You are forgetting the conservatism can never fail–it can only be failed. If Righty McWingnut is nominated in 2016 and fails, the political obituaries at Free Republic will simply declare that he wasn’t a true Scotsman–er, conservative.
Left-progressive Americans (most of them) have long since confronted and accepted the painful and dismaying fact that they are a numerical minority in the general population, indeed, a minority among “liberals”.
Hard-RW Americans appear to be capable of denying manifest reality much, much more stubbornly. But, that is what makes them what they are, isn’t it?
All it would take is one bad fuckup for the Democrats, and God knows they’re capable of it – and one charismatic Republican challenger who can manage not to speak of his love for rape, and that would do it, Republicans have the White House.
In fact, if the economy goes kaboom! it will be pegged to the Democrats … fairly I think, the Republicans have fought tooth and nail against fiscal sanity at every opportunity, but Obama has not shown all that much interest in opposing them … and we haven’t really fixed the underlying cause of the last meltdown (hint: credit default swaps) … so the odds are very good that it WILL go kaboom! again.
The nominee selection process on both sides has spit out some really bad candidates. Dukakis and Mondale for example were infamously terrible. Kerry I think was really bad as a candidate as well, it’s easy to defend him since he barely lost in the electoral college but Kerry was running against a President who was deeply polarizing and unpopular with a large segment of the population. The argument probably is that a “decent” Democrat candidate should have beaten Bush in the popular vote and electoral college in 2004.
For the Republicans Dole was basically never a serious threat to Clinton and despite being an all-around great guy (I’m a big fan of Bob Dole) I don’t know anyone who doesn’t wear partisan blinders on the right who thought Dole ever stood a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the White House. Before that you probably have to go to Goldwater for an epically bad Republican candidate, but I think primaries weren’t quite as prominent then as now (I don’t know for sure though, I am fuzzy on the details of when most of the delegates became primary elected.) Ford was obviously a weak candidate but he wasn’t so much chosen as he was an incumbent who lost in large part because he pardoned Richard Nixon, and was only on the ballot in the first place because he was the incumbent President. McCain/Romney are both probably somewhere in between John Kerry and George H.W. Bush '92, meaning not good candidates but not totally unelectable either. They both were candidates who could have won a Presidential, just not the one they happened to be running in (sort of like George H.W. Bush obviously was capable of winning a Presidential election, he just wasn’t suited for the nature of the 92 campaign or able to effectively defend the most unpopular aspects of his Presidency.)
Martin Hyde, I’m a young guy and I definitely skew liberal… but Romney was one of the most laughably terrible presidential candidates I could ever imagine. That being said, I’m only old enough to remember 2000 and later, so my perspective is narrow. But he was laughably, laughably bad. I kept thinking day after day that I might never see such a terrible candidate again in my life.
McCain on the other hand was a rather good candidate and he sunk his own chances with Palin and tacking hard to the right, I think.
Kerry was a boring candidate but I wouldn’t say terrible. Gore was also boring but not terrible. Bush was a fantastic candidate and very likable, even in 2004. I voted for Kerry, but I wasn’t surprised Bush won and I wasn’t devastated about it either.
This is just an intro… Part 1 of 6.
John Kerry kicked this guy’s ass on live television, and that’s why Swift Boatie has held a grudge.
Watch the whole show if you’d like to see why John Kerry, at a certain time, held promise.
AIUI, 1968 was the last time a candidate was selected at a convention, rather than already having been “selected” via the primaries. So Goldwater would have been a convention nominee.
I don’t agree with that. The democrats have promoted concepts like raising the cap and/or the tax rate to keep SS solvent. SS can be kept solvent until the 22nd century with minor changes. Raise the tax to 13% or so, plus raise the cap and the system will be solvent for my grandkids. I’m willing to pay higher SS taxes, if they raise the rate to 13-14% and raise the cap that will keep it solvent.
As far as medicare, part of the affordable care act was that in 2018 the growth in spending on medicare has to be limited to GDP growth + 1% (which will likely be achieved via comparative effectiveness eliminating less productive medical interventions). In the stimulus the administration spent at least a billion on comparative effectiveness research to ensure the money spent is actually effective. Ex-Obama cabinet member Peter Orszag would constantly give speeches about how 1/3 of medical spending in the US does nothing to make us healthier and could be eliminated w/o affecting our health. The dems also passed new medicare taxes. Medicare solvency was extended by 12 years due to the ACA. The health bill, while not a finished product, is supposed to help bend the cost curve over the long term.
My impression, as a liberal, is that the democrats are taking a balanced approach to keeping the social safety net solvent by a mixture of raising taxes and cutting benefits intelligently (by eliminating non-productive health care spending). Republicans are using deficits as an excuse to push their ideology which is to dismantle social safety nets.
I don’t think safety net issues will win the GOP votes anytime soon. If anything those are going to be net positives for the dems who are at least making serious issues to keep them solvent rather than using them as a leninist strategy to push an ideological POV.
