Not-So-Grand Old Party

The slow-motion train wreck that is the Republican Party has picked up a bit of speed with the near back-to-back admissions by Sen. John Ensign of Nevada and Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina of having strayed from the marital straight and narrow. In the Governor’s case, the confession was delivered in remarks sufficiently bizarre to justify questioning whether ole Mark is playing with a deck of 52. Although in fairness, his originally unexplained absence from the state might have been applauded by the teachers and students on whose behalf he turned down $700 million in educational stimulus funds.

In both cases, a member of the GOP prominent enough to have garnered some mention as potential a Presidential candidate in 2012 has been brought low and forced to consider the awful possibility of life off the political bandwagon. If the GOP keeps shedding prospective ticket leaders at this fearsome rate, we’ll soon be treated to the return of Sarah Palin to the national spotlight, an possibility which no doubt has comedy writers everywhere enthusiastically appealing to their deities.

But perhaps this is unfair to the party of Lincoln. In a truly Herculean display of optimism, Grover Norquist disagrees that the philanderings of Messrs Ensign, Sanford and their predecessors suggest problems for Republicans. To the contrary, he thinks “. . .It shows that sexual attractiveness of limited-government conservatism.” Which seems analogous to thinking John Dillinger cute because of his affinity for guns. Although, come to think of it, this is a sentiment many Republicans might actually espouse.

To be fair, malfeasance by politicians is hardly an exclusively Republican phenomenon. See, just at the national level, Clinton, W., Edwards, J., Rostenkowski, D., and, more likely than not, Jefferson, W., who you may recall had the bright idea of wrapping up a 100-large bribe and stashing it in his freezer. Obviously greed and disdain for the law and one’s electorate play well on both sides of the aisle.

But what particularly grates – almost uniformly - in the cases of Republicans fallen from grace is the revealed monstrous hypocrisy. Family men all, pillars of their communities, exemplars of probity, and as happy to bask in the glow of their halos as to decry and denounce those less morally elevated. Which is to say virtually everyone of a differing political persuasion. You might think the succession of colleagues being brought low would somehow temper their expressions of righteous indignation. You might even think one or two at least would recall the mossy advice to residents of glass houses. Evidently, you would be wrong.

“I think there is somewhat of an identity crisis in the Republican Party,” says Tony Perkins, president of the evangelical Family Research Council. “Are they going to be a party that attracts values voters, and are they going to be the party that lives by those values?” More to the immediate point, can they keep their accusatory fingers in their pockets and their trousers buttoned?