You manage to compose a veritable laundry list of woes for the modern Republican party without ever once positing a theory as to why they may be so unpopular these days. Your ideas stink and your party is rife with racists. You want to compete? Deal with those issues.

Greener misses obvious problems with the GOP. Instead of competant candidates, nitwits like Sarah Palin pop up, and hypocrites like Mark Sanford. Want to win? How about finding people who can think and chew gum at the same time? While blowhards like Limbaugh and Beck might be popular with elements of the base, the GOP has to bring out more intellectually honest arguements to make their case. Lazy intellectuals are William Kristol undermine the credibility of the GOP, and the drumbeating for the central point of neo-conservatism, Israel, puts off people who are weary of the endless foreigh policy manipulations of the Right. In short, fix the homefront.

Maybe if the Republican Party learned to be MORE - more in touch with real life, more up to date with what is happening and in particular - more real people - but then they would be Democrats.

Your article was pretty good, except the part where you had the Republicans on the Judiciary showing Sotomayor respect. I think they tried, but they did not have the skills to see that they were not treating her with anything like respect. This was a missed opportunity. This was a moderate justice by all analysis. They admitted as much by ignoring the 3000 rulings and focusing instead on a couple of lines out of context in her speeches. She had been originally appointed to the bench by a Republican. She had been confirmed before this panel twice before. Because the Republicans have come up with the brilliant plan of opposing and obstructing everything, they felt they needed to delay this nomination. Even the biggest opponents admitted that she would be confirmed. That means that they decided the best thing for the party brand was to go on national TV and display the race and gender based complaints. Asking her how her temperament was. Saying "you have some splainin to do".

The opportunity missed was letting the first nominee of the President pass with maybe one question by one senator about the "Wise Latina" comment. Letting this nominee go through with no fuss and bother with a one day hearing would have accomplished a couple of important issues for the party. First of all, the old white Republicans could have shown that they do not care about race or gender only that the person is qualified. They would have shown that they were happy to be the ones to approve of the first qualified Hispanic woman to the Supreme Court. It also would have legitimized any campaign they raise on Obama's next pick for the court. By having the party do ads about her being like Bill Ayers and other Republican mouth pieces saying she is a racist, they have shown that this how they handle every nominee. If the next nominee is a true progressive, the Republicans are now subject to the Regan phrase of "there they go again". They decided it was best to cry wolf on the minority moderate. When a real progressive shows up next time, they squandered their credibility.

They could have strengthened their ties to Hispanics and showed they were truly bi-partisan by letting this moderate through. Instead they displayed themselves as clumsy old white guys who aren't even sure how to talk to a minority woman with out screwing it up.

ArtsyJane: "I agree with the posters...

... who point out that the GOP itself has changed.. It's not only the electorate that's not the same, it's the party itself.

Parts of the GOP surrenedered to other parts of the GOP. Now you're all seeing the consequences....."

Of course it has: one of the most amazing things of the past one hundred and fifty years or so is how a region fired the treasonous first shot in a war over the defense of a principle, slavery, it couldn't possibly win against the backdrop of the flow of an enlightened history played out over the preceding two hundred years and then got virtual kid gloves post-war treatment from two American presidents--a treatment which allowed the inhabitants of that region to simultaneously grind down the former objects of that slavery and, ironically but fittingly, kick themselves in the arse both economically and intellectually.

When the party that had sympathised with them in their military effort on behalf of the freedom to conduct the business of slavery as usual and in scapegoating the reasons for their largely self-inflicted post-war misery, finally, after a century, began to come to its senses, they scuttled over to and infected the Party that owed its existence to a fierce opposition to the very principle Southerners had rebelled for and lost. A Party-more than a hundred and ten years after its creation--that had already been weakened from the persistent ideological assault of the Far Right of the Country's Western sun-belt.

That, in a nutshell, tells the story.

The GOP not popular with minorities? Let's see. Bush never could quite find the time to address the NAACP at its national convention. The immigration debate during the Bush years led to GOP congressmen calling for ever taller fences along the Mexican border. The Sotomayor hearings turned into one long GOP complaint as to how the white man is aggrieved, from Sotomayor's wise Latina remark to the "reverse discrimination" setting back white employees.

As for the GOP brand, what perception wasn't destroyed during the Bush years? Fiscally conservative? Bush doubled the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion and left the next president a huge budget mess. Strong on defense? The GOP got us into a war of choice and mismanaged it every step of the way. Socially conservative? Sanford, Ensign, Craig, Foley, Vitter, etc. Hypocrisy galore.

I voted for Obama. I'm willing to listen to GOP ideas on health insurance, the budget mess, and other pending issues. Literally, all I hear from the right is "no," can't do it. Status quo is the Republican brand, and that doesn't work in the face of a receding middle class, loss of good jobs overseas, the health care crisis, the budget crisis. Get some ideas, get some empathy, maybe someone will listen.