Partisanship is killing the Republican party.

Raised by staunch Democrats through the 70s and 80s I was witness to how partisanship, run amok, ruins the party it loves.

When Ronald Reagan was elected, the party line was that he was going to destroy America as we knew it. As a young teenager beginning to think for himself, I remember coming to the realization that what I was hearing from Democrats during the Reagan years was "politics" - a word I was just beginning to understand. As the eighties progressed the political discourse from the Democrats got further and further from reality - from what was going on on the ground. In college, I realized that the era of political-correctness had taken the party away from the mainstream and the party was beginning to suffer. I saw campus protests on anything and everything. We were all victims, whether we knew it or not.

Bill Clinton's success in 1992 rested on his recognition of this problem for the Democrats, and the fact that he brought the party back toward the center.

Today, it's the Republicans who have this problem. The GOP has moved so far to the right that the gap between their political discourse and reality is substantial. It's obvious. And if I was a Republican, it would be embarrassing.

You see, Reagan was a centrist. The Democrats were wrong. It wasn't until George W. Bush's second term, capitalizing on the fears wrought by 9/11, that the move to the extreme right wing was complete. The christening of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter as key spokespeople for the GOP, however unofficial, marks this grim milestone.

When a party moves too far to the extreme, facts fly out the window and hyperbole, name-calling and invective dominate (I recently wrote a piece showng how conservatives are far more likely to sling pejorative terms). Hence, Limbaugh and Coulter's extreme views win the day.

Just look at #TCOT on Twitter (these are from just the last few minutes as of writing this):

"You must be a Liberal (and/or blind) if you think nØbama didn't bow to the Saudi King"
"RED Alert!! nØbama's pick to be the State Dept’s legal adviser favor's Sharia over Constitution ! "
"IMPEACH OBAMA NOW! IMPEACH OBAMA NOW! IMPEACH OBAMA NOW! "
"Take a look at where we are heading people -->Free Speech vs. Islam in Europe (It is either / Or ) "

(And if you really want to see the total extreme, goto the Yahoo! stock chat boards, which are anonymous, and search on "Obama" or "kill liberals". You will find more hate than you can shake a stick at.)

To the silent center these are non-issues. To a person who was just laid off, or just lost their healthcare, or doesn't have the skill they need to compete, these statements don't compute. And herein lies the problem for the Republicans. Just like I was turned off by the political mumbo jumbo from the Democrats in the Eighties, today's centrist Republicans and Democrats are turned off by the Limbaugh-Coulter crowd.

Perhaps the Republicans can turn things around faster than did the Democrats. Republicans are the party of conformity. The Democrats, non-conformity. Maybe centrist Republicans can wrest the message back from the extreme and get everyone to line up nicely. It will be a tough row to hoe, though. The Limbaugh-Coulter-Fox News Axis of Extremism has a powerful bully pulpit and they don't strike me as the types you can just roll right over.

Until the Republican dialogue returns to reality they risk further isolation from the mainstream center, which clearly favors the direction in which President Obama is pointing the United States. Indeed, the entire world is reacting positively to the message Mr. Obama carries. And the more Mr. Limbaugh and his crowd hopes for Obama to fail, the further he alienates the party he loves so much.