Nov 06 2008
How To Lose Support And Elections
This was to be a post on how Liberals could turn 2008 into 1992 (or worse, 1928) by proceeding down policy paths sure to get them booted from power in 2 years. But before I get into the checklist of things to watch for over the next two years, I cannot help but note the insanity coming from some on the right. I will bring up only one instance because of how it made me cringe in how much the ranting winger sounded like someone from Kos Kids or Democrat Underground or one of the other liberal cesspools of immature anger.
Yesterday Monica Crowley made it to my ‘won’t be listening to that crap anymore’ list when she noted (paraphrasing here) that 55 million voters rejected the Obama “Dictatorship”. This analogy is repulsive and as self destructive as it comes. Apparently Monica is just a blonde Michael Savage who wants to foment a civil war because she and her kind cannot figure out how to attract voters with better ideas. This is how the far right lost respect and power and left the door open for Obama to step in with a positive (if not false) message.
Obama was elected President by the best country on the planet, the best in all of mankind’s history. Our great nation exercised it’s unique beacon of democracy and Obama was the result. There was no dictatorship established (anymore than Bush and Cheney ran one). I really cannot fathom what kind of idiot yells fire in a theatre like this. If there ever is a fire, or even actual signs of smoke, I’ll be there. But this is just ridiculous. It left me realizing I am not a conservative or with the GOP if that is quality of the debate they bring to the table.
Now, onto the other side of the rabid political spectrum. Here is a list of actions the liberals should not embark on, but I doubt they have the foresight or understanding to heed the warning.
- Don’t raise taxes on small business or let the Bush tax cuts expire – as the stock market showed yesterday (and probably all through the months of September and October) liberal policies really hurt our economy. All those people who bought the “Nirvana is coming” BS from Obama and his cronies are going to want to see well paying jobs and more spending money. Raising taxes on small businesses will slow an already slowed economy. The land mine is reality vs rhetoric. Lofty rhetoric fooled a lot of people, now comes the cold hard economic reality. Either way the libs are screwed here. If they don’t redistribute some serious wealth the voters are going to feel (rightfully) like they were conned. If they do there goes the job creation. Remember, when the neophyte Clinton came on board he had robust economy that took him 8 years to screw up (Bush inherited a recession and immediately enacted tax cuts and a stimulus package). Obama has no such safety net.
- Don’t Go On Witch Hunts – While America is waiting for all the milk and honey promised with this new ‘change’ Democrats will not want to be seen as wasting time on partisan witch hunts. The do nothing Congress will be seen wasting their time going after the GOP while the economic hurt continues. “Change” needs to mean more positive actions for the people, not personal or partisan vendettas.
- Domestic National Security Force – We don’t need a domestic federal security force running around our streets. Hollywood is replete with over the top fascism by government goons, the liberals will not be immune to the comparisons in people’s minds. And too many times individuals use these kinds of ideas for personal payback. Nirvana will look pretty much like a communist state if we get some thugs (even with just night sticks) running rampant for the government. Especially in tandem with the next item.
- Do Not Cut The Military – The face of military in DC is one of politically savvy generals and bureaucrats who are playing the DC political power game. To liberals on Congress they may represent an entrenched opposition, a threat. But the face of the military across the nation is citizen soldier, many times one who has been wounded. To cut the military is symbolically to cut support for soldiers and their efforts. They are suffering economically too. The liberals talk about throwing the poor in the street, the GOP can talk about throwing those who sacrificed into the street. It will look even worse if the defenders of this nation are replaced by national security forces playing Big Brother on our nation’s streets.
- Stay Away From Green House Taxes – The liberals enjoyed the hell out of $4 a gallon gasoline. It is not enough that they will not exploit our energy reserves. As Obama once hinted his plans to battle the mythical man-made, CO2 driven Global Warming is to raise the cost of energy through various schemes which – at the bottom line – are taxes on energy. He will try and run the coal industry into the ground. The Global Warming period for now has stopped and we will be seeing a decade of Global Cooling (even the IPCC/Church of Al Gore says this). Energy will be at a premium and it will be those economically hurting Americans who will feel the most pain of foolish Green House taxes.
