The GOP Primary: The Charge of the RINOs

As I PREDICTED (I got one right! I got one right!), Mitt Romney won a primary Tuesday night. The word of the day on Wednesday among media sources was “scrambled,” as in, the GOP race is more scrambled than my eggs were this morning.

Actually, I had a turkey sandwich but you get my point.

The Dems kind of sat this one out, Clinton won but since none of them campaigned and the delegates don’t count, it’s not really a meaningful victory. They did have a very nice, civil debate over on C-SPAN about, uh, something. I didn’t watch. We had Grey’s Anatomy burning a hole in our DVR.

But the merry-go-round of Republican candidates continues, and it’s driving us a little crazy. The fault, perhaps, lies not in our politics but in ourselves. There’s no rule that a party has to pick a candidate early in the primary season. It’s another manifestation of our horse-race mentality (and the modern urge to have every bit of information at our fingertips NOW) that we are impatient for this thing to play out.

Or at least I am impatient. You guys might feel differently.

But what I keep coming back to is how strange the Republican field is. Every one of the candidates has at least one issue that could be considered an Achilles Heel. In some circles, these candidates would be called “Republicans in Name Only” or RINOs. Now, this is a pretty clichéd perogative term that people regularly level at others simply because they disagree on some issue. Happens on the Dems side too (DINOs). Still, between the immigration stance that dogs McCain, the anti-corporate positions of Huckabee, and the anything-goes history of Rudy Giuliani, it is a strange group.

Even Ron Paul, whose No Government is Good Government libertarianism rings true with many of the hard-right conservatives I grew up with, goes completely against the grain of current Republican thought with his Out of Iraq Now position.

The most consistent Republican? Fred Thompson, aka He Who Will Not Be Nominated.

I suppose the reason Romney has been able to do as well as he has is that he now talks the talk of a conservative Republican. But his past is so inconsistent with what he now says … well, I’ve harped on that before.

As I'm writing this, there's an NPR report on this very topic. "Is the meaning of conservative changing?" asks the reporter. Some conservative spokeswoman (I'm listening with one ear) says something like "I hope not."

But change could be good. Especially if the Republicans could somehow shake this weird Flat Earth mentality that says tax cuts are good for deficits, science is wrong, war is peacemaking, etc. My problem with conservatives is not that they think differently. It's that they seem (lately) to be against thinking at all.

Maybe that's not fair. But when the half-dozen top Republicans in the country can stand on a stage, raise their hands, and say, "yes, we believe the theory of evolution is scientifically valid," or "yes, torture is wrong," I will rest a lot easier. We're just not quite there yet.