Anymore, the Republican Party reminds Frank Karst less and less of the Republicans he knows.
Among the Republicans Karst knows, money is hard-earned – and harder spent. Meddling in the lives of others is something they are loath to do.
Karst grew up on a farm outside Sisseton. Elected mayor of the northeastern South Dakota
"Am I a little disillusioned?" Karst responds when asked how he feels about the Republican Party. "Yeah, I guess that's probably where I'm at."
Once the citadel of everything small – government, policies, global intrusion and involvement – it seems the Republican Party today is the province of big spenders and big mouths and people who have big egos and others who like nothing more than to stick their big noses in places they shouldn't.
Were he still alive, I have no doubt my grandfather Art Okerlund would have been in an ill mood Wednesday morning. The political comeuppance dealt Tuesday to the Republican Party – his party – was of historic proportions.
Art was the mayor of Sisseton for a time in the 1950s. He died before I had much of a chance to get to know him, but he left a legacy of fiercely loyal Republicans whose independence and industry and reserve were characteristics he shared, and his political party at one time did, too.
In the eyes of Frank Karst, the Republicans who populate Sisseton and other stretches of South Dakota South Dakota
"Who knows?" Karst says about what led to the split. Perhaps, he theorizes, some of those who profess to be Republican don't know what being a Republican really means. Or it could be they know what it means, but they never really were Republican in the first place. Whatever the reason, "I don't think we're going to fix it from Roberts County
It is impossible to feel sorry for the Republican Party. It didn't just drink the Bush administration Kool-Aid. It bathed in it.
While President Bush was doubling the national debt, while the rest of the world clamored about climate change and the U.S.
That is not to say it offered no criticisms whatsoever. On the contrary, Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and Pat Buchanan and other Republican Party apparatchiks were ceaseless in their attacks of the Democratic Party. For eight years under their ambassadorship, the Republican Party flew the flags of venom and spite, of bombast and hyperbole.
Now, so steep is the grade ahead for America
Barack Obama better than John McCain understood that. It became his refrain, and I suspect more than anything it is why he won.
Americans are pragmatic. What they aren’t are idiots. When a barrel of oil costs $147 one day and $61 the next, when a health care system bankrupts those who use it, when a citizenry owes more money than it earns, they know something is broken that is beyond their power alone to fix.
Limited government doesn't mean no government. Nor does it mean government for some and not for all. Somewhere, the Republican Party got those wires crossed. "There are some things that government has to do," Karst says.
Those fiercely loyal Republicans who sat across from me at the dinner table in my youth on South Center Avenue fashion me a defector. They're mistaken. Honestly, it makes no difference to me – and I think perhaps to a slew of other Americans as well – who leads us over the mountains towering before us. Democrats. Republicans. Fiffer-feffer-feffs. Bippo-no-Bunguses. Star-Belly Sneetches. We don't care.
We only have two conditions: Whoever it is must be big in heart, and once we've scaled the mountains and again are in the clear, the person needs to step aside.
Because most Americans, I suspect, are like Frank Karst and Art Okerlund.
They are fully capable of taking care of themselves.