The Dumbing Down Of The Republican Party Began With Sarah Palin, Not Donald Trump, And GOP Lawmakers Haven’t Learned A Lesson

An eye-opener opinion piece in the Washington Post lambasted the Republican Party over its dysfunction over the years. The writer draws the conclusion that the GOP’s carnival-like antics are rooted in a costly decision in 2008: the introduction of the world to Sarah Palin. Donald Trump is off the hook for the party’s current snafu.

With some 265 days remaining until the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, to select the presidential and vice presidential nominees for the 2016 Elections, Donald Trump and Ben Carson are the party’s best choices to face a surging Hillary Clinton. It’s clear that Republican voters want a “Washington outsider” to lead the country for the next four to eight years, citing the CNBC post on recent polls.

Had Sarah Palin held some glimmer of preparedness and intellectual capacity to lead from the Oval Office, perhaps the world would take Trump and Carson more seriously. They don’t, and the two opposites are likely the circumstantial choices for the GOP nomination.

If you can get beyond the mantra of one who wants to “build a wall” and have “Mexico pay for it” and another who compares abortion to slavery, perhaps the race for the White House won’t be rife with regrets. Arguably, many will fail in that undertaking.

Donald Trump is down with giving states the right to legalize marijuana: https://t.co/srxNHoSLjr pic.twitter.com/Gt4Ug2n6JQ

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) October 30, 2015

Over the years, Americans have been force-fed sound bites and headlines that put Republicans in a bad light, most of which is self-inflicted, according to the Washington Post writer.

Ben Carson, when asked about literally anything pic.twitter.com/kDjxcwvMLh

— VICE (@VICE) October 29, 2015

There have been the personality clashes between John Boehner and Barack Obama, “manufactured crisis,” threats to the debt ceiling, looming government shutdowns, hundreds of attempts to repeal Obamacare, the Kevin McCarthy “surprise,” and more. Currently, the party is a laughingstock with Trump and Carson as frontrunners to the presidential nomination, and former titans Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio somewhere in the distance with their campaigns on life support.

The Post writer makes no attempt to reignite a debate over the scare John McCain nearly brought the world to by having Sarah Palin one beat from the presidency — had they prevailed. Instead, he attempts to expose the Conservative statesmen for remaining mum on allowing talking heads to plod all over the ideology of the party while adding kink after kink in its political stature.

“‘Once McCain put Palin on the ticket, Republican “grown-ups,’ ‘who presumably knew better, had to bite their tongues. But after the election, when they were free to speak their minds, they either remained quiet or abetted the dumbing-down of the party.'”

In short, party leaders did little while Donald Trump and other talking heads repeatedly alleged that Barack Obama was born in Africa, not Hawaii, as he claims. Those lapses in judgment largely led to the rise of the Ted Cruz’s of the GOP.

“It’s hard to feel much sympathy. The Republican establishment’s 2008 embrace of Palin set an irresponsibly low bar. Coincidence or not, a batch of nonsense-spewing, hard-right candidates quickly followed, often to disastrous effect.”

Have Republicans shot their party in the foot with self-inflicted strategies that have resulted in a laughingstock backlash? It sure seems that way. Only in America can a bonafide frontrunner whose family’s dynasty is known the world over can be upstaged by a reality TV personality who lobs insults at women and minorities. Only in this country can the Party of Lincoln be left defaced by infighting and a neo-Conservative machine that faces a loss of functionality as a political party.

If the months of polls and history are any indicators of future results, Donald Trump or Ben Carson stands to win the GOP nomination for President of the United States. It’s an irrevocable truism, and one littered with vestiges of self-harm.

In the distant, the haunting words of Patrick Henry are heard: “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

Perhaps, new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan can step in at the eleventh hour and save his party from disgrace and total meltdown. He appears to be the last hope to bring an out-of-touch GOP back to reality. If not, the “death” risk of the Republican Party is real.

Sarah Palin may have exposed the chaos, but Trump is carrying the torch of past missteps. Somehow, I can’t get the words from Trump out of my head: “My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars.”

“Small,” he says. There’s your reality.

Do you agree with the Washington Post writer that Republicans, mired in dysfunction, “brought it on themselves”?

[Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]