Perhaps the biggest issue facing Republicans, that is, as we move away from this awful and suicidal administration, is the very real issue of public credibility. Has the Bush presidency tarnished our collective credibility? Will people associate being a Republican with being a warmongering, evangelical, and social irresponsible imperial demagogue? Credibility is something that it takes a long time to earn and sometimes a single moment to completely destroy. Where will we stand in the public image after this long eight years is over?

The good news, perhaps, is that the Bush Administration has been so destructive to conservatives and evangelical Christianity that it is almost impossible for either a faith based candidate or a religio-conservative in the Bush mode to get elected in 2008. The bad news, well, is that without the religio-conservative party base, it the rest of the Republican Party is a strange combination of fringe ideologies. Without the vociferous and bloodthirsty base, we are left with a large, but unfortunately quiet minority of reasonable people.

There are the old school libertarians and the even older school liberal republicans of my grandfather’s vintage. Most of the latter are dead. More than one cynic I know cherishes their memory.

Most of us under fifty are a strange modern hybrid who like tradition but who can do without the nasty bits associated with it. We hybrids are a bit green in our social values, but also, we have a lot more to contribute to the ideas factory than just the typical tax cuts and abortion message which has intellectually retarded our political party for too long.

The problem with being a hybrid is that we are too nuanced. I don’t mean to sound elitist (for it is an apt critique), but in this case I believe it is true of the non-Bush crowd in the party. We are people who are multifaceted thinkers and it gets us into trouble.

Anywhere outside of politics, nuance is a good thing. In term papers we applaud the student who triangulates their evidence, who thinks of issues from multiple perspectives and offers a reasoned conclusion to round out the argument. In politics, this type of balance is a death sentence. The base wants emotional rhetoric like the famous “smoking gun might become a mushroom cloud”. Phrases like these are lazy; they require very little intellectual effort to understand. Unfortunately, they have devastating results in their simplification. Applied to another issue, healthcare, it is also true. The “I don’t want government telling me which doctor I can see” school is about scaring people to oppose something outright, rather than to discuss the issue in any depth and offer a reasoned solution.

And this is precisely why my contemporaries, those of us inching toward thirty, are full of political malaise. Any person with any moniker of education, no any person simply with the ability to reason, can see the fault in simplifying issues that are by their very nature, meant to be complex. We hybrids want our leaders to be deep thinkers, but for some reason, conservative Republicans have a complete opposition to nuanced thinking dismissing it outright as either soft or liberal.

However, I know for a fact that there are more hybrids out there than most pundits think. Most of us either voted Democratic in the last Congressional election or stayed home. We are people who come from Republican families (like me) or who were attracted to the reform movement in the 90’s that wanted to clean up government, make it streamlined and sensible, and were opposed to the very nature of Clintonian focus group politics. In short, we are intellectual, but not to a fault. We are not relativists but realists. We are moral, but not to an unpleasant extreme. Some of us are religious, though on the more liberal side of the theological coin. We are practical, without being simpletons. Our natural instinct is caution but we can and will act, especially on issues of fundamental human decency.

We are precisely the people who walked away from this horrid administration after Hurricane Katrina. If ever there was a time to lose hope in one’s party it was in that pitiful display of incompetence. The information that has been published since has brought to light the simple fact that all of our suspicions about the Iraq War have been true, and some, far worse than we thought.

So why do we hybrids have so little clout? Because the base of the party hates us. They think that we’re not Republican enough to matter, that we are fickle and flighty, and that we lack conviction. Of course, none of these things are true but it is that type of outright dismissal that is going to reaffirm the Republican minority in Congress in 2008. This is not a bad thing either, since we as a party need to do some soul searching, and there is no better place for that than in opposition.

The question going forward is what type of party will emerge? Will the hybrids transform their party or will they continue to be overshadowed by the base? Will the hybrids leave the party and go over to the democrats or, more likely, become independents? These are the questions that should be asked at party meetings. I wouldn’t know, for we hybrids aren’t invited. They’re afraid will ask for a vegetarian option.