The New Republicans?

Is Meghan McCain the future of the Republican party?



It's hard to say. Listening to that clip I get the sense that McCain would be a Democrat but for the fact that her father is a Republican Senator. But if she is, as she claims, representative of the new, young Republicans then the party is going to have to brace itself for a great deal of change, lest it lose these kids to the Democrats in the years to come. McCain describes herself as socially liberal in that clip, which presumably means that she's a conservative in her economic outlook (and in other interviews she has suggested as much). But currently the GOP is primarily a religious party whose economic stances are a muddle. The party is wedded to the idea of market de-regulation, strongly anti-union and virulently opposed to taxation. But it is a party that is addicted to lavish spending and has never managed to implement (or even propose) realistic policies that might actually help lower the deficit and the national debt. Nor has the party shown that it understands capitalism well enough to implement the sorts of intelligent regulations, transparency requirements and robust accounting rules that can help save the free-market from succombing to its own excesses.

The Republican response to Barack Obama is Bobby Jindal, a Barack Obama doppleganger that the party is pushing under the misguided notion that the only thing holding back it's appeal is the whiteness of its politicians' skin. But discontent with the party runs much deeper than that, and a generation that was raised on Will and Grace is not going to be satisfied with cosmetic changes. They need the party to that is still mired in 19th century backwater fundamenatlism to grow up and get with the 21st century. Bobby Jindal will not save the party from irrelevance. He's just window dressing.