I’ll echo John Mace, pretty much. Fiscal responsibility and federalism are important to me. And as a Christian who would probably be viewed as a fundamentalist by most Dopers, I have no desire to see the government legislating morality.
Please excuse my ignorance, but could someone tell me what LP means? I have a feeling I’m going to feel pretty stupid when I’m told. Thanks.
What I’d like more than anything else would be a Republican movement to bring fair elections to the US. The trend toward electronic voting is really a trend to eliminate validation and introduce election fraud. If the Republicans were to get behind a proposal to model US elections after Canada’s system of all paper ballots and hand counting, I’d be all for it. Let elections be decided by ideas and not by who can rig the counting.
As others note, a healthy move would be to divorce themselves from the Christian Right. The CR has played its hand beautifully, they know full well that they have swung many elections to the GOP and are reaching their zenith in political influence. It’s time for the pendulum to swing back.
LP=Libertarian Party.
D’oh!! Thanks, LP. 
I agree with George Washington and think parties were a bad idea to begin with - they can potentially destroy (or have destroyed) the “checks & balances” that the founding fathers set up to attempt to avoid as much unilateral power as possible. But if I am to believe ‘Publius’, of course, they’re unavoidable.
That said, I think Republicans should turn to more old-school Conservatives, who believe in the American system, not in just in themelves. The problem with that is that those kind of people are not usually freaks and attention whores, which BOTH parties seem to gravitate toward these days (Kerry has been the latter in the past too). Thus both parties alienate tempered war heros as leaders, in favor for insane “chroniferous” (yeah, I made that up) people - makes me angry. Someone mentioned missing the ‘moderates’ already - I agree.
I am still very angry about the given candidtates in last two elections. It was like a Criminal vs Criminal situation. There’s got to be a way out of this. I WANT to vote Republican because of many of my views, but I refuse to vote for an obvious freak-show.
Bye-bye Zealots & Fanatics, up with political reform. The Republicans had a Liberal wing, concerned with combatting corruption. That was the healthiest & noblest part of the party, & they hacked it off like a gangrenous limb. 
Really? The criticism I’ve most often seen levelled at multiparty systems is just the opposite – that it leads to frequent changes in government, as in Italy or Israel.
What’s wrong with that?
The trouble with distancing yourself from the religious right, is, well, that the religious right are voters.
You can’t eliminate the influence of the religous right without preventing religious right voters from voting. You can’t get politicians to stop opposing abortion until voters stop voting for pro-life candidates.
If a conservative complained about the influence of (say) homosexuals in the Democratic party, they’d have to be reminded that gays have civil rights too, and they aren’t going to stop voting for people who agree with them just because other people don’t like it.
If you want to decrease the influence of the religious right you can’t do it by wishing the Republican party didn’t listen to them, you’ve got to…well…decrease the influence of the religious right. Cause and effect is backwards here.
Good point. Can you suggest an approach?
I’d like to see them be honest and pragmatic about economics - admit that the tax cuts for the wealthiest aren’t there to stimulate the economy, which is empirically demonstrably false, but to please their biggest contributors.
Get serious about the federal debt. Get serious about social security. It’s hard for me to listen to current Republican policy and believe they’re even trying in good faith to help the economy.
In short, approach the economy scientifically: do studies about what works and what doesn’t, then decide policy good for the people, instead of deciding policy, then creating studies to support that decision.
There are plenty more changes I’d make, but that’d be the top.
I’d like to see the Republican Party return to treating politics as a cooperative sport, instead of a knife-fight. Too many Republican leaders have the repulsive idea that politics is all about killing anyone who disagrees with them so they can run unchecked over everyone else.
I’d really like to see something approaching caring for the average American. The average American doesn’t make $150,000 and up a year, have excellent health coverage, and a college fund for each child. Stop pandering to the have mores and to big business, and make the needs of the $50,000 wage earner with a spouse and two kids more important. In other words, stop chasing the money.
Actually, average income is closer to $30,000. http://encarta.msn.com/media_701500948/Personal_Income_Per_Capita_in_the_United_States.html
Well, I guessed. In any case, these are the ones that need help, not the fat cats on top.
My advice to both parties: idealism, not ideology!
You make an excellent point, but I offer a rebuttal which is that, by my perception, the influence of far-right Christian Fundamentalists is disproportionate to their actual numbers.
In other words, I suspect that the Republicans would do even better in elections if they distanced themselves more from that lunatic fringe. Many moderate Republicans and sympathetic Democrats are withholding their votes because of the Religious Right. Being in bed with that fringe is actually costing the GOP votes, I believe, especially over the long term. Consider Bush’s approval rating in late September, 2001, compared with the actual percentage of the popular vote he won in 2004. Many factors contributed to this decline, including lack of WMDs, concern with the Patriot Act, and so on. But I think the undue influence of religious conservatives played a very large role. Some people I know who voted for Bush in 2004 explicitly stated they voted for him despite the cloying presence of religious nuts, which was a serious concern for them, because they felt he was the superior candidate for the “War on Terror.”
Not to mention the fact that even if we distanced ourselves from the religious right, they’d still vote republican. Their views line up with democrats even less than those of us who are socially moderate, and libertarians are usually fairly socially liberal too. Short of them not voting at all they’re not going to have any choice but continue voting the same way they do now, if being socially conservative influences their votes as much as they claim.
. . . The difference being?
You who want the Repubs to drop the religious right will get you wish when Roe v. Wade is gutted/overturned, if the Dems get a huge boost from the expected backlash. But so long as the team-up with the religious right has resulted in Pubbie control of Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court, what the hell change their views?
What I’d like to see, and totally don’t expect to see, is Republican respect for the political process. But Rove has taught them that cheating wins. That’s a hard lesson to unlearn, in a country where winning isn’t everything … it’s the only thing.
As opposed to where? Britain? Are politics really less cutthroat anywhere else?