It was less than four years ago - three years and 11 months to be exact - when these same threads were being created for the Democrats. After a disasterous first term presidency and a Republican congress that rubberstamped the will of the White House, the Democrats still couldn’t come out ahead with ANY sort of victory. We were all left scratching our heads both as to why the Democratic platform revolved around a “we’re not Bush” theme while answering no questions as to how they would govern and how they still managed to lose the election (as if the two weren’t linked together).
Thread after thread and article after article all titled, essentially, “what in the hell happened to the Democrats?”
But two years later, there they were, sweeping House and Senate. And this year it looks to be not only a greater majority in both House and Senate but also the White House.
So the threads begin even before the first vote’s been cast: what in the heck happened to the Republicans? With some “conventional wisdom,” pulled out of someone’s ass that it’s going to take at least until 2020 before they turn their boat around again.
Remember 2004. Remember 2006. If we have so little attention span as a nation, as a party, as a message board, it’s going to come back to bite us come 2010.
If the democrats truly have control of both houses of the legislature and the executive in 2009, they are going to self-destruct by 2010.
Actually they were the rantings of yahoos then and called that then. Trickle down economics never trickled down, and in fact wages and income has dropped consistently since 1981. Stockman correctly admitted that the trickle down stuff was a trojan horse back in the early 80s. Giving tax breaks to the rich with the lie that it helps the poor is untrue and evil. Foreign policy by Reagan and W consisted of being bellicose rather than diplomatic. It was just stupid. The Soviets gave up the ghost not because of the bellicosity, but because they were financially collapsing and finally realized that Reagan wasn’t serious about “bombing starts in 5 minutes” and could accept that collapse. Reagan’s bellicosity actually prolonged the Soviet Union’s life because they genuinely thought the US would attack them first. Once Gorbachev was able to realize that we weren’t and convince others, the Soviet Union was finished. The Soviet Union lasted out of fear that once again, one out of four people or more were in danger from foreign invaders. That is what motivated the Russians in Georgia recently, a fear of many citizens, family members dying.
The Reagan policies were lies and were morally bankrupt and evil. You can’t borrow and give money to the rich and spend like a drunken sailor and help poor people.Duh.
Assume that Obama is unable to work miracles. Some of his plans will not happen by 3 years from now. The economy is still lackluster.
The GOP repackages itself as the new change agent. Yes a social moderate with strong economic cred.
I find much of your post suspect. Can you sight that average wages decline in a real way under Reagan? Strictly under Reagan?
As to it prolonging the Soviet Union, you might want to back this opinion up in a completely new thread. It has little to do with this one and is only held by Reagan haters. Reagan and Papa Bush did a great job managing the end of the Soviet Union. The facts speak for themselves. It was the mismanagement by Clinton and Baby Bush that have led to our current hostilities with Russia.
As of this afternoon, McCain said he’s got the democrats “right where he wants 'em”. With a 10 point dem lead, I find this most amusing.
Maybe, but part of the Republican collapse has been coming for some time.
They had four years to enact what the fundies wanted, and what did the fundies get for all their effort over all those years? Changes in abortion law? Good old fashioned Christian Sharia law? Work toward tearing down that pesky separation of church and state?
Nope. They got Terry Schiavo.
But they kept the faith (it’s what they do after all), and when the 2008 Primaries roll around they get a choice between a True Believer, a Mormon, and a God Damned Liberal-In-Republican-Clothing! And no matter how hard they work for the True Believer the rest of the country sticks them with the womanizing divorced liberal?
The Republicans need the fundies - the fundies might have needed the GOP, or at least had a use for them, but what have they gotten out of it?
The fundies will ditch the GOP long before the GOP “jettisons” the fundies.
-Joe
I never said they were good ideas. The theories were created by real economists and published in real journals. Some of them were being published during the Carter administration, where it seemed as if Democratic economic policies were leading to stagflation. I was lucky enough to be in grad school during that period, but our side wasn’t doing a real good job.
That’s pretty simplistic. Reagan called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire, but he also offered reduction in nuclear weapons far beyond what anyone considered feasible. Bush Sr., in particular, was hardly bellicose. Consider the end of GW I, where he stopped fighting when the goals of the war were achieved. If anything, we can criticize him for not being bellicose enough, and protecting the Shia when they rebelled.
I spent a good bit of my youth hiding under school desks and considering the after the nuclear war scenario to be very plausible - not that I’d see it, living in New York. If you told me the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism would die without a shot being fired, I’d have told you you were nuts.
Yes, one of the biggest countries in the world, flush with oil wealth and angry about no longer being a major power is acting up, but let’s blame the current Bush for mishandling that. Nothing Reagan, Bush I or Clinton could have done would make things fine forever.
Reminds me of this snippet from Firesign’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers:
First, a quotation–
Second, they will learn NOTHING!
Not for* at least* 8 years. They are too married to the BS to learn quickly.
I would argue those threads involved a lot of pointless naval gazing, which over-interpreted the loss as a longer term Democratic policy and leadership deficit and tended to accept uncritically the GOP’s narrative of its own victory.
