Yr Cities a Sucker!

Ok this is really more about whether or not the Republican Party is done. Pat Buchanan gives a brief history of politics since the civil war and notes that Each Party has gone through periods of ascendancy and decendency. The Republicans ruled from the Civil War through Herbert Hoover and the Democrats ruled from FDR to LBJ. And the Republicans have ruled since Reagan.

So the question is are we coming to the end of Republican Rule? Buchanan thinks this is a possibility.

All this is in peril today, as the Republican Party heads into a perfect storm in November that could sweep it away because it has failed not only to address the crisis of the age, but to comprehend it.

Another question is if George W. Bush is this cycles Hoover, where is our FDR going to spring from? Buchanan, not being very keen on Democrats, is quick to point out that we don't have one. But perhaps the question could be asked another way. If President Bush is this cycles LBJ, who is our Nixon. That reads a bit better, doesn't it?

Well maybe not. But surely we can find a candidate somewhere in between the lofty heights of FDR and the competent skulldudgery of Nixon to take us into a new cycle of Democratic ascendancy.

Minor niggling. Buchanan takes exception to the fact that Nixon's 1968 campaign strategy is referred to as a "Southern strategy." "Though decried as a Southern Strategy, Nixon's was a national strategy." It was a national strategy. President Nixon used language that meant one thing to the North and the West and something else to the South. That was the whole point.

What Buchanan finds offensive, presumably, is the suggestion that in 1968, Nixon pandered to racists in order to see Republican victories in the south. I can see why he would find that disagreeable. A pity for him, I suppose, that it happens to be the truth.