I am sure there are many other land mines out there – feel free to add them in the comments. These kinds of previously stated idiotic policies from the liberals have some common factors which make them highly explosive with the public, and therefore potentially very self destructive to Democrats.
First, the GOP and McCain-Palin our on record saying these are bad ideas. They are bad ideas. The problem is that the longer the economic down turn is (and it will be months) the more impatient all those gullible voters will be for their milk and honey to arrive. Heck, these people are so ignorant of how government works they will be getting really frustrated and agitated before spring is over. They expect immediate government handouts. They won’t be getting them. And if they do they will be a couple hundred bucks. The natives will be getting increasingly restless and the Dems will be looking for anything to give them.
So they will try some of these other efforts. Their energy/Green House policies will slow the economy. Their tax policies will slow the economy. Their military cuts will slow the economy. There never has been enough wealth to spread around to make a big difference to people. That is why they need to make their own wealth, because you could bankrupt the entire top 1% and it would not run this nation for a year or two. And then we would be back where we were, without the large corporations which tower over the world economy.
So the items listed above have been warned about by the GOP and will make the current economic situation worse (which is why this could be more like 1928 before the Great Depression). And now, in the minds of too many unsophisticated voters, the Democrats are in charge. There is no Bush to blame, no GOP to blame. If they try that the backlash will be immense. They promised Nirvana and the voters want payment for their vote (that’s how they see this game, payments for votes – right corrupt DC?).
The only way for the Democrats to survive these next two years is to reject liberal policies and follow a more conservative path. Will they do it? I seriously doubt it. I think too many believe the Kool-Aid induced fantasies about redistribution. What worries me is there may be ones who know their policies are about to bring some serious pain.
This scary scenario (which I am just speculating about, not claiming is true) is where the US military is cut and a national defense force is created in its place. And the national defense force is there to make sure no one loses power over these hard times about to come. That’s the worst case scenario. No sign of that happening right now.
But if you want to look for what will drive the direction of this country (not the efforts of those trying to drive it, but how the country will drive itself in reaction) watch the economy. If it struggles the Dems are out. They promised the promised land, those of us who are not so easily duped know they cannot deliver, and they will be struggling to minimize the damage for the next year at least.
Clinton inherited a strong economy he let implode over the dot.com debacle, and a strong national security position less than a year after Bush Senior liberated Kuwait with a Muslim Arab alliance. Within less than a year of leaving office (after having lost both the House and Senate to the GOP in 1994) we were in a recession and were attacked by al-Qaeda on 9/11. As Osama noted it was Clinton’s actions in Somalia and WTC I in 1993 which gave him his vision that America was weak and would cower if attacked.
Obama and the Dems have no such cushions to compensate for their errors. It will not take 8 years to discover how bad liberal policies are in this competitive and dangerous world. We are about to learn a very harsh lesson about reality vs fantasy.
Update: Another word of caution to the conservatives – pick spokespeople and leaders who don’t repulse the middle of America but attract it (and that doesn’t mean giving up principles, it means moderating them back into reality and acceptable steps towards a goal):
First, and probably most important, the ideological composition of the electorate this year was virtually identical to that of 2004. This year, 22% of voters were liberals, 44% were moderates and 34% were conservatives. In 2004, 21% were liberals, 45% were moderates and 34% were conservatives.
In the voting booth, it was moderates who made the difference. They had given John Kerry a 9-point advantage in 2004; in 2008, they gave Obama a 21-point advantage. That change, in and of itself, is worth most of the swing from Kerry’s narrow loss to Obama’s big victory.
