Like, the (false) assumption that the average welfare recipient is black.
What if I told you that a black person is 5 times more likely to be on welfare than a white person in America.
I’d say we got a whole lot more work to do.
While focusing on the economy and ending the wars (somehow) would have been better politically for the Democrats and probably also better in the short term for the country i disagree that Obama did not have a mandate to reform Health Care or that there was any chance in hell of it happening after the 2010 elections.
I believe that race plays a big part in the tea party movement. Not the only part, but definately one of their top 5 motivators.
Either way, I’m not as interested in their motives of being tea party members as how they managed to build such an effective political machine in such a short period of time. That is what interests me, because I wish liberals had a political machine that was as powerful as the tea party.
If liberals were capable of doing 10+ primaries from the left in the 2010 senate election cycle, it would have been amazing. Instead we got 2, and we lost one of those (Halter). The tea party is intimidating the GOP into submission while the democratic party is insulting their base. The saying ‘The republican party fears their base, the democratic party hates theirs’ is true. The democratic base (liberals, unions, the poor) are mostly ignored and ridiculed by the higher ups. Robert Gibbs comes to mind.
How did the tea party become so effective at doing primaries from the right in such a short period of time?
Unfortunately, the economy has continued to decline under Obama, and the situation in Afghanistan does not look good. My attitude is that no matter how bad things get, they would be worse under the Republicans, but that is not the American consensus.
I recently read a blurb by economists that if Obama & Bush had not pursued the unpopular policies they did (TARP, GM bailout, financial bailouts, stimulus bill) that we would have an additional 9-10 million unemployed on top of what we already have (aka 15% U3 unemployment) and the deficit would be 2 trillion instead of 1.4 trillion. How valid it is, I don’t know. But the stimulus and bailouts were probably a good idea that helps slow unemployment and shrink the deficit. And taking the issue serious was one of the few things I agree with Bush on.
Obamacare cuts the deficit. It will shrink medicare costs over time, and hopefully slow the rate of medical inflation.
The student loan reform saved money too. Instead of the government paying private lenders to loan money, the gov. cut out the middle man and saved tens of billions a year.
Basically, everything you’ve listed cuts the deficit rather than increases it. Making student loans more efficient, helping the economy survive the great recession and reforming health care are all cutting the deficit.
Heh saying that the tea baggers are Libertarians is just smoke. The birth of the movement is credited to Ron Paul, who is a Republican.
Again, read the demographics in the Wiki article. Tea baggers are repubs, and very likely far smaller than anyone believes. In the article, there’s lots and lots of details about where they had rallies and which media sources covered them (Fox News, what a surprise) but no attendance numbers.
Let’s see someone run on the Libertarian ticket (rather than a Repub with tea bagger support.) I’ll bet any amount they won’t even get 10% of the national vote if they aren’t in one of the two major parties.
Why don’t you feel that is the American consensus? Even though the GOP will gain seats in 2010, I don’t think it is because the public seriously think the GOP have competent, well thought out ideas to make the economy stronger. Very few people think that, and the ones who do are already members of the diehard GOP minority.
The GOP is going to win because they are the non-incumbent party. Not because their ideas are any good.
It’s more like the economy has not recovered as fast as people would like under Obama. We are by every measure doing a ton better than we were two years ago.
Who identifies himself as a libertarian, and has been a leader in the Libertarian movement for a long time. In fact, he was the Libertarian party’s candidate for President in 1988. This supports the point that the Tea Party is libertarian-oriented.
There have always been libertarian-leaning Republicans. The Republican party has a social conservative/religious right wing, a ‘business class’ wing, and a libertarian wing. The Tea Party is is made up of more of the libertarian and business-oriented Republicans, and fewer of the religious right/social conservatives.
Which is exactly why the Tea Party isn’t advocating a policy of running 3rd party candidates. But it heavily supported Rand Paul, who is even more libertarian than his father.
There are plenty of Christian conservatives in the Tea Party movement, but social conservatism is not their animating issue. Small government is. As an analogy, the Democrats were motivated by anti-war sentiment in the last couple of elections, and picked up independents who were against the war. That doesn’t mean there were no socialists or free-Mumia wackos left in the Democratic grassroots movement - just that they weren’t the ones driving the rallies and getting out the vote and attracting independents. They were relegated to the back bench. And so it is with social conservatives in the Tea Party.
Or let’s put it this way - if the tea party had to pick between two candidates, one of whom wanted smaller government and lower taxes and a repeal of Obamacare but who also supported gay marriage and drug legalization, and the other who was a hardcore social conservative campaigning on opposition to gay marriage and abortion, but who also supported more government stimulus and government-run health care, the first candidate would win tea party support in a landslide.
There are however two types of Republican that have been obliterated completely - the big government ‘compassionate conservatives’ like George Bush, and the neo-cons. Neither have any impact in the Republican party right now.
I see. So GeeDubya was one of those touchy-feely, huggy bear, big nannystate Republicans. Uh-huh. Too much into government interference with vigorous entrepreneurship, all that tree-hugging environmentalism and stuff. Right. OK. Good to calibrate. Not sufficiently suckitive of business interests. Hokey-dokey.
Quoth Wesley Clark:
I would hold off on calling their primary challenges “successful” until we see how they do against their Democratic opponents. It won’t do them much good to win primaries but lose the generals.
Quoth Sam Stone:
In what sense, aside from having the last name “Paul”, is Rand Paul even remotely libertarian?
Government spending exploded under Bush. He greatly increased the budgets of many government agencies. He introduced a new Medicare entitlement. He created “No Child Left Behind”. He send more development aid money to Africa than any other president by a long shot. He, like his father, had no real problem with big government. He just wanted it used for conservative ends. He didn’t want to redistribute wealth, but he did push for an ‘ownership society’ and use government money to help that along.
