Republican officials defecting to Democrats

It has been said that politicians look for the crowd, jump in front of them and then pretend to be their leader. If so then the Republicans are really in trouble. Their politicians are starting to desert them and join the opposition Democrats. Mainstream, that is non-theocratic Republicans, are quitting the party. Yes, voters left first. Now the politicians are following. Earlier I covered the Reagan administration official who is now the Democratic candidate for Senator in Virginia.

Well another defection has been Mark Parkinson. He is running for deputy governor in Kansas as a Democrat. Up until a few days ago he was the chairman of the state Republican Party. The Observer writes about his reasons, "Parkinson lambasted his former party's obsession with conservative and religious issues such as gay marriage, evolution and abortion." Parkinson said: "They were fixated on ideological issues that really don't matter to people's everyday lives. What matters is improving schools and creating jobs. I got tired of the theological debate over whether Charles Darwin ws right."

Paul Morrison, another former top Republican in Kansas is now a Democrat and running for attorney general for the state. The Observer reports that the neo-cons and theocrats in the Republican Party are thrilled as they figure this will cement their control over the party. True. It will. But that could be like inhereting a Kentucky Derby winning horse two days before it's due for the glue factory. What Republicans have to face is that their marriage to the theocratic right has destroyed the Republican Party. They glossed over it in the last few years only because the trauma of 9/11 focused people's attention on other issues. But people have seen the ugly side of fundamentalism and they don't like it.

Two things are happening here. People are deserting the Republican Party in droves. Now the officials are following. Secondly, people re deserting the traditional morality campaigns as well. This marriage of the GOP and the fundamentalist religionists has discredited the Republican Party and religion. Another news article I read today said that voters aren't embracing the Democrats so much as rejecting the Republicans. They still don't know what Democrats stand for, but then neither do the Democrats, but they do know what the Republicans stand for. In the past, as one pollster put it, they voted for the devil they knew. Now they can't stand that devil at all.

If the Democrats ever wake up and moderate their extreme Left views, accept real budget cuts to balance the budget, don't raise taxes, roll back the surveillance state of Bush, and focus on Iraq then would see a landslide that they haven't experienced in over 40 years.