your village voice

GOP And DNC Struggle Within

The inner turmoil of the Republican Party has been on the horizon well before Bush's presidential nomination in 2000. But it has been a trademark of Karl Rove and company to snuff out resistance in even the most unbelievable of circumstances. The recent Valerie Plame investigation notwithstanding, most fiascos have escaped public scrutiny. Until now.

Perhaps it is because Rove is so involved with the grand jury investigations into the Valerie Plame scandal, he is detained from giving the Mier's Nomination his usual "bludgeoning of independent thought" approach. Whether conservatives in the Republican Party are right or not, they are clearly fed-up with empty promises. A new conservative group called Americans For Better Justice bought $250,000 of TV/radio time yesterday to broadcast a nationwide ad against Harriet Miers. They are asking for Bush to withdraw her from the nomination. David Frum, former Bush speechwriter and spokesman for the group sees Miers as unqualified and non-conservative:

Conservatives have worked too hard for too long to settle for anything less than our very best on the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, liberals are sparing with moderates in the Democratic Party. Cindy Sheehan, national frontperson against the Iraq War, has now taken aim at presidential front-runner NY Senator Hillary Clinton. She had this to say about Clinton's position on the Iraq War:

I believe that any candidate who supports the war should not receive our support. It doesn't matter if they're Senator Clinton or whoever.

With her position as a senator, she's become more: "Let's see which way the wind blows, and what's going to get me re-elected or elected, or how am I going to benefit from this" instead of truly voting from her integrity.

Sheehan is clearly attacking Hillary's stance the same way Frum is attacking Bush's nomination. This is a microcosm of the rift that split US voters in the 2004 election cycle. Unlikely alliances within both parties are falling apart as grass-roots organizations that once worked together now split in favor of political ideology and, more importantly, identity. The once rock-solid foundations of the two-party system is now shaking into their extreme fragments.

Is this the end of the march to the moderate center? Are voters now more concerned about issues and less about the elephant and donkey? Will a viable third-party emerge from the fray in the meantime?

As much as I may hope, I doubt it. But what has been changing drastically over the last 10-15 years is the degree by which politics has infiltrated everyday life in the US. For every blind vote, there are now just as many voters concerned about the issues and not party loyalty.

Surely, voters are waking up to the inherent corruption of a two-party system...?

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UPDATE 10/27/2005: Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination today, claiming to be protecting the White House right to privacy.

posted by the prisoner @ 11:53:00 AM