Trust me, real fiscal conservatives can reel off a laundry list of reasons to dislike George W. Bush.
From my point of view it’s a bad thing, but conservatives have been pretty much running things since about 1980. Go back about ten more years and you really get to a place where what they then called a generally conservative ethos included some things that would now be regarded, or at least criticized by present-day conservatives as profoundly liberal or left wing. None other than Richard Nixon advocated UHC during a speech at some point during his administration.
Incidentally there was an article in the L.A. Times, a few days ago, describing a few weeks in the summer of '74 when Venice became a sort of de facto nude beach. Interestingly it took several weeks for the City Council to deal with the issue by passing an ordinance against nude sunbathing. On the bright, or at least the pro-naked side, they at least considered the idea of providing for clothing-optional beach areas and, even if that idea was put down in the end, it’s remarkable that it was considered at all. I mention the story because this sort of thing, combined with where the political center then seemed to be, almost gives you the impression that we were going to go in the same direction as Western Europe–and at a similar pace. How far we have swung back to the right, politically and culturally, since then is astonishing.
I’d say that’s still not enough to make the average person on welfare black, since they are after all a minority.
It always does under Republicans. As proponents of selfishness being a virtue, they naturally care nothing for the welfare of the country.
Actually the current makeup of the HoR’s leadership is exactly what you would expect based on the way the system is designed, and also on the fact that the people who live in those cities keep on re-electing them. Urban residents tend to be more left-leaning, which in turn is a natural result of the realities of city life. For example, you’re more likely to be a renter, and you’re also more likely to favor the sinking of large amounts of public money into huge infrastructure projects like mass transit. You’re probably also more likely to oppose the NRA. And more important than any of this, in terms of the House leadership, is that term limits seem to be one of the conservatives’ favorite silver bullets, and as such tends to have little attraction for the left wing. For this reason, Pelosi et al. didn’t get voted out of their districts, whoever happened to win or retain control in any given election, and kept their own seats for many years. Now that their party is in power they, as the senior Democrats in Congress, naturally have taken the leadership positions. Voila.
Is it exactly representative of America? No, but not any less so than the Republicans were in 1994. The House leadership tends to present an exaggerated version of the any actual leftward or rightward bent of the electorate. Today it’s the more liberal Democrats who are running the committees and holding the Speaker’s chair, just as in 1994 it was Newt Gingrich and other conservative Republicans who ran things then. You can look at a red-blue map of the U.S. and 99% of the country is red, but since we actually vote by population, rather than square miles, the political center is probably not as far to the right as you suggest.
He was pretty liberal in the campaign, and I believe he still is at heart. But what he has been able to accomplish has been limited by the drag from behind. Sadly, there just wasn’t going to be an HC reform law if it didn’t include the precious private insurance companies or five year waiting period. Whoever said that about “sops to the unions [and other liberal interests]” was spot on. To throw a sop to someone is to give a minor concession to the loser in a conflict, and to a lot of liberals it doesn’t appear like we’re winning right now.
I feel your pain and I agree with you, but this is by definition a contradiction. If America were really composed largely of near-fascists, plutocrats, and Christian bigots, then that’s were the center would be.
Exactly.
If actual left wingers ran the show, the whole health insurance industry* would not exist as a fundamental piece of the system, because as such it’s another cost layer in the system. As it is not only do doctors and other providers need to be paid, but so do the employees and executives of the insurance companies. The reported profits of the insurers may be only a few percent, but salaries and massive executive payouts are expenses, not profits, from those companies’ perspective. Yet it’s we who pay that money ultimately through our premiums. It’s sort of like a protection racket.
Q. Why do we have to pay insurance premiums?
A. Because otherwise the insurance company won’t pay for our doctor visits and surgeries.
Q. But wouldn’t it be cheaper and more efficient to have a single payer system?
A. Yes, but we can’t, because that would leave no place for the health insurers, indeed remove the very reason for their existence.
Q. And?
A. The insurance companies wouldn’t like being voted out of existence, and their wishes are paramount. Somewhere, somehow, they must be allowed to carry on business as usual and continue to grab their usual slice of the HC money pie.
A true leftist regards that as an unconscionable gouging of the body politic. In a UHC model, the federal government, in taking on the administrative tasks now done by the insurers, would also have to pay employees to do that work. However, in spite of problems at the fundamental fiscal level, Medicare as it is today is pretty efficient in terms of administration. And, as an operation, MC is not interested in making a profit for anyone; all that matters is that current and future expenses can be met.
The billing industry is another cost layer – and the inefficiency and incompetence here can be astounding–which also will bite the dust if the real Leftists ever do come to power.
*Health insurers might still exist, but their products would represent extras, rather than the essentials of being covered for ordinary doctor visits and procedures or treatments the doctor deems necessary.
In 2008 the unemployment rate was 5.8&. Now it is close to 10%.
Unemployment has grown since the inauguration of Barack Obama.
"Forty-eight percent of voters now believe that President Obama’s policies are to blame for the bad economy, while 47 percent fault former President George W. Bush. According to a new Rasmussen survey, Obama’s 48 percent represents a three-point increase since last month, giving him a greater share of the blame than Bush for the first time since May 2009, when the question was first polled.
“At that time, 62 percent of likely voters blamed Bush and 27 percent blamed Obama.”
http://matzav.com/poll-bush-obama-nearly-tied-for-blame-on-bad-economy
Awfully misleading though to take an average or median out the entire year since unemployment skyrocketed in the final months of 2008.
Here’s a more accurate month by month breakdown. Unemployment for January 2009, (when Obama assumed the Presidency) was already at 8.5% and skyrocketing.