GOP's Problems Much Bigger Than Bush

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Recent voter surveys, including private polling done by a leading Republican strategist, suggest "Republicans face structural problems that stem from generational, demographic and societal changes and aren't easily overcome without changing fundamental party positions," according to the Journal.

The main reasons for drift include the "Iraq war, conservatives' emphasis on social issues such as gay marriage, abortion and stem-cell research, and a party-led backlash against illegal immigrants that has left many Hispanics and Asian Americans citizens feeling unwelcome," the Journal reports.

Longtime Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio conducted a major survey of his party's voters this year, and compared it to a similar one in 1997. He found his party had gotten much older and more conservative in the last decade.

In the current survey, 17 percent of Republicans are 18 to 34 years old, down from 25 percent in 1997. Republicans 55 and older constitute 41 percent of the party - up from 28 percent a decade ago. By 53 percent to 42 percent, Republicans say the party "has spent too much time focusing on moral issues" rather than economic ones.

Such trends, Fabrizio told the Journal, means the GOP is increasingly at risk of being seen "as very old-fashioned, very old and not in touch with the realities of today's society."

Falling Out Of Love With Republicans

Out-of-touch with the realities of a rapidly changing society was how Goldwater Girl Hillary Clinton came to see the Republican Party during her years at Wellesley College, according to a profile in today's New York Times.

The article focuses on the politically turbulent year of 1968, which spanned Clinton's junior and seniors years, as the cauldron of her transformation from Barry Goldwater-boosting Republican to anti-war Democrat.

But, like most Clinton profiles, along the way it picks up telling details to reinforce the public's current opinion of the candidate. For example, the bold graduation speech "whose public rebuke of a Republican senator won her notice in Life magazine as the voice of her generation" was handwritten, with crossed-out sentences and scrawled insertions. "Yet Ms. Rodham's words are neatly contained between tight margins," the Times notes, sounding the article's underlying theme.

Hillary was brilliant and ambitions, the kind of student "who wrote thank-you notes to the professors who helped her." While outspoken and blunt, she was "hardly a bombthrower." She also seems to be something of a goofball. She bought a dreadful pair of clunky, mud-colored shoes because she "felt sorry for them," she told a friend. A photo shows her in a knee-kissing pleated skirt may also help explain her preference for pantsuits.

Even as early as 1966, Clinton wrote a minister back home that her "opinions on most human conditions were being liberalized," and "the combination of bleeding heart liberal and mental conservative is the inevitable conclusion one arrives at after following and pondering political events."

The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "devastated" her, while witnessing the mayhem of the Democratic Convention in Chicago left her "shocked" by the brutality of protesters throwing rocks and police beating protesters.

Together, they left her politically committed, but as square as the toes on those dreadful shoes. In "Living History" she describes how she and her friend discussed the Chicago riots in the ensuring months how, if there ever was a revolution, "We would never participate."

"I was rooted in the political approach that understood that you can't just take to the streets and make change in America," she told the Times in an interview. "You can't just give a speech and expect people to fall down and agree with you."

Black Magic And Red Politics

Grave-robbing is on the rise in Venezuela, but not for the usual plunder of gold jewelry and dental fillings, the Los Angeles Times reports. These days, robbers want human bones to sell for big bucks to paleros, practitioners of a black magic cult related to Santeria whose rising popularity is spurred by a mix of faith and politics.

Although most Santeria followers steer clear of the use of human remains and Satanism, the paleros embrace them, using the bones in rituals to cast evil spells on enemies, according to the resident priest of a recently plundered cemetery.

Some anthropoligsts are blaming the weakening Catholic church for the spooky rituals, but others see causes that are more worldly. They say the government of leftist President Hugo Chavez is encouraging the rise of Santeria to counter the authority of the Catholic Church, which Chavez has viewed as his enemy.

Many church leaders are blaming the rise of Santeria on Cuba, which they way are exporting babablos - or Santeria shamans -- along with doctors, teachers and sports trainers to Venezuela as part of closer economic relations with Chavez.

In a television talk show, Chavez has denied that he was a believer in black magic, but he is known "to be a mystic of sorts," reports the Times. Some say he believes he is the reincarnation of 19th-century Venezuelan leader, Ezequiel Zamora.

It does make you wonder, though. When Chavez famously announced at the U.N. a year ago that President Bush was "the devil," was he speaking of the underworld through more intimate personal experience than anyone guessed at the time?

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