Yes, moderating the speed of reform is frustrating, but it has the benefit of at least going in the right direction. Impatience (as we saw with Bush and the backstabbers) is not a virtue – it is a path to defeat and minority status. Next time forget about deporting illegal aliens and accept a step towards sanity that brings the nation along with us.
We lost this election because our party saw fit to nominate the one member of the GOP that really wasn’t a Republican. How or why they let that happen, we may never know, but it did!!
This is the same McCain that supported amnesty for illegals and partnered with Ted Kennedy no less.
Then there was the Senate Filibuster of Bush’s Judicial Nominations which in my opinion should have disqualified McCain from ever being nominated for the Republican Presidential Candidate.
As of May 4, 2005, all of the 45 members of the Senate Democratic caucus were opposing the effort of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tn.) to abolish filibusters on judicial nominees
If more than five Republican senators vote with the Democrats, it will not be possible to establish the precedent that filibusters are not allowed on judicial nominations.
As of May 4, three Republican senators had come out clearly against the reform: Lincoln Chafee (RI), Olympia Snowe (Me.), and John McCain (Az.).
McCain, who some political observers expect to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 as he did in 2000, announced in April that he will oppose the reform.
On the MSNBC program Hardball on April 11, host Chris Matthews asked McCain, “You’ll vote with the Democrats?†McCain replied, “Yes . . .â€
Likewise, in an encounter on April 27 with participants in a pro-life Capitol Hill lobby day called REAL Women’s Voices, “McCain argued that he wanted to preserve the right to filibuster future judicial nominees appointed by future Democratic presidents,†according to Samantha Cheatham, congressional outreach director for the Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life organization.
Fr. Frank Pavone, head of Priests for Life, told NRL News, “It is unfortunate that Senator McCain has joined those senators who are trying to prevent godly men and women, nominated by their President and supported by a majority of senators, from serving on our nation’s courts. There is not going to be a church in America that is not going to know exactly who those senators are.â€
Don’t believe for one minute that the church forgot McCain’s defection for one miinute.
There is one activity that McCain has continually participated in whenever he had the opportunity that is the worst of them all!!
Every chance McCain had to side with his former military comrades, he took the opportunity to stab them in the back. To top it off, he then used his military service in his campaign as a war hero.
On June 20, 1996, Senator John McCain allegedly assaulted a family member of a Vietnam War prisoner of war (POW) who was missing in action (MIA), as a group of about 15 family members of POW/MIAs watched in astonishment. Within about one month, five ethics complaints had been filed with the Senate Ethics Committee by five eyewitnesses. But the Senate Ethics Committee refused to investigate the matter.
McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying: “Any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both.” A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon.
In 1991, the POW/MIA Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence. And this was our GOP Nominee?? Did we not deserve to lose this election for nominating a “Democrat” as the GOP Nominee??
This same Committee shredded the report that was created to hide the truth from the POW/MIA family members and the American people.
The only reason I voted for McCain was with the hope that he would succumb to old age quickly and Palin would become the President. Otherwise, if Palin wasn’t on the ticket, I would have voted for whoever the Libertarian Party Candidate was.
SBD
I tend to be more libertarian (with a small L) myself but in this case the choice was clear to me. The US economy is made up of about 200 million people (of adult age) making individual choices every day. Anyone who thinks that one person or even a committee of people can “manage” an economy of that size better than it can manage itself is stupid, arrogant, or both. The mess we are in is the *result* of government meddling, not due to a lack of enough of it.
Anyone who wants to educate themselves on what caused the mortgage meltdown should read “Anatomy of a Train wreck” by Stan J. Liebowitz.
Executive Summary
Why did the mortgage market melt down so badly?
Why were there so many defaults when the economy was not particularly weak? Why were the securities based upon these mortgages not considered anywhere as risky as they actually turned out to be? This report concludes that, in an attempt to increase home ownership, particularly by minorities and the less affluent, virtually every branch of the government undertook an attack on underwriting standards starting in the early 1990s. Regulators, academic specialists, GSEs, and housing activists universally praised the decline in mortgage-underwriting standards as an “innovation†in mortgage lending.
