Impending Republican Disaster in 2008

TC wrote a couple of months ago about the possibility of a Democratic blowout in the 2008 elections. Since then the Iraq war has gradually worsened the Republican predicament.

So here is a conservative web site quoting George Will on what 2008 holds for Republicans.

The quote from Will (from ABC's This Week program) is quite amazing:

Stephanopoulos: If this now declared deadline of Gen. Petraeus of September, if the political goals haven't been met by then, do you see large scale Republican defections at that point?

Will: Absolutely. They do not want to have, as they had in 2006, another election on Iraq. George, it took 30, 40 years for the Republican Party to get out from under Herbert Hoover. People would say, "Are you going to vote for Nixon in '60?" "No, I don't like Hoover." The Depression haunted the Republican Party. This could be a foreign policy equivalent of the Depression, forfeiting the Republican advantage they've had since the '68 convention of the Democratic Party and the nomination of [George] McGovern. The advantage Republicans have had on national security matters may be forfeited.

Stephanopoulos: Wow!

There is a link to the video clip (the Will quote is right at the end) on the site as well, plus a gloomy quote from William F. Buckley. All this leads to this comment from Real Clear Politics (a site TC likes for its updated information on U.S. polls):

Even though both Buckley and Will are careful to hedge slightly on their predictions, essentially two of the most respected and smartest minds in conservative politics just declared that the Republican Party will not only suffer greatly in 2008, but that it is in danger of becoming a minority party for generations.

An impending Republican disaster? The gloom and doom foreseen for the Republicans is from the respectable right, not from the loony left.

We may be in for a remarkable transformation. The gradual decline of the Democrats following 1968 was directly linked to Vietnam so there is no reason the same could not hold true for the Republicans over Iraq. No one says so but if a Democratic President and Congress had the nerve to implement a universal publicly administered health care plan while ending the imperial adventures overseas, there could well be a new Democratic era on the scale of the New Deal.