The corpse twitches
So this is actually quite funny: in yesterday's City Section, here, is a report on the efforts by republicans to stave off the imminent death of their party.
It looked like an exam room for an S.A.T. A week ago Saturday, in a small conference room in a hotel in Bayside, Queens, rows of tables stood covered with neatly laid-out papers. The type of people filing into the room, however — mostly middle-aged and older — suggested otherwise.
This was, in fact, the first Candidates’ School of the Queens County Republican Party, where Republican hopefuls, in a city and state dominated by Democrats, had gathered for a crash course from campaign experts and party leaders on how to become better candidates.
You can have the best candidates imaginable - virginal Nobel Prize winners cum war heroes cum volunteers at the local homeless shelter - but they will founder on the deeply unpopular message which they must of necessity represent; brand GOP is dead in New York.
Notably, that brand isn't dead just because of the depredations of the national party; in New York, you can add to the miasma of the failed Bush administration the compounded failure of the local party. Two words: Joe Mondello. Four more: Joe Bruno and George Pataki.
The distance that New York republicans have to travel is revealed in this snippet:
The documents placed in front of the participants contained a detailed agenda that ran from the ideological, like “Traditional Values†and “Reforming Government,†to the practical, like “Things You Should Never Do†(never lie, the experts warned) and “Using Blogs†(embrace them, they agreed).
New York has a thriving Progressive blogosphere; the other side has nothing that could compare to that. Compare, for example, this to anything the other side has done; or just look at this.
It's not just that New York Democrats have better ideas than Joe Mondello's party; we also have a better infrastructure for propagating them. See you in 2008, fellas.
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Republicans | New York | Queens | Robert Hornak
Help take them down
Submitted by mole333 on 21 May 2007 - 11:36am.
Their demise won't happen just because we say it will. We need to work for it. I've been successfully raising into the thousands of dollars around the nation to win in 2008. So far no one has donated to winning in New York state. So if we want to win big in NY state, we gotta get the early money out there. Give now if you want it.
We need Repubicans
A thriving two-party (or more than two) system is necessary for true democracy. Just ask Donald Manes. Or Clarence Norman. Or ... well, the full list is far too long.
As solidly Democratic as I am, I hope for a resurgent Republican party, here in NYC and in Albany. A minority party, to be sure, but not dead. It took only a few years of complete control in Washington for the Republicans to become completely corrupt and evil. (Actually, it took less than eight months -- from January 20, 2001, until September 12, 2001.) Democrats are only marginally better on that score.
So let us celebrate the decline of the Republican party, but not hope for its total destruction. We need them, if only to keep us and our kind honest.