Change

I'm only a casual observer of the political landscape but over the last few years, as many analysts and pundits have noted, the two political parties are changing. That's obvious to anyone, even me, but it's changing in ways no one thought let alone predicted.

With the loss by Eric Kantor in his primary race to a far right Tea Party candidate, and rather soundly too, that leaves questions and a hole in the short-term future of the Republican party, one that more and more House Speaker Boehner has failed to manage let alone control.

With that in mind, to me there are now four political parties. There's the two in the Republican party, meaning the right wing and Tea party members and the old guard traditional conservative members. The moderate, more centrist, members are out on a limb going "WTF."

The Democratic party has two groups, and likely 3 or more if you look at subgroups. There's the ever present left wing liberals which include many progressive independents, like myself. And there's the old, traditional moderate democrats who have shown abslutely no backbone to stand up for the American people, for their own party and against the Republicans.

One lesser group in numbers is the old conservative (blue dog) democrats who are almost extinct in the party and politics, replaced with republicans. What's missing in this mix are the libertarians who are in the Republican party but even they have become their own subgroup.

What all this means is which party has the leadership to keep themselves from splintering apart, and so far it appears to be the Democrats but underneath the surface there's the same tension and stress as in the Republican party, just less public.

The Democrats have the problem they made political decisions in negotiations with Republicans which angered their members because the Republicans have always reniged on their agreements to make the Democrats look weak, taking the blame for everything.

The anger within the Democrats has shown their problem is the divide between the traditional groups of moderates and liberals, moderates winning within the party but losing with the Republicans, causing the liberals to blame their own leadership for their failures.

So in 2014, for what it's worth, that's what I see, lots of divisiveness in both parties, and both need to change to win. The question is the November election to control the House and Senate, and then set up the fight for 2016 in both and the President.

The Republicans need to resolve their internal fight which isn't likely as both sides are far apart on the issues and only united against President Obama, something that's not sustainable in general elections. The Democrats need to stand up and fight for the American people or lose. It's that simple for them. Get some backbone and a voice.

As Rusty Wallace said, "Stay tuned Hotrod, we're just getting started."