Republican or Democrat: the lines are blurrrred

Glenn Beck makes a really good point in the first chapter of his book "Cowards: What politicians, radicals, and the media refuse to say," when he noted that the 1912 Presidential election was a turning point, when the republicans became democrats and the democrats became progressives.

It was that election where Theodore Roosevelt ran left of Woodrow Wilson, making Wilson look like a conservative.  Yet Wilson turned out to be among the worse Presidents ever in terms of turning our government into a liberal machine.

He notes that a good example of this occurred in the 2008 election when "our choice for president was between a Republican who wanted to spend billions to 'combat' global warming and a Democrat who wanted to spend hundreds of billions to do the same thing.

He notes the following:

Progressives realized long ago that if you rig the game of politics against the small government option, then you end up with a series of candidates who increasingly blur the line between teh parties.  Eventually the parties themselves become meaningless -- empty vessels that simply serve to funnel money and power through the system.  With a few exceptions, our elections are really no longer about whether to grow or cut government's size and power, but rather by how much they should grow.  We debate double-digit increases in social program spending versus single-digit increases.  We debate how many new billion-dollar entitlements we should add instead of whether these programs should even exist in the first place.  We debate whether teachers unions and the U.S. Department of education should have more or less power, rather than whether the federal government should have any role in local education at all.  all of this is part of the con, and it's worked to absolute perfection.  With very few exceptions even the 'boldest' of conservative politicians submit budgets and bills that, a hundred years ago, would've been too far left for even a democratic to propose."

I think that is a bold statement, and one that has had me thinking lately.  It has me thinking now that it might be better with Obama in office than a republican who does the same thing.  This way democrats and progressives and liberals and socialists will be blamed for all the failures, and not republicans.  This way, perhaps some conservative/libertarian will step forward and do what only Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and  Ronald Reagan were able to do during the 20th century -- make our country great through capitalism, limited government, and personal responsibility.