GOP Needs Its Brains Back

Republican sycophants may think Sarah Palin’s resignation was brilliant, “but don’t kid yourself,” writes Robert Eisinger in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The GOP is in trouble.” The party has lost its intellectual coherence, and if it wants it back, it’s got to look beyond the Palins and Mark Sanfords of the world: “The problem with these Republicans is that they have drunk the proletariat punch.”

“The intellectual underpinnings of smaller and smarter government have been replaced with incoherent ramblings,” writes Eisinger. “Sanford now sounds like Paula Abdul.” The party needs actual intellectuals and academics, people like Newt Gingrich (Tulane), Mitt Romney (Harvard), or should-be stars like Rob Portman (Dartmouth) and John Sununu (MIT and Harvard). But thanks to candidates like Palin, “the GOP faithful now downplay pedigree as hoity-toity irrelevance.” (More Republican Party stories.)