This weakening of underwriting standards succeeded in increasing home ownership and also the price of housing, helping to lead to a housing price bubble. The price bubble, along with relaxed lending standards, allowed speculators to purchase homes without putting their own money at risk.
The recent rise in foreclosures is not related empirically
to the distinction between subprime and prime loans since both sustained the same percentage increase of foreclosures and at the same time. Nor is it consistent with the “nasty subprime lender†hypothesis currently considered to be the cause of the mortgage meltdown. Instead, the important factor is the distinction between adjustable-rate and fixed-rate mortgages. This evidence is consistent with speculators turning and running when housing prices stopped rising.
Hindsight is the best sight, they say. Unfortunately, the housing establishment and our political leaders seem intent on not learning from the past. Hopefully this report can help move the debate in a direction that will allow for more productive learning.
“He didn’t tell us that he needed to fix us or transform us or change us.”
And yet, that’s exactly what won NOTUS this election.
At the same time, you’re absolutely right about Reagan and not alienating the center. Reagan stood by his convictions and let the center come to him on their terms.
Reagan was also secure in his convictions because he came to them by maturing out of the ones he held as a Democrat. Americans knew this and they still love him to this day because he stood his ground and he allowed America to stand its ground, with pride, purpose, and from a position of strength.
This is not what won this last election.
The arrogance, the pandering, the sermonizing of America’s guilt, America’s weakness, and “lost” America’s need to follow like sheep, and the relentless demonizing of America, did not alienate the center. It won the center, lock, stock, and 3 packs of smokes.
Only one side lost, and I don’t think it lost the center.
Stepping back, the face of America today is not one that believes in itself. The face of America today is one that believes in weakness as a virtue, believes in victims as saints, and believes wealth to be a right.
It’s one that accuses America and believes its only salvation is to force it to its knees while emasculating and disemboweling its very soul into abject shame and contrition for its sins and failures, past, present, and future. This is the one that wants to see America paraded thoughout the world bearing its cross through public streets as The Ultimate Sinner.
This is the face of America today.
But this is not the face of center America. This is the face of center/left America. This is the face that will now dominate America for the next four years. This is the face that the right allowed to dominate the election and lost it by doing so.
The right constantly courted the left-of-center by letting the shrill pejoratives, the strident sloganeering, and the profound emptiness of that face dictate its entire campaign. With the exception of Joe Wurzelbacher, the right’s campaign, John McCain’s campaign, as hard-fought as it was, was never more than reactionary.
The center was passed over as a given. The staunch conservatives, the principled conservatives, the hard-wired conservatives abstained because they felt rejected. And determined supporters had to fight hard to keep from feeling dejected.
This entire election belonged to the center/left. The right was “pwned”.
These tactics are not new. Cowing the opposition into submission by constantly antagonizing them into relying on their reflexes and forcing them to “take responsibility” (i.e. accept blame) by constantly setting fires for them to put out have been repeated again and again throughout history in most modern revolution states.
The guerilla politics we saw in this election is what many modern revolution states see as “democracy in action”. It’s all about forcefully victimizing the other side into making the “right” choice.
Half of America had no idea what hit them until the morning after. The other half don’t care.
The right doesn’t risk losing the center. It risks abandoning it by rejecting the core-right (as opposed to the far-right or extremist-right) as absolute bedrock, and prevaricating on principles and convictions in favor of Hollywood populism.
Prevaricating is what the center/left relies on, for lack of anything better. NOTUS is a chamelion because he is a prevaricator, possibly even The Great Prevaricator.
NOTUS won not as a “True American”, but as a “True Anti-American” posturing as “The NEW American”.
If the right can’t figure out how to neutralize the center/left into irrelevance by the next election, it will again waste all its precious time, funds, energy, and people on fending off the same inane and immature but highly effective attacks.