The difference is that talk of a GOP wilderness is grounded in the fact that the Republican brand really is in the toilet in ways the Democratic Party’s simply wasn’t in 2000 or 2004 with independents and even moderate Republicans. In fact, I think it is a testament to McCain’s profile as a war hero and sometimes critic of his own party that they have avoided a worse kind of meltdown as a party. GOP strategists certainly know this - which is why you actually see so much open criticism of the campaign and talk of Reagan ‘old’ coalition collapsing on their own side - something which is largely unthinkable on the conservative side during a normal election.
The people who think an establishment candidate like Romney would be doing better are simply wrong. He would be doing much, much worse.
Ultimately, the 2004 election was a squeaker which involved a sitting wartime president with all the advantages of incumbency. Now, I do believe it was still a winnable election - so it does certainly invites critiques of the Party- but despite all the second-guessing by punditry like Joe Klein, it was never a repudiation of the Democratic brand or some kind of larger wilderness. Indeed, the policy apparatus and positions on the Democratic side have largely remained constant, and we see Obama is not having any trouble selling his message. But then the Democratic problem has never been that they can’t win on the issues, it’s that they’ve lacked an effective spokesperson who was not compromised by things like a war vote or a lack of pith.
That year, Dean – the pro-gun, fiscal conservative and social liberal who was against the war would have done better, sans the scream. But the party picked on electability like they almost did for Hillary this year and suffered for it.
Personally I see no change in the Republican party whatsoever. There are many reasons for this, but the main one being that the Republicans exploit the fact that Americans can be whipped up into a frenzy based on fear. Voting is almost always based on fear. Notice how Obama didn’t really get much going until the fear kicked in. It was an economic fear this time. The Democrats play off of economic fear and the Republicans play off of social fears and fear of government. Assuming an Obama victory, and and a subsequent economic recovery, what’s going to stop Americans from yet again becoming complacent? I see very little.
The only way that the Democrats could possibly set up a long-term movement in their direction, would be to drastically change the perception of government for a large majority of Americans. I don’t know how we can do it, but it would take DRASTIC changes and progress for people to actually be grateful to the Democrats to vote in Obama’s successor. If Obama leaves us in a place like Clinton (definitely a good place, but not great) then the right will come along singing the same old tune to the same old people and will win again.
The Republicans are married to the Religious Right indefinitely. I don’t see how you put that cat back in the bag. They are active now and have many institutions. They aren’t going anywhere. The thing about them is that they are smart. They aren’t stupid enough to create their own party. They are in a much better position controlling the Republican party and then getting moderates on board once the market does better. One way to counteract this would be for the Democrats to take on the mantle of fiscal responsibility. I feel this is an interesting side-effect of the two party system. There is certainly a way to affect politics in the US without starting a third party. Just take a look at Barack Obama. He completely changed the Democratic Party. The Christian Right did the same to a large degree too.
Personally I don’t know if that dynamic will ever change. The Democrats do well when the economy goes down and the Republicans do well when people aren’t worried about the economy. Unless the Democrats can somehow change the consensus that we as Americans generally distrust government, then it probably won’t change. All they have to do is point out how much you pay in taxes, talk about how the government should get off your back and try to scare people on social issues. It will probably never change.
If I were Obama during my first term, I’d work on hammering this theme home. “Goverment is good.” That would be the foundation of a true paradigm shift.
- Get back to the kind of fiscal responsibility that got us a balanced budget back in 1994.
- (related) Get back to being the party of smaller government and less spending.
- STOP TORTURING PEOPLE!!!
- STOP WALKING ALL OVER THE CONSTITUTION!!!
- Stop trying to pass amendments banning gay marriage and flag burning.
- Insert into party platform - Congress is not to be used as a rubber stamp for the president.
That is not what Reagan claimed trickle down (piss on the working) would do, nor did I claim that. I did claim that over the long haul real wages went down and that trickle down doesn’t work and never did: that is, it doesn’t trickle down. It does, however, make the rich richer. This also depends greatly on what you mean by “real” way. The public averaged 7 cents a year more in wages under Reagan, gnp increases, despite inflation and productivity increases, and over 27 years we have lost, when the promise was long term future benefits. Working more hours and harder is not worth an average of 7 cents on the hour a year more. Workers should be paid for each additional hour on the hourly basis The rich simply don’t share. Duh, that’s how they got rich. Not sharing. My cite/site/sight Wages in America: The Rich Get Richer
And an article from 1988 lambasting the deficits: http://www.inc.com/magazine/19881001/5989.html
The only way that wages went up is if you credit Reagan with that 7 cents an hour raise, and make the workers work longer hours without getting paid for them, be more productive, devalue the dollar through inflation etc. These are real losses and poverty inducers.
