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Republicans need a new mascot
The elephant is no longer representative, not even with the circus inference.
If you want to know why the Democratic Party’s animal symbol is a donkey and the Republican’s an elephant, you have to look back, way back, to a time before the parties unofficially but meaningfully exchanged identities.
Andrew Jackson, a Democrat whose autocratic bent, pugnacity and unwashed populism befit the current GOP, was called a “jackass” by his political rivals during the 1828 Presidential campaign. In part because he was proudly just that, Jackson embraced the insult, even put the animal on posters.
It became a more formalized, overarching Democratic Party symbol when Thomas Nast, the pioneering political cartoonist, a Lincoln-loving Republican progressive, started caricaturing Democrats as donkeys in 1874.
It was also Nast who cast the Republicans as elephants. By the time of Dwight Eisenhower’s Presidency in the 1950s, the GOP was touting its pet pachyderm as a symbol of strength and dignity, but Nast’s intent was critical, not complimentary. He felt that his party was straying from the social liberalism of its founding and getting soft on the defeated Confederates.
I think it’s fair to say that the current Republican Party has strayed a long, long way from social liberalism, and as for “strength and…
