I can understand why people like Daughtery don’t like the GOP. Political Parties have to be involved in the nitty gritty of politics. Political parties have to work to raise money for candidates and try to appeal to a wide audience which means having to dilute your ideological beliefs. Political parties also have to govern and that means making compromises. It means that a President Bush has to give money to banks to prevent a Second Great Depression. It means that a President Reagan will raise taxes to try to tame a deficit. It means a President Nixon will create an EPA to deal with a growing environmental problem.

Of course for someone like myself who considers himself a moderate, I tend to like political party that is able to be a bit more flexible and pragmatic. Also, I have to wonder who corrupted who: conservatism or the Republican Party? I do know that before the conservative resurgence that began with Barry Goldwater, moderates like me had a place in the GOP. Now we are holding on by the skin of our teeth, if that.

On the whole I like Daughtery’s essay. The current conservative movement is embarassing and it makes it damn hard to say you are a Republican in public. I’m tired of the Joe the Plumbers and Sarah Palins who don’t have a brain between them, becoming what passes as intellectual heft among conservatives.

But I don’t think you can place all the blame on the GOP. It takes two to tango.

President Barack Obama will wake up tomorrow, the one-year anniversary of his historic election, with bad news. Voters sent a strong message by (1) rejecting his political allies in Virginia, the swing state that helped deliver him the White House. This is the home state of Tim Kaine, who is the Democratic National Committee chairman and outgoing governor, and (2) the Democratic stronghold of New Jersey.

However, the Democrats did get a coup in one area: New York’s 23rd Congressional District, a Republican-leaning district (R+1, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index). Bill Owens (Democratic Party candidate) beat Doug Hoffman (Conservative Party candidate), and so the Democrats picked up a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. As I’ve argued here before, it isn’t strategically wise for movement conservatives to be knocking moderate Republican candidates (as was done to Dede Scozzafava) out of races.

After all, New York is not Alabama.