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> > Back at Scholz Garten, Burnt Orange blogger Karl-Thomas Musselman hoists his beer in a toast of sorts. "The best thing that ever happened to Democrats in Texas is that the people who took over the Republican Party in Texas are running it into the ground," he says.
"They're out of touch because they're fanatically ideological," says editor Matt Glazer. "They've failed to govern effectively by every measure you can come up with."
"Say you've been voting Christian values, or along small-government Republican lines," says Musselman, who comes from a place where most folks have been doing just that. "At some point, you have to start thinking, What does it do for me? My taxes are not lower. My kids are not smarter. My job is not better. What are we getting?"
Right now, folks are getting a heaping dose of right-wing bluster from the Texas Republicans--most notably, and most disastrously, on the sticky subject of immigration. Party leaders like Senator John Cornyn and Governor Rick Perry have veered from Rove and Bush's formula and become fence-building border warriors. "They're just digging themselves deeper in a hole by moving right on immigration," says Cal Jillson. "The only prospect for the Texas Republican Party to remain competitive in ten years is to be winning 35 to 40 percent of Hispanic votes, along with 75 percent of whites and 10 percent of African-Americans."
But as the center of Texas political gravity veers inexorably leftward, GOP leaders like Governor Perry appear determined to go down, Alamo style, with ideological guns blazing. "The reason we lost our majority in Congress," Perry lectured the California Republican Convention last fall, "is not because our ideas lost their luster but our leaders lost their way.... It's a sad, sad state of affairs," he said, in a clear dig at fellow Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, "when...Republicans govern like liberals to be loved." No such coddling would be forthcoming from the governor of Texas. "We need to hold the line on what it means to be a Republican," Perry said, "which is, of course, being conservative." > >
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