I’m not trying to be a dick by saying this and am looking for a discussion with an intelligent person who has a different POV than me (which you are) but how will informed voters look at programs like SS or medicare and think the republicans have a good plan that will win them votes? Again, the dems are proposing smart changes via smart cuts and reasonable tax hikes, the GOP is pushing a slash and burn program and are indifferent to the effects it has on voters. Worse, they seem to promote tax cuts to eliminate whatever savings doing that would create so they can’t even claim it is about deficit spending.
I don’t think they felt that, I think the republicans were in a bubble and believed their own internal messaging that 2012 would be a GOP landslide. Even Romney/Ryan believed in slanted polls showing them winning by a wide margin. The loss caught them off guard, Romney didn’t even write a speech.
If they didn’t think they were going to win, they probably would’ve passed their gerrymandering bills before the 2012 election instead of working on it after.
Yet another benefit (to the democrats) of the inmates running the asylum in the contemporary GOP.
OTOH, you have to go back to Eisenhower for a tolerably good Republican POTUS.
Funny how that works.
That’s just opinion-mongering, though. Eisenhower is far enough back that he’s “historical” so any of his non-liberal position aren’t offensive, and he was probably one of the most underrated and effective “administrators” and executors of foreign policy we’ve ever had. Basically Eisenhower is a somewhat forgotten President who didn’t have a lot of “big ideas” but at an operational/process level he may have administrated the White House and the country more effectively than any other 20th century POTUS.
But lots of people on both sides of the aisle are willing to consider at least parts of the Nixon, Reagan, and H.W. Bush presidencies as tolerable. Nixon was generally pretty good at many of the roles of the Presidential office, but horribly corrupt so I don’t know how that shakes out overall. Some of his legislation and foreign policy achievements were undeniably amazing and have lasting effects to this day.
I won’t turn this into a SS thread, but I agree we need a social safety net for old poor people. However, doubling the SS tax would cripple the country and if it only keeps up with the present level of benefits it’d be economy wrecking to give old people a meager benefit. I think we should look at some forms of reform that other countries have taken in regard to their old age pension system. Virtual accounts for example seem to have worked well for some countries.
I think a lot of good could be achieved by basically eliminated all SS retirement benefits for people who earn over a certain amount and create some legislation that regiments 401ks a bit more than they are now (I’d need another thread on that issue.) A properly regulated 401k system could replace any need in growing SS. (The current 401k system has too many mechanisms by which people can stupidly destroy their nest egg.)
But economists are already projecting big negatives to consumer spending and economic growth because the payroll tax holiday of 2% is going away, imagine if 13% of everyone’s paycheck (including the middle class and poor) had to go to payroll taxes, before even factoring in income tax deductions. Many States have income taxes in the 6-10% range, and even some cities have 2-3% tax. It’s not too hard to get middle class taxes up to the 40% range if you start stacking that stuff, and that’s a fairly high burden especially since we get far less in return than any other country I can think of, primarily because Democrats are unwilling to make any efficiency reforms to our entitlement programs.
Romney wasn’t that bad, he was no worse than Bush in 92 I don’t think, and that was a winnable election for Bush if he had campaigned a bit differently. I think Romney wasn’t good, and his campaign was poorly conducted, but he doesn’t enter the pantheon of really bad candidates, and isn’t even in the top 5 bad candidates in my lifetime.
I think the fact that many people are saying Romney lost in a landslide shows people have little historical perspective. I’ve lived through guys winning over 500 EVs, and candidates like Goldwater, McGovern, Carter '80, Mondale and Dukakis weren’t laughably bad, they were abominable.
Well, Nixon had brains, certainly, and a certain integrity (a peculiar kind of integrity that never in his life included honesty), and dedication to public service. I’m always readier to listen to defenses of Nixon than of Reagan. (Despite . . . certain things.)
Goldwater was the Republican nominee in 1964 not 1968. Nixon was nominated in 1968.
I have heard both that Romney was shocked and that he knew the day before the election that Ohio was a lost cause and made a desperate attempt to turn Pennsylvania around. I don’t see how both things can be true. So I am skeptical of the stories that he was really all that surprised.
But hey maybe he really thought he could lose Ohio and win in the electoral college.
True that Christie’s snub by CPAC makes his row a bit harder to hoe. But of those there are several who would be able to tack center pretty well. Jindals’ “we gottta stop being the stupid party” and Rubio’s appeal Hispanics speak well to general election electability. I’m not so sure the hard line right is going to get as much funding this time. A lot of course depends on who is up on the other side. Biden? The GOP wins with one of them. HRC? They lose.
Oof. Thanks for the correction.
The Republicans can probably keep doing well in midterms with their present configuration for another 10 years. The demographics don’t really begin to bite hard until then. As for presidential elections, let’s be serious, they are usually about who has the nicest smile. If the Dems do their usual moronic thing and nominate Professor McAmbien, then the GOP can run somebody superficial and cheerful – I dunno, say, an actor – and win.
In the long run, the parties will change out from under the current identities. In 2040 it may well be the Republican Neo-Marxists vs the Democratic Hamiltonians. Parties at the end of the day are just machines that turn donor contributions into democratic “consent.”