Obama's ideas and make them better. Meanwhile, they are ceding the future by isolating voters of my generation who understand that global warming is real, that gay people should have equal rights, that plans that add to the deficit do not decrease the deficit, and that smarter gun regulation would save lives...among other things. But this is where we find ourselves, Republicans are the stupid party, and they don't seem to have any intention of changing that. They'd rather cheat to win.
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