Steven Bavaria's  Instablog

GOP Needs To Move "Crazy Brother" Out Of The House

In a famous scene in the movie "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," Michael Caine's character, a Don Juan who preys on rich women visiting the French Riviera, has the tables turned on him when one of his victims announces she's taking him home to a shotgun wedding in Oklahoma. He escapes with the help of Steve Martin, who pretends to be Caine's lunatic brother Rupprecht, whose constant drooling is merely one of his nicer personal habits. When Caine's character insists that Rupprecht will be coming along to live with the happy couple, that quickly scotches the deal.

This scene, unfortunately, describes how the Republican Party is perceived by millions of Americans, who view it like the neighbor up the street that nobody wants to visit because of the crazy relative who lives with them.

Many Americans would welcome a party that embraced serious fiscal responsibility and a smaller overall government footprint. A Republican party that made those issues the centerpiece of its message would generate huge support and have a real shot at winning an electoral majority. But millions of voters who would support a serious campaign based on those issues, are put off and even frightened by what they see as the GOP's lunatic fringe approach to a whole host of socioeconomic issues:

• Their seeming indifference and even hostility to the desire of millions of women to control decisions about their own health
• An opposition to basic science in areas like evolution and climate change, and apparent willingness to incorporate religious mythology into school curricula
• The desire to re-write American history to make Christianity an "essential" aspect of our constitutional framework
• A convoluted interpretation of the 2nd Amendment that envisions no limit on the personal right to arm one-self (bazookas, rocket launchers, assault rifles, tanks on your front lawn?), and apparently gives society as a whole no right to protect itself by putting reasonable restrictions on arms-toting individuals
• Simplistic, demagogic proposals on immigration reform (Send 'em all home, even if they have no home to go to)

As long as the GOP puts these issues at the forefront of its platform, or makes them litmus tests to judge the "purity" of its candidates, it will continue to turn off voters who would otherwise find its fiscal and economic message attractive.

They should also drop the rhetoric about rich Americans - as a class - being "job creators" who earned their wealth Horatio Alger style by the sweat of their brow. We've seen enough self-dealing in America's boardrooms, and hundreds of M&A deals that had no economic rationale whatsoever other than to generate fees for the CEOs and their Wall Street enablers, to know that much of the real "socialism" in America involves protecting the compensation of the elite from real market forces. For every "one percenter" who built their financial wealth creating a business with their own hands, mind and entrepreneurialism, there are dozens of others who got theirs by manipulating companies that were owned and built by someone else. The shenanigans in CEO suites and on Wall Street revealed after the financial crash have made that readily apparent. So basing a tax policy on protecting this group as though they represented the engine of economic growth in America is unrealistic, if not laughable.

These conclusions are obvious to many Americans, but will require some serious and painful self-analysis by the GOP leadership, whoever that is. But a GOP espousing reasonable fiscal and economic policies, without the extreme and/or downright goofy positions on other issues, would be a welcome ballot box alternative.