This is something that can be done now, and I have already started.
It’s a simple and powerful campaign, I call it Buy Nothing.
Beyond the few essentials that you must have, food, and fuel,
buy nothing else.
Don’t let Barack Malcom Jr Hussein Soetoro whatever his name is
show that his communism saved the day. His supporters are so
stupid that they will only stop and think when a nuclear bomb
goes off in their city or they lose their jobs.
I am buying nothing.
I was going to get a new car, I was thinking Dodge. Forget it.
I don’t need to eat out, I can buy wine from France instead of California.
Use the Net, don’t patronize chain stores for stuff like that.
I don’t need any new clothes and will restrict present buying at Christmas
to one small inexpensive gift each, which is how it probably should be anyways.
I don’t need to buy daily newspapers telling me inane nonsense nor
do I need to improve my home. I can take my vacations in Mexico
or the Caribbean. Lots of nice places there.
I’ll make an exception for small businesses that display Republican
credentials. Beyond that it’s zero zip nada.
I am angry and I can’t wait for the RNC to reorganize itself.
Over at Pam Geller’s site the foremost suggestion is that the
Republican nomination contests in the future should not be open
to independents. Good idea but I can’t wait for that.
Buy nothing is something I can do today. It’s a weapon and I will use it.
Take this thing down.
Perhaps the lesson of this election is not that we need to nominate a ‘moderate’ Republican; rather that we need to elect a Republican who can explain core conservative principles in a way that moderates can relate to and support, without emphasizing the social conservative “baggage” that turns moderates off.
I think that for the most part social conservatism is about individual behavior and the freedom to make those socially conservative choices without government, or courts, imposing liberal social views. When social issues were determined by legislative action, by and large, there was a bias towards not making major changes until society as a whole was ready for them. Fine.
The difficulty is that over the past 30 years we have acquiesced – both libertarian/classical liberal conservatives and social conservatives – in allowing the issues to be framed in such a way that moderates see social conservatives as wanting to impose morality in the same ways that this country has tried and subsequently rejected with Prohibition.
My early 20’s daughters are both conservatives, and very conservative in their own behavior, but they bridle at the absolutist pro-life and the absolutist anti-gay positions they perceive as coming from the Republican party. Perhaps they are closer to being classical liberals, but they do believe strongly in tolerance. If they and their friends are typical, and I think they are, unless the Republicans can craft a message that emphasizes the liberty, defense and economic issues and assuages their concerns on ‘morality’ we’ll lose them and their entire generation.
kathie:
We don’t know that McCain or his aides are behind those leaks, all we know is that the media is pushing this nonsense with the usual anonymous sources, the right wing blogosphere is helping them to spread it around and people are too willing to accept this at face value.
Palin herself said it was gossip and that she was not going to pay any attention to it. McCain picked her, he is not the one going after her because it only reflects badly on him to do so. As for Palin, she wanted the nomination and this is the kind of nasty thing that happens once someone is in the national spot light.
I don’t think we should help the rumor mongers and trouble makers by giving this credence.
I don’t think it would have mattered who the nominee was once the markets collapsed it was over. McCain was ahead in the polls when that happened.
There is nothing wrong with nominating center right people. Considering the fact that the American people were willing to vote for someone like Barack Obama it is obvious that they are not leaning to the right at this time.
If Republicans want the people to support conservatives then they need to make conservatism seem attractive and relevant. Just throwing some hard right guy at them and thinking they will go for that is not going to happen.
That seems right Terrye, but seeing McCain in action was just awful.
In the early part of his campaign he seemed to agree with
“Obama” on almost everything. You’d have thought, if you weren’t
into politics, they’re the same, I guess I’ll vote for the young guy.
I voted for McCain in the primary but I didn’t know he would be
so lame. He never made “Obama” the issue and was a big waste of
time.
