re: #55 Jimmah

Nor mine - however I will say that this seems to me to be a similar question to one that the Labour Party here in the UK had to ask itself following Thatcher’s landslide election win in 1979. Initially, their reaction was to appease the extreme left wing ‘core’. They made Michal Foot their leader, and embraced a whole raft of fringy positions, ignoring all advice about the changing nature and attitudes of the electorate. They spent the next 18 years in the political wilderness. It was not until Tony Blair modernised and reformed the party and brought it to a much more electable, centrist position that they returned to power. I imagine the GOP is going to have to go through a similar process, and as with the UK labour party, it may take a long time to come back from where they are at the moment.

Curious but on what issues did the Labour party change on that made them more acceptable to the public. To me from the outside looking in on the GOP, it looks like their problems are on issues like gays, abortion, and immigration though in the latter there were some steps in the recent President Bush’s years to be more open minded on that but now they sound closer to Tancredo than they do Bush on immigration.