Voting Rights Act was signed in 1965 and Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964. Carter was elected in 1976. 21 and 22 years after the signings, respectively.
Well, if that happens, I just hope the Daily Show does something set to Johnny Rivers.
It’s more about what Reagan symbolizes than what he actually did. He never stopped talking about smaller government. He just couldn’t accomplish it. In part because the Democrats controlled Congress back then, but also in part because in the end he was too nice. DAvid Stockman’s book has several scenes where they go to Reagan with proposed cuts, and he’d say, “Oh, but we can’t cut THAT. That would hurt people. Find something else, because I want the budget slashed.”
Captain Amazing: That’s exactly the kind of split I’m talking about. Another example was when Jay Danforth (the man who presided over Reagan’s funeral) attacked the current Republicans by saying the same thing - their focus on social issues was way out of whack. He said that when he was a Senator he spent almost no time worrying about things like gay marriage. He was too busy trying to manage the government properly.
Otto, according to my math, that’s 11 and 12 years respectively. One of us is missing something.
Sam Stone, if the Republicans would go back to being the party of smaller government, I’d consider joining them. Unfortunately, what I’ve seen in my lifetime is the Republican being the party of big business back in the 80’s with a touch of unsubstantiated moral superiority. I couldn’t see how a divorced man (Reagan) could be seen as a paragon of family values.
It’s me, missing the portion of my brain that lets me do math good. Somehow I lose a decade here and there. It’s like I took drugs.
I believe his comment was that the Democrats lost the Southern vote for the next 20 years. Apparently he was being too optimistic, because it’s been over 40 years and the democrats still haven’t gotten the south back. Most of the bigots migrated over to the Republican Party.
First of all, there’s no reason a divorced person can’t be a paragon of family values. Divorces happen in spite of the best of intentions, and sometimes a divorce is simply unavoidable, due to one side of the other just being unreasonable and unmanageable. Plus, people can change. Reagan was a lot younger when he divorced. I think it’s actually a bit intolerant to believe that a divorce suddenly excludes you from the ranks of the virtuous.
But you’re right that the Republicans have presided over a major expansion of government in the past 20 years. But it ebbs and flows. In the first few years of the ‘contract with America’, the Republicans did try to hold the line on spending to some degree. They supported welfare reform, they stopped Hillarycare, and they rolled back a lot of regulatons. The current crowd, however, just doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass. Bush won’t veto a damned thing, and his buddies in the Congress have increased the number of earmarks by a huge amount in the past few years. Even Bill Clinton said the era of Big Government was over - then Bush came along, increased the budget for the Dept of Education by 30%, increased the budgets of numerous agencies, and signed into law a new 1 trillion dollar entitlement that was totally his baby. No one was clamoring for it. It just came out of the blue and he rammed it through when he was popular, and now you’ll be paying the bills for it for decades.
The problem for Republican voters is that even though the Republicans are the party of big government, the Democrats are the party of bigger government. What’s a poor libertarian to do?
That’s a foolish thing to say after enumerating all the ways in which the Republicans have increased government over what the Democrats did when they were in charge. Do you have any evidence of that ?
Give up. Libertarianism is unworkable, unpopular and will never be anything but a fringe idea. People want what government can give them, and they want to be protected from non-government groups like corporations, simple as that. Even if they got into power somehow, they’d get kicked out and even further marginalized as soon as they inflicted their ideas on the public.
The same people they’ve always blamed – anyone else.
Well, there’s an article on World Net Daily suggesting that gay Republicans should be outed for the sake of the party: ‘Truth’ organization wants GOP ‘gays’ to come out: Critics says presence undermining values Republicans say they support
No idea if it’s likely to happen, and there is of course a “consider the source” factor here, but between these guys and Bill Maher, there might be some interesting developments.
More fundamentally, people want stuff free of charge. That’s why big government doesn’t work – the bill always comes due, one way or another.
Old shibboleths die hard. But that’s all they are.
True dat - if they ever did get power, they either wouldn’t know what to do with it, or the politics they’d have to play to get anything done would cost them the intellectual/moral purity that is so attractive to ideologically-minded people.
But they won’t ever disappear from the ballot, as long as there are voters who will go for whoever promises the lowest taxes. That’s their electoral base.
No they don’t; that’s why the tax resisters are nothing but fringe nuts. That’s why the Republican refrain of cut taxes cut taxes cut taxes doesn’t always work. Most people both want things from the government, and are willing to pay for it.
Big government does work. Not for everything, but nothing works for everything.
Public opinion on the subject can be summarized as: “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me; tax that guy behind the tree”. People want stuff, and they want somebody else to pay for it; pandering to that impulse has been one of the keystones of politics for as long as there’s been such a thing as politics.