Time to Buy GOP

The Republican Party is like a great American standard - say IBM - that has fallen on hard times. A few engineering errors, a bad marketing plan, the arrival of Microsoft all seem to herald the collapse of an institution. The thing is that political markets are just as brutal and efficient as any other. The company, in this case a political party, has tremendous underlying assets including a still-whopping market share of between 40 and 50 percent of the public on a normal election day. Sales are down right now but just wait. The shiny new company on the market is the equivalent of the Dutch tulip market: irrationally inflated and built on ideas that not only haven't stood the test of time they have been decisively rejected by a half century of experience. Excessive taxation and government regulation of the economy and pie-in-the-sky foreign policy didn't just become good ideas because their alternatives, rampant spending, excessive deregulation and neoconservative Wilsonianism, turned out to create dangerous overhangs.

It is just a matter of time before some enterprising young executive will come along to pick up the pieces of the badly damaged but inherently valuable GOP and figure out how to make the company climb back toward its historical average. President Obama is going to provide a very valuable assist. Circumstances, logic, and the truth about economics and a hard, cruel world will do the rest.

Buy GOP. There's nowhere to go but up.