Guy we need to get the conservative message out to the young headbangers:
http://www.youtube.com/user/machosauceproduction
“And yet, that’s exactly what won NOTUS this election.”
Well, not really. I mean, he won the election but it appears to be because Republicans didn’t vote. Obama got about the same number of votes that Bush got in the 04 election, McCain got something like 8 million less than Kerry got.
Obama got no huge influx of new voters nor did he get any overwhelming mandate. The center went to McCain, the far right stayed home, apparently. Obama has about two years to show people what he is all about or he stands to lose his Congress in mid-term elections.
It doesn’t appear that he will be all that difficult to defeat in ’12 *if* the Republicans can run a candidate with a little charisma.
One piece of advice for the RNC … *NEVER* allow Democrats to vote in your primaries ever again.
Study the Congressional race results district by district, and especially note the range in turnout. Michelle Bachman’s MN CD had 404,231 votes, which looks like the highest.
Anthony Weiner in New York? 111,169. Inference? A lot of Hillary supporters stayed home, but also that the New York GOP lost the message that won Pataki three terms as Governor and Giuliani two terms as Mayor.
This election was about “no more Bushes or Clintons” What else do voters under 30 know? Once Obama gamed the Dem caucus system, the Dems had to embrace him as their nominee to mask the civil war going on inside their party.
McCain was definitely the victim of ageism, and voters never got a chance to meet the real Sarah Palin that I saw in the Alaska gubernatorial debate from 2006 (on C-Span the weekend after she was picked) until the last two weeks of this campaign. The pragmatic, inclusive get the job done reformer. If McCain had solely wanted to energize the “base” he would have picked Mike Huckabee.
Neither party has enough hard-core knee-jerk voters to win the Presidency.
Republicans would do well to accomodate the Libertarians and reject the Nativists. Hispanic voters are one real key, especially if they get shut out of key cabinet positions. Blue Dog Dems are also very wary right now because the big government liberals dominate committee chairs.
“Republicans would do well to accomodate the Libertarians and reject the Nativists.”
I agree with that sentiment 100%. I am finding more people these days with a more libertarian sentiment than I have in the past. People want government to leave them the heck alone. Government should be about creating a fertile seed bed for innovation, not about ensuring people a living. When government starts playing Robin Hood by taking from the rich to give to the poor, the rich leave.
People want to eat at McDonalds all their lives and have someone else pick up the medical bills for their bad habits. Medical care, for example, starts with individuals taking care of themselves. What government programs do is allow people to place responsibility on the government rather than taking responsibility themselves. I would support catastrophic insurance for those things that are devastating and come out of nowhere, but I don’t think I support the notion that government should be primarily responsible for the regular care of the general population.
Economic growth is created by only a few individuals relative to the general population. A small minority have the drive, vision, and organizational skills to pull off things like that. Those few people feed the rest of us. They should be rewarded and encouraged to continue what they do. Bill Gates didn’t create Microsoft with any government program. Neither did Henry Ford create Ford Motor Company through a government program. Thomas Edison wasn’t on the dole.
We need to reward people for having the drive and the vision and make sure they have access to the capital required to realize that vision. We need to encourage people to start small businesses, innovate, compete. Generally speaking, nobody ever gets rich working for someone else.
“Generally speaking, nobody ever gets rich working for someone else.”
Unless it is a government job that is!!
Who are the Nativists?? Not wanting to give 25 million people here illegally amnesty does not make one a Nativist. We are all decendents of immigrants who for the most part came to this country legally looking for a better opportunity. That is not the same as someone who comes here illegally, takes a job, and sends that money to another country.
As far as attracting the hispanic vote, the Republicans have more in common with their culture than the Dems ever will.
sbd … I don’t “want” to give anyone here illegally amnesty either but at some point one must face reality. There is no way to deport 25 million people. It is a physical impossibility. It would also destroy the economy to remove 25 million laborers. There aren’t enough unemployed/underemployed to make up the difference. And with the boomers retiring soon, those laborers need to be “above the table”.
