Umm, that’s the entire point of the article? :rolleyes:
The difference is that, in multi-party systems, coalitions form in the middle rather than towards the edges.
Well, not necessarily. It can go either way. In Germany, a governing coalition of center-right and center-left parties was just recently supplanted by a coalition of center-right and far-right parties.
Highly unlikeyly. The Dems have an 80 seat majority. According to CQ politics the safe races represent a 60 seat majority, with only about 100 seats listed as favorable or lean. Republicans would then have to wiin those 80-20, VERY unlikely. CQ politics in fact predicts really no net gain for the GOP in the House.
The Seante will be more interesting, it seems, although 6 seats seems highly unlikely to me. At best I think 3.
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=183&gclid=CIqTzIaWvZ0CFQ4MDQodwiWljQ#senate
A reasonable question. Recent Republican extremism that bothers me starts with these two:
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Anti-science, ideological appointments to various scientific commissions, and the rampant firing of government researchers because their findings did not match that ideology.
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Foreign policy decisions – which IMHO have proved disastrous – based on the neo-con New American Century.
I also have a fuzzier concern that Republicans will move us more toward an acceptance of “intelligent design” and away from evolution – not my sweeping mandates at the Federal level, but by relentless appointments of ideologically-driven lower-tier judges who will, eventually, start finding on behalf of schools who want to teach creationism alongside science. I admit that this hasn’t happened yet, but I don’t feel like my worries on that score are unfounded.
I’ll be sure to forward these to Senator Leiberman.
The radical right controls the GOP? Really?
When I look at the Presidential nominees of the GOP over the past few decades, I don’t see a lot of holy rollers or fire-and-brimstone types. I see a lot of boring, stuffy moderates.
Was John McCain the choice of the far right? No!
Was Bob Dole? No!
Was George H.W. Bush? No!
Even Dubya was not the “fundy” his enemies think he was. Look at his Cabinet, and then try to tell me this: apart from John Ashcroft, which of his Cabinet members in either term was identified with the Religious Right? The Harriet Miers debacle was proof positive that George W. Bush was all about personal ties and personal loyalties, NOT about ideology.
I WISH the right wing nuts had a fraction of the power within the GOP that their enemies think they have. In reality, another country club moderate is likely to win the 2012 nomination.
Yeah, hopefully he’ll realize how nice he’s being treated by the Dems, given that he hasn’t just taken a contrary stand on one or two issues, but (a) run against the Democratic nominee for Senate from his state in the general election in 2006,and (b) supported the GOP candidate for President in 2008.
We’re not talking about the past few decades. We’re talking about right now.
I’ve said it before (maybe here, maybe not), but IMHO the tipping point was Palin’s nomination as VP candidate just over a year ago. The grassroots crazies were already there, but they seemed to find each other and realize their collective strength at Palin rallies last fall. So talking about where things stood even a couple of years ago doesn’t really connect with where they are now, IMHO.
Faces of the GOP at the new GOP.com:
http://our.gop.com/community/app/templates/tptblogtypeentries.aspx
Seems like Ron Paul is a biggy over at the RNC nowdays.
She get’s high favorability ratings among Republicans, but if you look at these poll numbers, Republicans poll almost the same as Independents when asked if they think she would make an effective president. So they like her, but they don’t want her to be president.
You have to scroll down about 1/4 of the way to a CBS poll.
Gimme a break. That right wing loonies control the GOP has been an article of faith on the Left for decades. It was silly 20 years ago, and it’s silly now.
Sarah Palin is of no real importance, except to David Letterman. And considering she’s not even the governor of Alaska any more, I can’t imagine why HE’S still obsessed with her. Since when is the losing candidate’s running mate still the focal point of liberal obsession a year later?
The Religious Right doesn’t control the party, and the GOP nominee in 2012 will NOT be their preferred candidate. But when Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty (or someone similar) accepts the nomination in 2012, I expect you’ll find some way to pretend he’s a maniacal theocrat.
The requirement that insurance companies cover anyone with pre-existing conditions, for one thing. You do realize that this makes matters much worse, right? One of the reasons healthy people get insurance now is so that if they develop expensive conditions they will be covered. That brings more money into the insurance pool and keeps rates down for everyone. Once you mandate that insurance companies must not discriminate against pre-existing conditions, you set up conditions under which healthy people will stop buying insurance. That will drive up premiums for everyone else.
To combat this, the government has to mandate that everyone buy insurance. So now, when you become an adult, you have three years to find and pay for an insurance policy, or the government will start levying fines against you. That’s a pretty significant change, wouldn’t you say?
It also doesn’t fix the problem. The three year ‘grace period’ and the size of the penalties is such that premiums will still go up somewhat.
Then there’s the little matter of 800 billion dollars, but that’s just for starters, and it’s a lowball estimate.
I’m glad you’re giving the GOP credit for the tax cuts, because they appear to be about the only thing that has worked in this stimulus plan. So fine, I’ll scale it back to about 500 billion in liberal pet projects.
My positions haven’t changed. I’m still a social liberal and fiscal conservative. I’m not an extremist. I don’t think government should be completely dismantled. If I’m sounding more oppositional these days, it’s because Obama really is taking the U.S. on a hard turn to the left. I opposed some policies of Clinton’s, and supported others. I probably opposed as much of GHW Bush’s policies as I did Clinton’s, as they were both moderate centrists who did some things I liked and some things I didn’t.
