Jeff, I do not know about you, I’m still open to public-financing, as are a lot of artist-practictioners throughout this country who could use some of the financial support thrown behind Barack Obama during this campaign season. In an ideal world the money turned down by Obama and potentially McCain would be re-distributed to fund education and arts initiatives. But I digress….

In other news, Joe Klein seems to have agreed with my theory that Republicans will retain control over the military during Obama’s tenure. Klein suggests that Obama should retain Roberts Gates as Secretary of Defense declaring that “[Gates] has been a superb Secretary of Defense, as good in that post as his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, was awful.” Any thoughts on whether the Republicans will in fact hold on to the military?

The question I have for you this week is: what on earth happened to the Republican party?

Surely when Newt Gingrich led the Republican Revolution in the early 90s never did he imagine in his wildest dreams that in 2008 the Republican party would feature a septuagenarian atop its presidential ticket, a Democratic controlled house, and that Republicans would be struggling to find viable candidates to fill Congressional. Well here we are in 2008 and that is precisely the case.

Case in point, here in New York, after Staten Island representative Vito Fossella stepped down the Republicans selected mogul Frank Powers to run for his seat. Sadly, Powers passed away and the Republicans were sent scrambling again to find a suitable candidate. Powers’s untimely death was yet another unfortunate setback for a party that has been reeling for much of this decade, and which suffered a string of disheartening defeats in the 2006 midterm elections.

Worst yet, as the Democrat’s brand is soaring in light of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama’s historic campaigns, the Republican brand name appears to be going out of style. Ironically, it’s not as if the Democrats are the ones downgrading the Republican brand, it’s the Republicans themselves. Listen closely to McCain or any of his surrogates from within the party talk these days and you’ll hear them use the term “Conservative” to describe themselves a lot more than they use Republican. On the contrary you do not hear Democrats going around announcing themselves as Liberals. This is not simply because in some circles the “L” word is a dirty one in American Politics, but all Democrats are not liberals—a lesson that Joe Lieberman has been determined to teach us since 2000. Former Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman’s transformation into John McCain’s #1 cheerleader is not the only peculiar development over the last eight years; as interesting as Lieberman’s transformation has been the disappearance of figures such as Bill Frist, Tom Ridge and Christine Todd Whitman, who at one time represented a more-centrist Republican party, one capable of going toe to toe with the kinds of candidates being groomed by the DNC and DLC. Eight years later, neither of these retain their prominence as party spokespersons, and as with many of their Republican peers who have retired from the spotlight, they were not adequately replaced within the party.

The Republican, rather Conservative party has also let Fox News and flamboyant talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh set its agenda. Throughout this campaign many of the memorable “right-wing” sound-bites were not uttered by anyone working directly within the Republican party, but rather by sundry commentators on Fox. Since 2000 Fox has transformed itself from a mouthpiece of the Republican party dispensing party memos as news reports, to being an unwieldy beast that the Republicans themselves barely know how to control and therefore work to their advantage. What this has created is a news cycle that often features back and forth debates between prominent Democrats and Fox-News hosts instead of their Republican counterparts, or as has often been the case throughout this campaign, absurd-racist-sexist comments such as calling Barack and Michelle Obama’s embrace a “terrorist fist jab” or referring to Michelle Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama” overtakes John McCain’s attempts at getting his own headlines and making Americans familiar with his agenda.

Seriously, has there ever been a point in this nation’s history where the party who has just spent eight years in power has entered an election cycle in such disarray? The Republicans do not appear to have any prospects in their farm system, they’ve rebranded themselves as conservatives therefore either alienating or confusing many voters, and their allies in the media are outfoxing them?

What in the world happened to the Republicans?