What we need to do is provide them with a legal working status and then tax them just like everyone else and get them paying into Social Security. We don’t need to give them citizenship, at least not unless they have been living here without problems for a decade or so, but giving them a legal working status here would solve more problems than it creates.
BarbaraS… that ad for the IQ test lists everyone’s IQ at either 136 or 146, it’s just an ad. I’d put Bidens IQ at probably 100-105. ( I wouldn’t put Obama’s that high.) We know nothing about him. We don’t know if he has any degrees from any school. No official records have been released. We do know that he got into Harvard law school via political meddling by some unsavory characters. He apparently couldn’t get in on his own.
Why the talk about immigrants. That was one of the contributing factors to the Repub losing. the right wing conservatives didn’t like either candidates position of ‘no borders’ essentially so they stayed home. Well they got that position anyhow.
any repub that wins in the future can NOT be center left as McCain was. He won’t get the left votes and he won’t get the right wing conservatives votes.
The country is a center right country and that means if the far right won’t vote, it leaves it to the socialists.
They have it now. It’s gonna be interesting to see who emerges as the new Repub leader. We absolutely don’t have one now.
Crosspatch:
One must realize that the Republicans play politics the same as Democrats. They make promises to buy votes. Whether that is with welfare programs like Obama or other promises (Reagan promised a growing economy without inflation), the politicians have to deliver. AJ’s whole point was that Obama will not be able to and worse that he will cause things to collapse.
On the hispanic vote, it seems the 2004 promise of amnesty by Bush went by the wayside. Not only was it broken it was broken violently by the far-right and with such glee.
I know many hispanics who would not vote republican for the treachery (their words, not mine), that was done to Bush by his own party. Hispanics feel betrayed by the Republican Party for their failure to deliver amnesty.
Crosspatch – let’s start a blog together! Just kidding – nice meeting up here. I never heard 25 million illegals – usually the number is 12 million. The economy is driving that number down.
Very complicated issue, but the Tom Tancredo wing really hurt the GOP with Hispanics this year.
Coolidge had a bigger problem in 1924, but he managed to hold the Nativists in the Republican Party even though they were the resurgent, northern, anti-immigrant Klan. The Governor of Maine was Klan that year.
How do you think the Jim Crow Democrats of 1920’s attracted so many ethnic Catholics and Eastern European Jews. Really interesting chapter in presidential and American history. When the Republican Party was born, the Know-Nothings had to be reconciled with the Germans in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Lincoln managed to pull that off.
Reconciliation of uncomfortable coalitions is the ongoing story of the fracturing and regrouping of the two political parties. If we had a parliamentary system, the coalition-building would be easier.
Consider the two gifts to the GOP that may come their way: Al Franken in the Senate and Larry Summers as SecTreasury.
I really do hope that Coleman hangs on, but Franken scares the Democrats. Larry Summers lost his job as Harvard’s president with his comment that “women are innately less gifted in science than men.” The Dems cannot win without women, and Summers would be the slap of sexism that could make for a very rocky start, a bad distraction for our economy.
A.J. – study those results by Congessional District! Find a source that compares the presidential vote with the house vote by Congressional District. There will be a lot of insights in that data. Explain why Vermont just re-elected a Republican governor. Explain CT Gov Jodi Rell’s high approval ratings. Collins and Snowe in Maine.
And watch the fates of Democratic Blue Dog congressmen like Jim Cooper of Tennessee and Gene Taylor of Mississippi with committee assignments. Let’s see how they get treated and then you will know if the liberal wing is over-confident. or not.
AJ – Islamo-facism is a term the GOP really has to reframe. Islam is a religion that struggles to reconcile government and religion.
I just Googled Mohmand Pashtuns and my earlier comment here was the fourth hit.
I had no idea you were tagging every comment or however this happens.
so much for further commenting here…