re: #15 iceweasel

They’re certainly acting like it, what with the endless calls for more purity within the party and calling everyone a RINO. Very bad news for us all, no matter what our political affiliation. A healthy democracy needs a minimum of two vibrant political parties if it wants to stay a democracy.

Unfortunately, in “first-past-the-post” electoral systems, two major parties is generally all you get. Look at the UK (another FPTP system): the Lib-Dems (which are actually worse than Labour in some respects, but that’s not the point) sometimes get 2% of the seats in the House with 20% of the electorate.

If the US electoral system were different, this would be the ideal time to create a new centrist party, and then a stance of ideological purity would actually make sense for the GOP, as it would be assured of a large chunk of conservative voters that way while moving to the center would merely result in these voters being gobbled up by the first new credible conservative party to come along.

In the real world (and the actual US electoral system), the GOP cannot win without at least part of the independents. Sure, pandering too much will lead the base to stay home or waste their vote on the Libertarian or Constitution parties. And, sadly, politics is often a game of perception. 0bama was perceived as a statesmanlike moderate by many independents even though anybody who did his homework knew how far from the truth that is.

Of course, purely Macchiavellistically speaking, this still leaves the option of a two-pronged strategy: statesmanlike to the center and screeching to the base (the latter preferably by technically “non-partisan” pressure groups). I am sad to say that this worked wonders for the Democrats ;-)