People are debating a new symbol for the Republican Party. Check it out.

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Does the Grand Old Party need a facelift?

We associate an elephant with Republicans and a donkey with Democrats because of Thomas Nast, America’s first great political cartoonist, who depicted politics as a circus.

Nast was a Republican, but he portrayed the Republican Party as a well-meaning but bloated and cumbersome elephant. The Democratic Party was a braying donkey.

Consider this cartoon, where the elephant and the donkey are at the edge of a financial cliff. The elephant can’t be bothered to care about the danger (“Let Well Enough Alone”) and the donkey is actively trying to kill itself/the country by leaping away from the “safe and sound financial road” and into the abyss of “financial chaos.”

Not much has changed since 1879, eh??

The donkey as a symbol for the Democrats also connected to Aesop’s fable about the donkey who wears a lion’s skin.

(CS Lewis fans may recall this story being reused in “The Last Battle”)

In this cartoon, the Democratic media machine drives the public to panic about President Ulysses Grant being a dictator while the GOP elephant is warily teetering on the edge of another unstable cliff.

Like I said, not much has changed!

On the positive side, the elephant was supposed to represent strength and courage and maturity that could take on a braying donkey, or even a lion or tiger.

But the cry has gone out from Republican voters that even elephants in an age of RINOs is not enough: Many people want a new symbol to revitalize American politics for a future that isn’t entrenched in the same old arguments.

What do you think?