Walter Ballin

I read an article in the May 18th edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, about Governor Arnie Schwarzenegger calling for the Republican Party to recast themselves as moderate http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/05/18/MNI410LK62.DTL. The article mentions that Republican Presidential candidate John McCain is trying to recast himself as independent of George 'Dubya' Bush, but for anyone who follows the news they will find that McCain's Senate record is very much in sync with Bush.

I say that with Barack Obama hopefully being elected in November, that in order for the Republicans to be a viable political party anymore that they will have to resurrect from the dead such moderate-liberal Republicans as Dwight Eisenhower, Jacob Javits, George Romney(father of Mitt who was much better than his son) and some others. Although I have always been a Democrat except for a brief stint in the Green Party, I recall that as a child in the 1950's when we had a Republican President Eisenhower, a Republican Governor in California Goodwyn Knight, a Republican Mayor in San Francisco George Christopher along with quite a few Republicans on the SF Board of Supervisors, that we funded our schools, parks, county hospitals, transportation systems etc. We didn't have homeless and mentally ill people on the streets. The wealthy paid their share of local, state, and federal taxes. I'm not saying that Ike was a great President, but by his policies he was more of a Democrat than our last Democratic President Bill Clinton.