It's not yet clear how the one-armed midget demographic is shaping up, but everybody else seems to be bailing on the GOP.
Begging the forgiveness of one-armed midgets, I'm merely quoting Republican National Committee Chairman and former Maryland lieutenant governor Michael S. Steele. In a Washington Times interview shortly after being elected head of the GOP, Mr. Steele met Howard Dean's gays/guns/God challenge and raised him a jackpot of grief.
Mr. Steele was making the point that the GOP needed to "uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets."
That was February. This is now:
As state party chairmen gather this week in Maryland, a new Gallup analysis shows that since 2001, fewer people in all but one demographic (those who attend church weekly) identify themselves as Republican.
People moving away from the GOP include those who attend church nearly weekly or monthly, Midwesterners, Southerners, married people, moderates, college graduates and nongraduates.
The findings confirm growing disenchantment with a party that is viewed as belonging primarily to older white males, despite the GOP's having selected a hip-hop-friendly African-American to lead them.
The party is roiling between the purgers (good riddance to anyone who thinks outside the pup tent) and the bingers (we love everybody!). Within those two groups are subsets: the sane people who are not afraid of paradox or advanced degrees, and the "Billy Bobs" who think it's terribly clever to pass a resolution insisting that the Democrats rename their organization the "Democrat Socialist Party."
And then there's Mr. Steele.
The running joke is that Republicans have "tragic" where Democrats have "magic." The emerging consensus is that Mr. Steele, though he means well, has the wrong personality for the job.
"He's goofy and light in heavy times," as one insider put it.
The list of complaints doesn't stop at Mr. Steele's shoot-from-the-lip style. Of equal concern are his handlers (about whom more anon) and the Republicans' failure to win the recent New York special election.
On his speaking style, the only person who can't wait to hear what Mr. Steele will say next is Joe Biden.
Finally, winning cures all ills in politics, to borrow a Republican friend's words. And Mr. Steele isn't winning. "Right now we're considered losers," she said. "We get back in the game by winning."
Insiders feel that the GOP should have won the New York special election to replace Kirsten E. Gillibrand, the Democrat who succeeded Hillary Clinton in the Senate. And internal polling showed that the contest, lost by just 700 votes, was winnable. Although Mr. Steele directed some money to New York, his critics say that it wasn't spent strategically enough to draw out soft Republicans - the GOP's real target demographic.
Correction: In my column on the torture memos, I mistakenly attributed two quotes to the torture statute that actually came from one of the memos.
Kathleen Parker's syndicated column appears regularly in The Baltimore Sun. Her e-mail is kparker@kparker.com.
