I think [Kerry] has no choice but to try to split the Republican party in the same way. If I were Kerry, I would devote every breakfast, lunch and dinner to meeting with every Republican who's willing to break bread with him, from the true moderates like Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snowe through the old-timers like John Warner and Pete Domenici and the mavericks McCain and Hagel, and asking every one of them, "We don't have to agree, but are we here to govern this country, or wage ideological warfare?" And slowly, as they all understand the long-term fiscal crisis and the consequences of the Bush mania, just enough of them will decide they're here to govern and begin to work with Kerry. The solutions won't be to everyone's liking. They won't float Max Sawicky's or Jamie Galbraith's boat. It will feel a lot more like the first Bush Administration, with endless, unsatisfying budget summits at Andrews Air Force base. But they just might ward off disaster and make it possible to do something more constructive with government in the future.

And, possibly, just as in Virginia, they just might destroy the Republican Party. That's the choice these Republicans will face as they decide whether to align with the Republican Party or the anti-tax Republican Party. (Or, as I would call them, the Conservative Party or the Nihilist Party.) If they join the effort to find a compromise, they will find the Club for Growth, slowly prying their fingers away from the brink of their own party, as it almost did to Specter and will now do to some Virginia legislators. But if they join the Nihilist Party, what will they have to show for it?

[via Pandagon]

I was idly wondering the other day if things might not get so bad for moderates and outliers in the Republican Party, that they might actually consider splitting off to start another party. I really can't understand why the true moderates, Chafee and Snow, for instance, remain in the party, when it's obvious that the people who run the place have no respect for them and no interest in accomodating them, but I understand the inertia and social pressure which keeps them from becoming Democrats. Why not, then, go the third way and caucus with Jim Jeffords as the first step to breaking away?

If I remember correctly, the Republican Party was founded after internal dissension caused the disintegration of the Whigs -- perhaps we might be seeing the beginnings of another such change.