When Australia was newly federated the Labor Party shared the most policy with the Deakinist Liberal Party. They formed alliances in the early days even. However, the first Labor Parliamentarians acted like the wheeling dealing politicians of old and were quickly wedged or maneuvered out of parliament by the other parties and politicians.

As a result the Labor Party developed the pledge whereby Labor politicians would vote the same way as the Labor party executive determined. This changed Australian politics entirely as Labor was now a voting bloc. Judith Brett writes:

The insurmountable barrier between the Deakinite Liberals and the Labor Party was not Labor's policies not its attitude toward the state, but the nature of the party's organization: the demands which it made on its members to subordinate their own views and judgements to the collective will of the party and the implications this had for parliamentary government.

The problems Labor's organisation posed for the Liberals was particularly apparent in Labor's hostility to alliances. Labor simply refused to play the parliamentary game as it had hitherto been played, and parliamentary leaders found themselves stalled at every turn as they tried to put together workable majorities in the usual way.

This voting as a bloc in the way the party executive requires is known as the pledge and has led to Australian politics being dominated by absolute party discipline. The conscience vote - which Labor does not allow - is the rarity and exception. The horse trading that the American Congress would do where party dissent was tolerated is unheard of in Australia. It is becoming rare in the United States too though. James Fallows commented that in an overhead conversation in Congress:

"GOP member: 'I'd like this in the bill.'

"Dem member response: 'If we put it in, will you vote for the bill?'

"GOP member: 'You know I can't vote for the bill.'

"Dem member: 'Then why should we put it in the bill?'

While the Republican Party only has enough votes for a filibuster in the Senate in order to stop bills coming up for debate, that is a more a convention than a constitutional or legislated rule. But it does seem to show that the Republican Party is able to maintain party discipline - I am not sure where from though; there is no Executive in power and I don't see the US party structures outside of Congress as that strong. The recent purity test was ignored for instance. So I am not sure where it is coming from.

More A speech by Petro Georgiou describes the history of the pledge.

More Cyclical link to John Barrdear who argues that it is fund raising enabling this.

Obama met with the Republican party in Baltimore, made a speech and answered questions off the cuff. I don't fully understand what the event was, but it appeared to be some official Republican party retreat. Obama is skilled at talking and thinking on his feet, easily the equal of a parliamentary leader and the ease which with they talk in the hub-bub of a Westminster style parliament; consequently the Republicans came up lacking but not as badly as they have in the media in the past. From the transcript:

So I am absolutely committed to working with you on these issues. But it can't just be political assertions that aren't substantiated when it comes to the actual details of policy, because otherwise we're going to be selling the American people a bill of goods.

I mean, the easiest thing for me to do on the health care debate would have been to tell people that, "What you're going to get is guaranteed health insurance, lower your costs, all the insurance reforms, we're going to lower the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, and it won't cost anybody anything." That's great politics. It's just not true.

So there's got to be some test of realism in any of these proposals, mine included. I've got to hold myself accountable, and I guarantee the American people will hold themselves - will hold me accountable if what I'm selling doesn't actually deliver.

The US system of Congress does not have the absolute party discipline that the Australian Washminster or British Westminster systems do. In Australia the absolute discipline in brutal; Labor has a pledge and even in the Liberal Party conscience voting is an exception rather than the rule. During the Bush years the Republican Party honed its congressional discipline under DeLay and Hastert. Money and influence adapted to power, along with an absolutist base, and led to the closest thing America has seen to Labor's pledge.

There appears to be some hold over from that under the Obama Administration and the Republican Party is largely maintaining discipline. At least in Congressional votes. Most of Obama's speech and his replies were focused on the frustration at the Republicans for not cutting deals where both sides can gain something out of legislation and do something positive for the United States; or even provide good governance.

Personally I think the Republican Party is currently unable to govern, and has not been able to for the last decade. I don't know when sanity will return to the party, but I am still not seeing anything that would suggest it.

Update: Video of the speech and questions.

Mark Thompson argues that before the Republican Party can provide good governance it must shed a leg from the the three legged stool. The legs are nationalistic conservatism, economic conservatism and social conservatism. Currently Thompson sees that the three strands do not have sufficient cross-sections that they can agree on what constitutes good governance.

