Republican Party 3

I find it difficult to rate political parties. For me, it depends: the moderate libertarian wing of the party gets four stars from me, but the neo-conservative wing gets only 2 stars. And of course it depends on the candidate who runs. I'm sure you can define your rating of each political party based on their positions on the social issues, but even then, a brief examination of judicial appointments shows that the Republican Party has contributed their own fair share of liberal jurists to the bench, for example David Souter, John Paul Stevens, or Earl Warren; likewise the Democrats have contributed conservatives like Hugo Black to the court as well. There's no way you can really know how a justice will vote, so the issue of judges shouldn't be at issue when it comes to political parties. The social issues like abortion don't motivate me that much. Even though I am generally pro-life on that issue, it is not a deal-breaker for me. Those issues like gay right and abortion are controlled by the federal courts, and even when theyre not, it is usually a local issue. I vote on fiscal issues and foreign policy. Generally in the past I've supported the Republican Party because of their realist foreign policy and their balanced and prudent approach to budgetary matters. This is a tradition that has dominated the party since the last century, going to the current Presidents own father. The son has been influenced by the neo-conservatives too much. Many from this wing of the party were former Democrats who advocated an aggressive approach to the Soviet Union during the 1970s. That included ending detente, which I've argued before on this site actually set the stage for the end of the Cold War. That wing of the party is big government and highly corporatist (direct subsidies to large corporations) when it comes to fiscal policy and almost imperialist on foreign policy questions.

The party over the past 6 years has been very highly disciplined, with a strongly honed-in ideological message. Now this works when you can define the debate, but when events intervene, you need to bend with political reality. That is why the neo-conservative agenda was repudiated in the 2006 election. Truth is that many of their policies have been far too rigid, too far right of center to build a strong working majority. Many of their policies like privatizing social security, although innovative, is simply the wrong solution to the problem. The country certainly hasn't moved left, but they are not happy with the current state of events in the GOP either.

Mixing corporatist economic policy with an imperialist foreign policy together has many perils, some of which has become evident. Luckily the party is beginning to come around on these things, as many of the neo-conservatives favorite programs, like direct intervention in the Middle East, have been largely discredited. The person who wins the nomination in 2008 will almost certainly distance themselves at least somewhat from that wing of the party. Doing so will increase their chances of retaining the White House in the long term.