You asked for average wages in a “real way”. That’s defining an issue the way you thought you could win it, but could not. Now, let’s talk about minimum wages, which many people work for and are a disaster:
Here is a site with a historical minimum wage graph. Doughroller - Banking, Borrowing, Personal Finance & Tools
The prolonged slide of the minimum wage below the poverty level began under Reagan where he and his buddies worked very hard to use inflation to fuck the very poorest workers the very most. That is why Reaganism and Reaganites are so relentlessly evil. Reaganism was bad for the average worker, but it was absolutely impoverishing for minimum wage workers. Trying to talk about averages while starving the poorest workers is just fucking evil!
Democrats have always tried to increase the minimum wage, and Republicans have blocked most of those efforts, using inflation to reduce the value of the minimum wage.
Here are the quotes from Dave Stockman, Reagan’s brain on budget issues:
Stockman’s power within the Reagan Administration waned after the Atlantic Monthly magazine published the famous 18,246 word article, “The Education of David Stockman”,[1] in its December 1981 issue, based on lengthy interviews Stockman gave to reporter William Greider. It led to Stockman being “taken to the woodshed by Reagan” as the White House’s PR team tried to deal with the article’s damage to Reagan’s perceived fiscal leadership skills. Stockman was quoted as referring to the Reagan Revolution’s legacy tax act as: “I mean, Kemp-Roth [Reagan’s 1981 tax cut] was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate… It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down.’ So the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.” Of the budget process in his first year on the job, Mr. Stockman is quoted as saying: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” which was used as the subtitle of the article.
…
Do you realize the greed that came to the forefront? The hogs were really feeding. The greed level, the level of opportunism, just got out of control. [The Administration’s] basic strategy was to match or exceed the Democrats, and we did.
It was all bullshit, all along, as admitted by the guy that did it.
I don’t see an avenue for the GOP to reinvent itself anytime soon. Like it or not, it’s the party of fundies and oligarchs. The oligarchs can buy up Blue Dog Democrats, but the fundies have nowhere else to go. As others have pointed out upthread, as Pubbies in moderate districts lose, the remaining GOP officeholders are increasingly going to be the raving loons.
I’m seriously thinking there could be a death spiral here - the crazier they get, the more they alienate sane conservatives, and the more middlin’ conservative seats they lose, which leaves a core GOP that’s even crazier than before. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Eventually the Dems split in two, into a Blue Dog/Liebercrat party and a forthrightly liberal party.
Your findings of “suspicion” are meaningless to me. I have never supported economic policies to destroy the minimum wage or social security through inflation without cost of living increases.
Reagan and Bush Sr. made none of the decisions to dismantle the Soviet Union. Reagan’s “tear down this wall” was only words that had nothing to do with it happening. Reagan had no power in the Soviet Union, the Soviets did. Only Americans who think that reality conforms to their opinions think that Reagan and Bush Sr. had more than a tangential role in the end of the Soviet Union. That they didn’t start a World War when it happened isn’t a credit to Reagan and Bush. You will find no major European prime minister or foreign secretary crediting the fall of the Soviet Union to Reagan. It’s American propaganda, pure and simple. There are other threads going that talk about the Russian (Soviet) effort to defeat the Germans in WWII that are similar: if you talk to almost any American, they will take credit for the German defeat in the form of D-Day. Good for D-Day, it was very helpful, but it was little compared to the Russian sacrifices and war effort. This is historical fact, yet Americans glorify D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge like the Russians did nothing. As glorious as D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge were, they were very small compared to the Russian efforts.
I just want to applaud IClaudius’ first post.
Perhaps a bit overly long-wordy, but well said all the same.
I read the post on your recommendation and thought it a bit enlightening. But it is wishful thinking to think that the Repubs are going to be doing those things. Those are things that liberals want the Repubs to do.
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There will be huge deficits and a huge increase to the debt if Obama wins (or if he doesn’t). Repositioning as a true party of fiscal conservatism (not spending money on foreign adventures, not creating vast new bureacracies like the Medicare drug benefit) would be a good way for them to put daylight between themselves and the Dems. For the moment, they’ve totally lost credibility on these issues thanks to idiot GWB.
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Coming up with an anti-inflationi plan – again, printing a trillion or more dollars for “bailouts” and “economic stimulus” is going to leave anyone with a serious, long-term inflationary hangover. This is a pocketbook issue.
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Embracing more, not less, populism (but not the fundie kind). Diverging notably from the WSJ editorial page would send a message to their many middle to lower middle class voters that on issues like immigration, or the bailout bill, their nominal leaders will stop ignoring overwhelming public sentiment and adopting pro-corporate/globalist policies.
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Making clear that American foreign policy will be based first and foremost on defending American sovereignty, and that other considerations will always be subordinate to this. This keeps you out of preventative wars in Iraq. It keeps you from being bamboozled by lobbyists and think tanks. It keeps you from signing up for proxy wars on behalf of others. And it keeps you out of the entangling alliances (100 years in Iraq, anyone?) about which Geo. Washington so presciently warned.
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Find some rising young leaders with a little more dynamism, independence, and intellectual firepower than what has been on offer the last few go rounds. Not an Obama clone (they will be tempted). Not another tired old retread or second-generation also-ran.