Embrace of centrist ideals is source of GOP problems

COMMENTARY luring more and more voters by dispensing free stuff and promising to take care of them. Government has replaced individual responsibility and accountability. We now subsidize bad individual decisions and failure and penalize those who have succeeded by playing by what used to be called “the rules.”

For many, government has become an addiction with Democrats serving as “dealers.” Republicans have had only marginal success in countering this because they don't seem to be able to come up with a set of unified policies and goals. Instead, the GOP has become like a protein shake dieters drink because it contains fewer calories. In too many cases, Republican positions resemble “Democrat-lite.” The growing debt is only one example. Republicans seek only to manage it, not reduce it.

Susan Eisenhower quotes from a letter Ike wrote to a California friend in 1954: “I developed a practice which, so far as I know, I have never violated. The practice is to avoid public mention of any name unless it can be done with favorable intent and connotation; reserve all criticism for the private conference; speak only good in public.” In this, Ike demonstrated his good character, but that didn't stop Democrats from criticizing him about everything from the rounds of golf he played to allegations by Harry Truman and others that he was in the pocket of “reactionaries,” which translated into today's parlance means “extreme right-wingers.”

There's a cliche about sports: “It's not whether you win or lose; it's how you play the game.” In politics it's about winning, and if you don't win how you played the game won't matter. Texas politician Jim Hightower wrote a book titled “There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.”

Modern Republicans might learn from that Texas liberal.