No, Gore was a conservative Democrat by the standards of the time. By today’s standards - as defined by those who have hijacked conservatism - even Zel Miller is a socialist. And probably a Kenyan!
Gore proposed eliminating the payroll tax and replacing it with a carbon tax. That’s practically in Fairtax territory.
So, *Nevertheless *in this context means, “I was wrong, but that in no way undercuts my argument”?
It should be amazing that this thread has come down to another attempted glorification of Reagan, but sadly it’s not.
If there were a Board in 1988 I’d have been writing something to the effect that the Democrats should almost hope that they lose the election. Because whoever lost would be blamed for the economic catastrophe that was sure to come. If the Democrats had won, then the Republicans probably could have kept the Presidency for the next 20 years.
But the Dems dodged that bullet. Bush did win. The catastrophe occurred right on schedule. It was severe enough to take a competent president with a wartime popularity rating of around 90% and sink him the next year. And every single bit of that economic failure was laid under Reagan.
This was utterly obvious in 1988, not merely with hindsight. Reagan was a horrible president under any possible criteria (hint: he didn’t destroy Communism either) but he had a personal popularity that was invincible. His legacy is more than merely the craters from bad economic and foreign policy; he somehow left his followers with the lesson that they should pay more attention to the words a politician says than to the acts and the actual consequences thereof.
That blight hangs over every political action today. Saying the right words to the right ears is crucial, even when they conflict with sanity, reality, history, the Constitution, or basic human decency. Today’s political invective is nothing like that in Reagan’s time. Saying that “Democrats’ current concessions that Reagan wasn’t so bad compared to modern Republicans is belied by the fact that Democratic rhetoric towards Republicans hasn’t changed since the 1960s.” is a positive compliment. Republican rhetoric toward Democrats has changed, though, and since it starts with the utter vituperative and physical hatred toward the counterculture in the 1960s and Nixon’s war against his enemies in the 1970s, the extremes it takes today are beyond rational belief.
Zell Miller was a reactionary Democrat. Gore was unquestionably a conservative Democrat. Remember the PMRC hearings? During the 1988 primaries, Gore advocated ending federal funding for abortions and school prayer. His original portfolio as Clinton’s VP was cutting waste and overstaffing in the federal government.
Well, that’s not really an ideological issue. Oh wait, yes it is, but it shouldn’t be. Liberals should be the most vigilant about waste and overstaffing, except that while helping poor people and the elderly is nice, it doesn’t get you campaign donations the way providing jobs and patronage does.
I’m not saying it’s an ideological issue. I’m saying a liberal would have left cuts to individual departments.
Doesn’t matter. He WON the popular vote. Which is what we’re talking about here - popularity. Only a strange quirk kept him out of office, not the voters.
Let’s not even begin to pretend that Republicans don’t play political games like that too.
And many Dems view providing jobs as the same thing as helping poor people.
Republicans can be awful, but there’s a reason the term “machine politics” is usually associated with Democrats, and the whole concept of patronage was invented by a Democratic President. Of course both parties do it, but just as Republicans are more beholden to corporations than Democrats, Democrats are more beholden to the bureaucracy of government than Republicans. Gore had to fight a lot of resistance in the Democratic Party and within the Clinton administration itself to get anything done. People like Gore are often derided as “googoos” by liberals who take a more realist view of getting things done in Washington.
Obama himself is often called a “googoo”, but that’s got to be willful blindness. There is no evidence that OBama has ever been a reformist when it comes to the way politics mix with government operations.
Trying desperately to nail down your fog of references to actual history so some context can applied, I start with “there’s a reason the term “machine politics” is usually associated with Democrats.” I wonder what that is, since you don’t say. It certainly is not because of your claim that “the whole concept of patronage was invented by a Democratic President.” I’m guessing you mean President Jackson in 1828, since wide scale awarding of positions followed the 1828 elections, were defended by William Learned Marcy, who coined the term the Spoils System. While the scale might of been larger, ascribing the creation of the system to as late as 1828 is surely folly. It had been around since the early days of Washington’s term, and blossomed in full splendor during Adams’ and Jefferson’s presidencies.
The Jacksonian Democrats, however much they systemitized it, are not part of the hey day of the patronage system, since that was practiced at its highest rascality in city and state politics a full 50 years later, with a re-formed post-war Democratic party. It’s questionable that everyone in the country would have associated the patronage system with Democrats. Probably the largest and most successful machine in the country was the Republican machine of Pennsylvania, which had the state legislature in its pocket and almost all the Congressional delegation, along with the city of Philadelphia. Tammany in New York attempted a similar triple but had more problems in managing to hold it together for long. Too many reformers. Tammany lasted 50 years but hardly qualified as a machine by the end. Still, it was in NY where the media was. Chicago’s machine was Democratic in recent time, but they took the levers of power from Big Bill Thompson, a Republican. Southern machines were Democrat because of the one party system there.