Thompson notes that not being able to provide good governance is different to being able to win elections. The Bush Administration was very competent and successful at winning elections. It was woeful at governance. Thomson writes:

Where I think Frum and Douthat, and to a lesser extent Postrel, go wrong is in the assumption that "salvageable" means "capable of winning elections."

The old coalition will remain capable of winning elections, if only because of the inertia of our two-party system. Where it is unsalvageable, however, is in its ability to govern well on a federal level once it is in power unless and until it can chop off one of those legs and replace it with a leg that is currently compatible with the other two.

If a leg must go I hope it is the social conservatives. It is the arm of conservatism I find the most repugnant. Thompson thinks that the Republican Party will be in the wilderness for a considerable time:

[R]ealignments don't happen overnight, and until this one is complete - which will take a good decade or so, I suspect - I don't see movement conservatism being in a position where it is capable of governing competently beyond existing as a possible legislative check against Democratic overreach.

Prior to the Republican party gaining a majority in the House in the early 1990s the Democrats dominated the legislative for nearly forty years. The current back and forth between the two parties in the House and Senate is a very recent thing. The modern history of the legislative in the US has been one of slow oscillations with long periods of party dominance.

The US Republican Party has no legitimacy. After the last eight years of horrifically bad governance, they have no political claim to policy, to governance, or even rational politics. They are a broken and illegitimate party that is echoing an ever tighter and smaller constituency.

It is sad to see a party that should have a legitimate view and say in American politics become one that has sabotaged itself so completely that it follows politics which leave it unable to govern or even contribute meaningfully to good governance.

The stimulus bill is rife with political calculations, supposedly the economic ills are sought to be blamed on Obama with cynical calculations of when jobs will kick in from the money; alternatively the Republicans are rediscovering their principles after fourteen years of majority government and cutting back on spending despite their recent history of wild and profligate full speed ahead on the printing press.

But all those are more talking points for a mass media which requires the drama of a political horse race rather than any definition of good government or empirical policy. The problem is far deeper than that though.

Liberal democracies tend to follow the dictum that bad governance has political consequences. The US Republican Party failed to provide good governance and has left itself politically and publicly illegitimate.

I can recall a friend of mine making the comment that a New Jersey Republican is a Virginian Democrat. A statement of the changing political principles as you moved further south from the North Eastern United States. I can recall talking to local Democrats in Virginia who were all fiscally conservative, I am not quite sure how Cato came up with approximately 15% of Americans falling into that category. I would have suspected it to be much higher.

There is not really that many that I know of in the US how are protectionist, it is a free-market nation that is aghast at prolifigate public spending.

There has also been a large migration of the populations of the coastal cities into the south and interior. Northern Virginia for instance is all immigrants from other part of the United States who have carried their political values with them. It is a large purple area that is politically distinct from central and southern Virginia, enough that they go by the acronyms NoVA and RoVA where the RO condescendingly stands for the 'rest of' Virginia.

The electoral college is an electoral system which was chosen to amplify the federal character (as opposed to national) of the system. This gives the smaller inland and southern states larger influence than it would in a purely national electoral system.

But if we look at George Bush's performance in 2000 and 2004; neither was a strong and resounding win. He got over the line with the help of the Supreme Court in one, and did not have a dominating win in the second. It could be argued that Bush's wins were anomalies and that the southern strategy has been waning for a considerable time.

Then again governance has been so bad under the Republican Party in the US that there is no way it could be expected that the party would win the executive or a majority in either house of congress under a democratic system in 2008.

Via David Frum, some data describing how the US Republican Party's appeal to their base has alienated them from the wider electorate.

Not quite the permanent majority Karl Rove had in mind. The Republican Party's woes are wide and long. There is the poor governance of the Bush years clear in everyone's mind leaving 90% of American thinking the country is on the wrong track. That was rammed home again with the recent financial crisis when the incompetence of the Bush Administration was put into full light again. The Republican Party has heavily gone for the vituperative echo-chamber approach, which, while highly Schmittian, has meant that with their decreasing popularity, more and more Americans are now enemies of the nation and treasonous. It makes for a democratically unpalatable political party which will leave them unable to win government.