I support some things Obama has done - his charter school initiatives are very good. I like his talk about poor people taking on more responsibility for their condition. I initially liked some of his cabinet picks. I liked his ability to communicate and his even, cool demeanor. I liked his promise to listen to both sides and be bipartisan. But as time has gone on, I’m seeing less and less of the ‘good’ Obama, and more and more of the ideological lefty I was worried about. His even tone has evaporated and he’s starting to sound like a whiner. His bipartisanship turned out to be an illusion - this administration is constantly on the attack against the right.
The Republicans haven’t become more extreme. Let me remind you that Ronald Reagan wanted to dismantle large parts of the Federal Government. The Gingrich Congress wanted to completely defund the Department of Education, the NEA, and seriously scale back the FDA and other federal departments. The current crop of Republicans supports none of that. Hell, they probably wouldn’t even agree with Bill Clinton when he said “The era of big government is over.”
The problem with the current crop of Republicans isn’t that they are extremists - it’s that they are mostly lightweight idiots who are empty vessels to be filled with ideas by their lobbyists. And the same is true of the Democrats. The combination of Gerrymandering, campaign finance laws, and the complete infiltration of the American political system by special interests on both sides has produced a very poor quality political class. The result is the kind of chaos you see in Congress today, with the 20% approval rating that goes along with it. But the system is so rigged for the incumbents that a Congress with a 20% approval rating will see 85% or more of its incumbents re-elected.
Who picks a VP candidate to appeal to your party’s base? As I’m sure you are aware, Palin got pushed on McCain by Kristol and that crowd, those to his right. The cover story was that she was supposed to appeal to women disappointed that Hillary didn’t get the nomination, but anyone believing that would work was stupid at best and sexist at worst.
I just don’t see any reasonable analysis of voter demographics that made the Palin choice make any kind of sense at all. It only works as a sop to the extreme right, and that part did work fairly well.
To get back to the OP, I’d offer that a multi-party system would make things worse. Sure, today the right has a stranglehold on the Republican party, but that is not going to last as the demographics get more Democratic all the time. Eventually either a moderate will get the nomination, win, and build a new coalition sentencing the nuts to the outer darkness, or a set of moderate-right Dems will split from the party for some reason and move to the GOP and take it over, like the Dixiecrats did. If there was a multi-party system the extremists would hang on, and in some cases be essential for building a coalition, like the religious parties are in Israel. I wouldn’t want that on the right or the left.
I agree with Sam about the difficulty of making a coalition work, especially in the Senate. The US has nothing like a vote of confidence. There is a bigger problem, though. The presidential election system in the Constitution was originally set up for no parties, and got modified to more or less support two parties after the fiasco of 1800. Having multiple parties (with some chance) would very likely mean that few candidates would ever get an electoral vote majority, and a lot of elections would get thrown to the House. I hope no one thinks this would be a good idea. It would also encourage the formation of regional parties, since a true third party would get no electors and thus no power.
Wow, that’s radical.
Seriously, how do you get to universal health care, and still leave the private insurance industry intact, without that requirement? In terms of change to the system, is the minimalist route to UHC.
You can argue that UHC itself is radical, but when your own country, and pretty much every European country, and the more economically advanced Asian countries all have it, the absence of UHC seems a bit more radical than its presence, don’t you think?
No. It demonstrates why UHC is needed. It would make more sense to go straight to single-payer, but instead we’re requiring tens of millions of new customers buy insurance from private insurance. The profits from those new customers should balance out the end of the per-existing condition dodge.
And sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Again, it’s significant, but hardly radical. We require everyone who drives, in a country where a car is practically a necessity, to have auto insurance. Rail against that ‘individual mandate’ if you will.
And once again, it’s the minimalist route to UHC in terms of change to the system.
Which bill are we talking about? SFC, I believe - and everyone seems to agree that the stronger provisions of the House bill will win out here.
Over a decade. IOW, it’s considerably cheaper than the Iraq War.
‘Appear’? Talk about meaningless bullshit. Got any evidence?
Again, evidence of such pet projects, please.
Yeah, you just spout the rhetoric of extremism.
And your railing against the fiscal profligacy of the GWB administration would have gotten tiresome, if you had actually started any threads railing against it. Some fiscal conservative you are. Just like American Republicans, you’re a fiscal conservative when a Democrat is in the White House.
This is a stupid thread.
You likely were never going to vote GOP in the first place. So why should they care about your opinion?
Their goal is to win elections and if current polls are correct, they will be doing pretty well.
So “time for a multi-party system”. OK, start it up. Or do you mean the GOP should be banned because it’s been taken over by “crazies”, otherwise known as “people I disagree with”.
The democrats were taken over years ago by union thugs, trial lawyers, welfare rights people (social “justice”), the racial preferance/grievance lobby, abortion on demand etc.
Time for them to go too.
Someone, like McCain, with whom the party’s base isn’t that thrilled.
True. But that doesn’t have anything to do with what I was addressing in my post.
So what? McCain needed that to rally the base. They flubbed by picking a lightweight from the right rather than someone with some intellectual heft. Again, that’s a tactical mistake, not any indication of the the GOP going off the deep end. Not any more than saying the Dems are doomed because they had another presidential candidate with a sex scandal. Palin is a flash in the pan, working her 15 minutes of fame for what it’s worth. She won’t ever be a significant player on the national election scene.