A Little Political Truth

“Of all the strategic errors that all of the campaigns have made this cycle, Romney's effort to appeal to all the individual factions of the GOP may have been the biggest.”

That’s from a great article from Dean Barnett of The Weekly Standard. The truth is fun. Read these other quotes:

On Republicans…

[T]he link between all the current Republican party-approved issues is tenuous if indeed it exists at all. If you favor a muscular approach in the war against Radical Islam, do you necessarily contradict your support for the war if you favor gay marriage? The same question holds for lower taxes and environmentalism. While many of these issues have become part of the tribal warfare that separates the two parties, it's impossible to identify a coherent philosophy that demands a voter adopt all the Republican orthodoxies.

On John McCain…

Right now, it looks like we have a party composed of members who pick and choose from a menu of Republican positions that have no logical reason for co-existing with one another. How else do we explain John McCain's success?

And on the Democrats…

The Democratic party has long been a multi-member marriage of convenience. The only thing that truly unites its disparate members is their disdain for the Republican party. The preceding, by the way, is one of the reasons Barack Obama has a chance to be such a transformative figure--he's the first Democratic politician in well over a generation to offer a sweeping (though vague) vision that offers anything more than a bunch of little schemes to rip off a piece of the federal government's carcass to give to each member of the coalition.

We don’t have parties anymore. We have two political buffets and we get to choose at which we’d rather eat.