Radly Balko of Reason magazine writes:

The Republican Party has exiled its Goldwater-Reagan wing and given up all pretense of any allegiance to limited government. In the last eight years, the GOP has given us a monstrous new federal bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security. In the prescription drug benefit, it's given us the largest new federal entitlement since the Johnson administration. Federal spending--even on items not related to war or national security--has soared. And we now get to watch as the party that's supposed to be "free market" nationalizes huge chunks of the economy's financial sector.

Ironically, David Kuo makes the same argument from the evangelical constituents point of view in his book Tempting Faith:

By 2008, we will have had a good conservative Republican in the Oval Office for twenty of the past twenty-eight years. Republicans have had outright control of both houses of Congress for most of the last twelve years.

Republican Presidents have appointed the vast majority of American judges and seven of the nine Supreme Court justices. In short, we've had almost everything we wanted politically.

But things are hardly better. Social statistics are largely unchanged. Divorces are rampant and more and more children are growing up in a home with one parent. Nearly a million and a half abortions are performed every year. There are more children in poverty today than there were twenty years ago. A great percentage of Americans lack health care than ever before. Educational achievement is hardly soaring. Millions of Americans live in what seems like utterly intractable poverty.

It is hard to find a constituency that the Republican Party has not alienated during their short time in power at the national level. It may be that the factions in the Republican Party lead to incompatible policy, which is true to an extent, but I don't think that is the main issue. Policy has been ad-hoc and the main goal has been re-election through media management. I suspect if governance was not so bad these refrains from the differing factions would not be so public. Yet the demographic for the Republican Party has changed and is non-urban, it may be that the factions that have given it democratic majorities in the past is no longer tenable.

David Brooks argues that the US Republican Party's populist and anti-intellectual stance has alienated the highly educated regions of America such as the cities and coasts. The republican appeal is now to evangelical and rural sentiment. The problem for the Republican Party is that wealth flows from the cities and from the upper-middle class. It has got to the point where the Democrats receive more in individual funding from professionals. The data below is from Political Contributions; Democrats are in light purple.

Brooks writes:

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions -- Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it's 2-to-1. With tech executives, it's 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it's 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

This is my experience of the Republican Party. I consider them a myopic bunch of incompetent crooks that are unable to govern. In Australian politics I have fluently floated across party lines for my voting; from the Liberals, to Labor, to the Democrats and to the Greens when it warranted. This is because, despite the Liberals dabbling with modern conservatism, the Australian political parties are arguments within the framework of democratic liberalism. The US Republican Party has lost this modern basis of their philosophy.

The bottom-line is; governance counts.

I became way more interested in the Labor Party in Australia after the Children Overboard Affair which was bad governance personified. Bad governance is remembered and generally is punished by the electorate. This is why I consider the US Elections as going to be a Presidential and Congressional blood bath. Only 9% of Americans think America is on the right track. That hurts democratically.

We are seeing the end effects of bad governance all strike during the years that the Republican Party has been in power; war, economy, constitutional flagrance, poor policy, poor emergency responses (Katrina); you name it, the Republican Party is wearing it. I should also point out that I experienced bad Republican Party governance at the county level too. So it is not a national thing; it is endemic. The philosophies of the Republican Party and their democratic appeal has left them unable to govern.

I am probably in that group that the US Republican Party would call 'liberal intellectuals' and Brooks is right. They have lost me. Whereas I might be fluid in Australia with my voting, in the US my experiences have left me with no sympathy for the Republican Party. I doubt I am alone.

It appears that US Republican Party strategists are worried that the elections will be a bloodbath for Republicans in Congress. The Senate Map at the electoral-vote has the Democrats likely to end up with 58 seats to the Republicans 42. Brutal.

I suspect it will be like the recent elections in Australia where it was a landslide against the Howard Government. A result so encompassing that the Prime Minister even lost his seat; a rude ejection from national politics.

I am pretty confident that the Presidential and Congressional elections will be a landslide to the Democrats. In my opinion, people know in their gut (emotionally) when things aren't right and vote accordingly. Bad governance has consequences. While it may not be immediately obvious and the voters are far more forgiving than they should be, they do end up acting correctly.

The 2006 Congressional elections were a repudiation of the Bush Administration's and Hastert's Republican caucus' bad governance. I think the upcoming elections will be the same.

Bush's legacy will be Democratic control of the executive and legislative; including both houses of Congress with comfortable majorities.