You say “Democrats are more beholden to the bureaucracy of government than Republicans.” That’s fog, and I can’t grasp what you might mean by that except that its somehow bad. Republicans have been calling for the elimination of several cabinet departments through several Republican presidencies without any real-world effect. Reformers of either party have been called goo-goos - standing for “Good Government types,” ie, reformers - since the 1890s. I haven’t seen it used in any but the most inside beltway publications in decades and I doubt one in 100 average Americans know what the term means. And there are no realist ways of getting anything done in Washington in this era of reflexive Republican opposition and obstruction to any measure proposed by the Dems, an old tactic that has been raised to a policy by indiscriminate application.
Mind you, I’m trying just to translate the words you use into language others here may comprehend. The meaning the language evidently is design to convey is above my pay grade. What machine politics, a relic of a lost time that does not exist in classic form in any major city, broken by reformers and the loss of patronage jobs, has to do with anything else in this thread is mystifying to me. I get that it’s bad and therefore the Democrats do more of it - asserted without any proof - but as given I suspect it was assembled by an American Heritage Institute refrigerator magnet word set.
What I said was a lot more precise and provable than the usual “Republicans are racists, extremists, warmongers, and they smell too!” commentary that usually passes for insightful here.
I somehow doubt the practice of political patronage was invented in the U.S. in 1789. Surely the British had dabbled in the idea in the 16th century, and I’m sure the ancient Romans…
Anyhoo…
You get no sympathy from me if you won’t recognize that a great deal of thoughtful political analysis (or at least the best one can expect from an internet message board) also goes on here, well above the level of your paraphrased example.
Certainly. But due to the liberal bias of this board, merely mediocre political analysis from conservatives gets called out as idiotic, while insipid polemics from liberals tend to be accepted as obvious.
I’m still not feeling any sympathy. All you did was reword your claim without addressing mine. So there will always be some people on this board who reflexively jeer any conservative statement (no matter how thoughtful) and reflexively cheer any liberal statement (no matter how stupid)? So? Are you concluding that it is impossible (or even difficult) to find expressions of respect for thoughtful conservative positions and scorn for stupid liberal ones? You’re not looking hard enough, or I suspect even at all. It simply easier, I gather, to find the statements that reinforce your beliefs while ignoring those that do not.
I admit being guilty of this, too, on occasion. I don’t think I’ve ever bothered to generalize the board, though. If I genuinely felt such contempt for this place, I can’t imagine why I would hang around.
I said don’t do that. 
Machine politics are just one of many ways BOTH sides play that game. The machine is associated mostly with Dems because of history, not any particular way of doing business.
That’s a fair statement - but what’s missing is that Republicans serve their masters by using government too, just in different ways because they have different needs. Republicans give corporations tax breaks and regulatory exceptions and pork (“corporate welfare”).
I think that, due to your own political bias, you’re judging what Dems do more harshly. It’s not really any different from what Republicans do.
That’s where you give us the advantage. You can say that liberals are poopyheads and that disappears in the noise. The more precise you get, the easier it is to challenge what you say. When a statement is provable - “the whole concept of patronage was invented by a Democratic President” - it is almost inevitably provably wrong.
Thanks, I guess.
There is one difference. Conservatives who are not politicians want Republicans to stop serving particular corporate interests and instead be pro-free markets. Liberals who are not politicians tend to be on the same page with Democratic politicians on the need to support the coalition.
In other words, Republicans who do this are acting against principle. Democrats are acting fully in principle.
So you win among all non-politicians. Great.
So Republicans are hypocrites who espouse principles but actually feed at the same trough. Okay.
That fits my analysis, which is “Democrats want to screw you and they’ll tell you so; Republicans want to screw you but they’ll lie to you that they don’t.”
An alternative explanation is that the Tea Party has been in part a revolt against the unprincipled way the Republicans do business. There are Democratic reformers, Russ Feingold and Claire McCaskill among them, but they are much fewer.
Earmarking is a standard way of rewarding campaign contributors with real money. The vote to reform earmarks was overwhelmingly Republican, pushed mainly by the Tea Party, and only brought in a few Democrats, like Russ Feingold(who I believe has never taken an earmark) and CClaire McCaskill(who I’m almost certain has never taken one).
One of the "complaints about the recent gun control bill was that the Democrats couldn’t buy any votes due to earmark reform. The fact that they see that as a bug and not a feature says alot.