Mofo Politics | Hoping Obama Fails

David Frum: “What’s good for Rush Limbaugh is bad for Republicans”

Posted January 29th, 2009 under Headlines Tags: coulter, david frum, gingrey, obama, rush limbaugh

Fake conservative David Frum trashes Rush Limbaugh, demands conservatives follow drug dealer, terrorist sympathizer Barack Obama instead.

Frum:

Gallup’s latest polling reveals the continuing collapse of the Republican party’s base vote. The news is so very bad that there will be only one possible response from GOP party leadership and our radio talkers: Ignore it.

Overall: 36% of Americans now identify as Democrats and only 28% as Republicans. That 8% advantage for the Dems is the biggest since 1983, before the Reagan boom and triumph in the Cold War created a “Reagan generation” of young conservatives.

…

State by state, the numbers look even worse. In only 7 states do more Americans identify as Republicans than as Democrats:

Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Alaska, Nebraska, and Kansas, and Alabama. The two parties are tied in Arizona and South Carolina.

In all the other 41 states, including every one of the large population states, Democrats outnumber Republicans. In 29 states, including every Northeastern state and every Midwestern state save Indiana, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 10 points or more.

These are the numbers that make Wednesday’s flexing of muscle by Rush Limbaugh over Georgia congressman Phil Gingery not merely ridiculous but actively dangerous. When Republicans line up behind Rush Limbaugh in this way, they are dividing the country 80-20 against themselves. The GOP’s supreme priority now has to be to reinvent itself as a pragmatic, inclusive, modern party of free enterprise and limited government. We have to relearn how to talk to moderates, independent, younger voters, educated voters, women – it’s a long list.

Instead, our congressmen talk to and about Rush Limbaugh like Old Bolsheviks praising Comrade Stalin at their show trials. Rush is right! We see eye to eye with Rush! There is no truth outside Rush!

Rush and Hannity and O’Reilly and Ann Coulter and the others have their place and their role. They spoke for an important section of public opinion, and it is a section our party needs. But it is only a section, and not the whole. The more the party allows them to become our public face, the more embattled and endangered the party becomes.

The relationship between these radio talkers and the larger Republican and conservative world has become parasitic and antagonistic. They flourish and profit to the extent they can polarize and radicalize. The GOP will recover only to the extent that it moderates and reaches out. They benefit from controversies that position them as the leaders and designated speakers for conservative America. But the more visible they become, the more our party is shoved to the margins and rendered unelectable. What is good for Rush is bad for the GOP, and what is good for the GOP is bad for Rush. At some time, some bold party leader will have to confront this dilemma: not by quarreling with Rush or by breaking with him, but by making it clear that our party is bigger than Rush, that it has room for more points of view, and that while Rush may speak for a party faction, he does not speak for the party as a whole.