Whitman is a turd, at least I've always thought so. But the GOP does have its problems, and I think they are sketched out nicely in this recent piece by Reihan Salam of The American Scene. The money quote, by losing GOP candidate Tim Pawlenty: Republicans "need to be the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club."

Punch, it sounds like you think the Bush family are native to Texas. Scratch a little deeper?

Given how slender the GOP majority hold on power is, I'm not sure that a walkout by a significant chunk of the northeastern contingent of the party could be taken lightly -- especially if that sparks a similar revolt in, say, the Pacific northwest.

Hubris always gets paid back in the end.

I don't deny the money and the elitism in the Bush dynasty, but at least they know who their customers are. Even Bush 41 figured it out early in his career that the GOP was no longer his father's (Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush) Republican party.

Regarding the other note, look at those county by county electoral maps. Heck New York and California are red states. But they will remain blue as long as LA, SF, and NYC exist and let's face it those cities are never going to go GOP anyway.

My biggest fear is that the Republicans are not going to reduce government enough which will most certainly lead to a big defeat down the road.

PTB,

I hate to spoil your party, but if you look at the population weighted maps, you will find that those states are indeed quite blue.

In addition to PTB's rather silly mistake about what it really means to be a red/blue state (i.e., _not_ to be measured in terms of acreage), which Steve just pointed out, there's PTB's additional mistake of focusing too much on the presidential election, and thereby overlooking the House of Representatives. I think that NY has 9 current GOP seats, NJ has 6, CA has like 19 -- already that's more than the 31-seat margin the GOP has in the House right now, and I haven't looked at, say, Pennsylvania or New Hampshire or Oregon or Nevada or.... Not that every single GOP seat in these states would defect to the 'New Liberal Conservative Party' or whatever it would call itself, but even if just a dozen or so did, and then there started to be serious multi-way electoral battles in some of the others -- well, it's not at outcome that the GOP should be willing to just shrug off, I think. (Not that I would mind, if it came to pass!)

It would be stupid for the conservatives to go from Coke to New Coke. Your silly ideas would dilute the Republican Party so fast and its base would evaporate. Why are so many liberals interested in fixing the Republican Party? It's the Democrat Party that needs to be in the collision repair shop, the GOP just needs a tune-up.

Calling New York and California red states is a marginalization of people who live in big cities or urban areas.

In Oklahoma, it used to be Republicans complaining that they were marginalized in that representation in the legislature was weighted (before the one-man, one-vote decision) toward the rural counties, composed of Democrats, whereas the population centers of Tulsa and Oklahoma City that voted heavily Republican were underrepresented. I have no doubt that there were rural Democrats that were saying, well if you look at the map and go by which party controls the most square miles, then Democrats win.

The Democratic party is in need of some serious tactical rethinking, but it's politically right about where it should be. The current GOP, on the other hand, has been proving that you can be simultaneously too corrupt and too ideological to manage the country successfully, and needs to change before it runs the country completely into the ground.

Anyhow, it's not a question of the GOP deciding whether to 'fix' itself -- the current leadership can't or certainly won't -- so much as whether the moderates (of whom there are a great many more than you think, PTB) get sufficiently fed up with the current bunglarama to force the situation.