They'll have to come up with another one pretty soon. Just when the cognoscenti wrote off the Republican Party as a hopeless collection of angry white guys, it was 2010 and Republicans started electing black, brown and female candidates to office up and down the ballot.
It's not just that Republicans are electing young, interesting candidates, writes Michael Medved, although they are.
The Democrats, in other words, have become a party of shop-worn retreads while the GOP bench is full of next-generation leaders of potential national stature, including Governors Chris Christie of New Jersey, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Rick Perry of Texas, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Senators John Thune of South Dakota, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and many more.
First of all, Republicans are electing Hispanics.
After the recent elections, skeptics can no longer deride the GOP as an all-white party of grumpy old men. Marco Rubio, 39, became the new Senator from Florida while fellow Latino Republicans Bryan Sandoval in Nevada and Susana Martinez in New Mexico became the nation’s only two Hispanic Governors. Jaime Herrera, age 31, captured a Democratic Congressional seat in Washington State, while Raul Labrador did the same in Idaho. Two more Hispanic Republicans-- Bill Flores and Quico Canseco—knocked out incumbent Democrats in Texas.
Then you have South Asian Americans and African Americans.
In South Carolina, Indian-American Nikki Haley won for Governor while black conservative Tim Scott beat Strom Thurmond’s son (among others) for a Congressional seat. Alan West, an African-American Iraq War hero, trounced an incumbent white Florida Democrat.
Charles Krauthammer has described the 2010 election as a "reset," that gets the party strength back to 2004 before GOP fatigue set in. But the 2010 result seems to go further than that. It seems to be knocking the predictions of an enduring Democratic majority out of the ballpark. Especially when you add into the mix the entry of conservative women into the mix. Yeah, it's true that conservative women like Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, and Christine O'Donnell don't get no respect. But here's a prediction. You ain't seen the last of conservative women in the political arena. The déclassée ladies from State U ain't gonna take the derision of the liberals lying down.
Women have spent the last century getting into the public square. The first thing they experienced was politicians offering the services of big government to liberate them from the hardships and the drudgery of the ages. With that liberation women could have careers just like men!
Well, it didn't turn out quite as promised, because most women aren't particularly interested in the greasy pole of careerism, and they aren't that excited about trashing their families and short-changing their children. So now women, led by conservative women, are trying to work out a culture that honors women as women rather than trying to turn them into men but without all the aggression.
It's a new era. You could call it post-racist, post-sexist, and definitely post-liberal.
And in this new era, big-government liberalism is turning out to be on the wrong side of history.
I find it strange, to say the least, that you add conservative women, or women at all, to a classification based on race. Women are not a minority in any population around the world, and should not be singled out as such. That's very politically correct. I am not even sure that conservative women in America are a minority amongst American women. Conservative women are a minority only amongst elected officials.
ReplyDeleteI am a woman who worked more than three decades in a profession considered exclusively manly. I am an engineer. That makes me part of a minority amongst engineers, but not a minority in the cultural sense. The same goes for conservative women in politics, they deserve a separate article, not to be mixed into an ethnical breakdown.
Time has come to get rid of the hyphenation, for even many people amongst minorities find it offensive. They say it over and over that would be nice to be considered and called Americans. That would be a tangible difference in approach between the guilt-ridden democrats and those who managed to exorcize their anger by becoming truly color-blind.