Winning At All Costs

As our longtime readers know, we generally despise the use of the 'politics as sport' metaphor that seems to run rampant through the media. A couple of times a year, though, we drag out our best sports and politics cliches from the old locker, and give it our best college try - which is what we're doing today. That's more than we can say for the current Republican Party.

To say the GOP is looking ugly for 2012 has nothing to do with their appearance.

To start with, President Obama's latest plans to tackle both jobs and the debt already have the support of significant majorities of Americans. Even worse for partisan Republicans heading into an election year, Congressional poll numbers are sinking somewhere below the Ohio State football team's poll numbers - and Americans are more unhappy with Congressional Republicans than they are Congressional Democrats.

The GOP playbook also seems to be all out of winning formations. It's obvious the go-to Republican technique of saying no to everything won't work anymore, with the trigger threat hanging over their heads. Bigotry and class warfare also seem to be headed for the bench.

To top it all off, their fans - Republican voters - don't seem too happy with any of the potential "team captains" running for the GOP 2012 Presidential nomination.

With all those factors against them, it doesn't surprise us at all that Republicans are trying to cheat the system, and change the rules.

The political right has already curbed early voting in multiple states, made it harder to register new voters, rolled back voting rights for ex-cons who have already done their time, and even eliminated voter registration groups like Acorn. Where they can, Republicans have tried to rig federal congressional redistricting processes to make Democratic-leaning districts disappear and give Republicans an unfair advantage.

In Texas, GOP arrogance led to them getting caught already in political hanky-panky.

Republicans' biggest unethical move for 2012 appears to be a direct assault on the Electoral College - from both sides of the ball.

In Pennsylvania, Republicans are attempting to change the way their state tallies votes for President. Their state GOP is trying to sell the idea that a system like Nebraska's and Maine's - a proportional system - would better represent the voters in Pennsylvania. While that may be true, it's also no secret their real intention is to try to use that proportional system to give Republicans more electoral votes overall - an idea that could backfire.

In Nebraska, the state GOP is claiming exactly the opposite as their teammates in Pennsylvania - that Nebraska should go back to being a "winner take-all" state in the Electoral College. The Nebraska Republican Party is even threatening with political excommunication any Republican state senator who dares to stand up for the state's current method of apportioning Electoral College votes.

If these were old-fashioned, sane, moderate Republicans, this kind of unprincipled, amoral spiking the ball would be called what it is - cheating - and would never be tolerated.

Of course, if the current Republican Party was controlled by old-fashioned, sane, moderate conservatives, they never would have gotten themselves into this mess in the first place.