A Collapsed Republican Party

Frank Rich's take on the Republican Party:

The Republican Party has collapsed, and that is not a good thing for the
country or for Obama. We need more than one functioning party, not just to
ensure checks and balances and pitch in ideas at a time of crisis, but to temper
this president’s sporadic bursts of overconfidence and triumphalist stagecraft.
No one is perfect. We must remember that there is also an Obama who gave us “You’re
likable enough, Hillary,” a faux presidential seal and a convention speech delivered before what Sarah Palin
rightly mocked as “Styrofoam Greek columns” hauled out of a “studio lot.”

That Obama needs a serious counterweight in the political arena. But
the former party of Lincoln and liberty has now melted down to a fundamentalist
core of aging, rural Dixiecrats and intrusive scolds — as small as
20 percent of the populace in the latest polls. Its position on the American
spectrum of ideas is somewhere between a doomsday cult and Scientology.

You can’t blame the president if he is laughing, too. As The Economist recently certified, the G.O.P. is now officially in the throes of “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” The same conservative gang that remained mum when George W. Bush praised Putin’s “soul” and held hands with the Saudi ruler Abdullah are now condemning Obama for shaking hands with Hugo Chávez, “bowing” to Abdullah, relaxing Cuban policy and talking to hostile governments. Polls show overwhelming majorities favoring Obama’s positions. But his critics have locked themselves in the padded cell of an alternative reality. Not long before The Wall Street Journal informed its readers that 81 percent of Americans liked Obama, Karl Rove wrote in its pages that “no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly.”

From derangement it’s a small step to madness. Last week, the president of a prime G.O.P. auxiliary, the Concerned Women for America, speculated that the president’s declaration of “a state of emergency about the flu was a political thing” to push through Kathleen Sebelius’s nomination as secretary of health and human services. At those tax-protesting “tea parties” on April 15, signs and speakers portrayed Obama as a “fascist,” a “socialist,” a terrorist and Hitler. Republican governors have proposed rejecting stimulus money for their states (only to fold after constituents rebelled) or, in the notorious instance of Rick Perry of Texas, toyed with secession from the union.