GOP needs wake-up call

     This country needs a two-party system -- at least two, maybe more.

     Many folks still believe we have two: The Republicans and the Democrats, right?

     Actually, it’s one-and-one-half – The Democratic Party and half of a GOParty.

     The Republican leadership at this point in time in our country’s development (and this country, like most countries, is still developing) has lost touch with the reality of the demographical shift in the United States. The voting power is no longer strictly in the hands of unions and big money; diversity has risen up and slapped the political process upside the head.

     Blacks now make up about 14 percent of the population; Hispanics, at more than 52 million, are almost 17 percent of the population. If my elementary math skills are still intact, that’s about 31 percent. The number of Hispanics without our borders has more than doubled in less than 25 years; within another 25 years, that number will grow exponentially until by 2050, 30 percent of the nation’s residents will be Hispanic.

     These two facts – plus another biggee to be dropped a paragraph from now – seem to elude the Republican Party and its take-no-prisoners chairman, Reece Priebus. He thinks he can bluster his way and his party to the presidency by ignoring demographics and stridently harping on the scourge of the rise of minorities in our political process.

     His ignorance is startling – but not surprising. Politicians and those that are served by them are blissfully ignorant of facts with which they do not agree. Priebus, unlike Robert Steele, the former RNC chairman, has also forgotten another voting bloc that the GOP has tried hard for years to disenfranchise: Women.

     The party of Lincoln and Reagan – now of McConnell, Boehner, Paul and Cruz – conveniently forgets the 156 million women in the U.S. and the influence these modern females have on the home-front voting decisions.

     In the past decade, the Republicans have done just about everything they can do to alienate a large segment of the female voting population on the issue of personal health, i.e., abortion. The likes of Cruz and Paul, today’s front-running darling in the dash for the primary nomination, cater to the extremists of the party (for the moment at least) in order to curry the “early favorite” mantle in the party primaries and caucuses that are still over the horizon.

     Neither can be elected president; you can take that to the bank … or Las Vegas, where they will gladly take your money on that sucker bet.

     Taking the facts that a Democratic candidate – virtually any Democratic candidate – can count on a majority of votes from blacks, Hispanics and women if the GOP stays its historical course, how can the Republicans win the presidency in 2016?

     With the individual members of the herd who has his or her neck stuck out now, they cannot. 

     That statement is not political, it’s demographics mixed with common sense and logic.

     Additionally, the more the GOP tries to skew those voting numbers by bogus voter ID laws that are aimed at reducing the number of minorities who vote, the more minorities will vote. By such actions, the GOP is flatly stating it is a non-inclusive political party. 

     To have a chance to win the presidency in 2016, the GOP has to – HAS TO – move to the center of the political spectrum. And the Tea Party movement will fight any such move tooth-and-claw, creating a wider party chasm than now exists. For the past five years, the leaders of the party have spent so much time and energy “hating” Obama, they have lost sight of the bigger goal … elect a Republican president.

     In order to win the presidency, as a party and as part of their stated and approved platform, the Republicans have to embrace minorities and establish an acceptable (read, flexible) path to citizenship for immigrants, drop the bombastic abortion noise to a murmur (or at least leave that debate to Women of the GOP) and allow that it’s really not a part of the Constitution that any citizen can own an automatic assault rifle or any other weapon of choice.

     The party hardliners will not be able to make those adjustments. And, thusly, the GOP will have to be content to win regional and statewide seats in Congress and let the Democrats run the White House.

     It’s not too early for a wake-up call.