Well I’m glad you’re nice and comfortable.:rolleyes: Your scenario of what he would do is highly vague and dependent on the absurd notion of Obama becoming “king”, and then you admit he still doesn’t fit the dictionary definition of “socialist”.
But it’s reasonable for grown-ups to publicly declare the President to be a socialist despite what a highly potent political buzzword that is–being so closely associated with communism–and the clear implication that a slippery slope to full-blown socialism is just what he is launching.
Right. And you’ve never been let down by a politician before, right? Does that stop you from hoping for the best from the next guy? Or are you just completely cynical about it all? You’re above the fray, casting your jaundiced eye on all politicians and declaring them all liars?
Or does this only apply to Republicans?
Marco Rubio, who I mentioned before, is campaigning on entitlement reform and spending cuts. I believe he’s sincere about that. I also believe that if he were president, he’d have almost no chance of doing either.
I actually think entitlement reform could happen, because the energy on both the left and right is now being transferred to younger generations - the ones who are actually paying the tab for the current retirees and who won’t be getting much in the way of benefits themselves if reform doesn’t happen. They’re also far enough away from retirement that the impact of increasing the retirement age or requiring higher savings by seniors isn’t too burdensome. But I think that by the time any reform makes its way through the system, it will be pretty thoroughly co-opted.
I think Barack Obama was sincere in the promises he made before being elected. I think Reagan and Bush were sincere about it. I think Bill Clinton was sincere. They all wanted to make big changes. Reagan wanted to slash the size of government, and he wound up increasing it. He campaigned against Carter’s deficits, and wound up tripling them.
Or look at Schwarzenegger in California. He was absolutely sincere about cutting spending in California. Then he preceded to break his governorship on the rocks of the legislature and the massive special interests in California that benefit from the status quo - primarily, the public sector unions who are enriching themselves on the backs of the taxpayers. Arnie lost. He’s now a shill for every single liberal program in the state. A state which is rapidly going bankrupt because of those programs. He’s worse than Gray Davis was.
That’s what centralized government is like. It’s not your liberal ideal of enlightened thinkers intelligently steering the ship of state on scientific and moral principles. It’s a mob of plutocrats, lobbyists, and finance men (check out the revolving door between government and Goldman-Sachs). The entire system is co-opted by them. They turn regulations around and use them to their benefit at the expense of the public. They use regulatory agencies to restrict entry into markets and protect their profit margins. The military is heavily influenced by the large arms manufacturers that supply them. There are armies of protesters ready to march in the streets against any policy the special interests don’t like. And the public sector labor unions are very powerful and growing in power daily.
Did you notice that in Obama’s new health care plan the tax on the union health plans has quietly vanished?
It’s not that the politicians are corrupt - many of them are well-meaning people who are sincere in their beliefs - on both the right and left. The problem is that power corrupts, and the U.S. government is the more powerful force on the planet, and it has been thoroughly corrupted. The entire system. The inmates are running the asylum.
Well, I would hope that it stops me from trusting ideological fantasies as reliable predictors of probable outcomes.
There was no rational reason for even a diehard conservative to think (as opposed to merely hoping) that the grandiose neocon Bush 43 would ever turn out to be a fiscal conservative. Likewise, there’s no rational reason for even a diehard socialist to think that the centrist, business-friendly Obama with his Chicago School of Economics advisers is even remotely socialist in his personal economic views.
But rational reasons seem to have damn little to do with your mystical assessments of politicians’ “true selves”.
It would be a little less suspicious for Huckabee to make the “CPAC is not conservative enough” argument BEFORE he got a dismal share of the straw poll vote rather than after. As for Huckabee not being too happy with the Tea baggers, he talks admiringly of their grassroots organization and doesn’t hint at any disagreements with them.
Whether he said this because of his low CPAC straw poll results or whether he didn’t go because he didn’t like them, either way it’s not fair to say that Huckabee is a voice of this movement.
Sarah Palin was also a no-show, and did poorly in the straw poll.
Another example of the changing tide - some speaker started into a homophobic speech opposing gay marriage - and the crowd booed him off the stage.
The “tea baggers” may provide the best chance for the left to salvage itself.
Way too many liberal/progressives had expectations that were much too high for this administration…and their constant carping and grousing has been hurting Obama and the more progressive candidates almost to the death.
By these “tea baggers” are a (you will excuse the expression) a godsend…because anyone with a brain can see right through the kind of nonsense they spout.
If they manage to polarize the right the way the disgruntled liberal/progressives are polarizing the left…perhaps the walkover the right is expecting will be averted.
I hope so. I am not a liberal…nor in fact, a Democrat…but the last thing this nation or the world needs is more “leadership” from the American right.
Anyway, for you guys who are so sure this is just the same old conservative movement - 54% of the CPAC attendees were under 25 years of age. They were children when George Bush was elected. I doubt if they have much connection to the old Republican establishment at all.
And if you read the conservative blogosphere, you’ll see that there’s a lot of dissention in the ranks towards the Republican Party and also towards the big names trying to speak for it. Mark Levin just posted an editorial slamming Glenn Beck for being divisive. I find daily articles written by tea party activists slamming the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Michael Steele, etc. The Tea Partiers are well aware that Republicans are trying to glom on to their movement and control it, and they don’t like that one bit. One of the big knocks on Sarah Palin’s appearance at the Tea Party Convention was that it made her look like she was a ‘leader’ of the Tea Party movement, so a bunch of local representatives wrote editorials against the notion that the Tea Party had any leaders at all. They want it to be a grass-roots movement that stays separate from any political party, even if their natural affinity is towards Republicans.
No, because in one breath you slam a poll done as cherry picking and in the next breath you tout a poll of a self-selected, narrow spectrum of the conservative political populace as a meaningful guide to the conservative political mindset.
Not sure why you think you get to have it both ways.
Being Speaker of the Florida House is not an achievement. It’s nearly as dysfunctional as the New York legislature.
They might as well have called him “the one who reads and writes good”.
Anyway, Rubio is going to beat Crist because everyone thinks Crist is gay - not on the issues. Hardly a ringing endorsement of your suggestion that gay marriage is not an issue.
So the ignorami who make up the GOP-activist-conference-going-type demographic are getting younger. That’s not true of GOP voters as a whole :
Fifty years ago, one could have written, as Nile Gardiner does today, that “conservatism is the future” with some reason for believing the claim to be true, and in the decades that followed there was a significant conservative political coalition that seemed to be growing in strength over time. Today it is increasingly difficult to believe anything of the kind. Pew released a survey on Thursday showing that Millennials have soured a bit on Democrats in the last year. Despite this, they remain the one age group with 50%+ Democratic party ID and the one age group in which 50%+ say they will vote Democratic this fall. The percentage of self-identifying conservatives among Millennials is basically equal with that of self-identifying liberals (28% vs. 29%). The youngest generation of voters is unusually ill-disposed towards movement conservatism of the sort on display at CPAC, which is the event Gardiner hails not only as proof that conservatism is the future but as an “intellectually vibrant” gathering.
Gardiner can believe what he wants, but the evidence we have available right now suggests that conservatism is losing, indeed has already lost, most of the next generation, and that conservatism as we know it today is going to keep losing ground in the future. It is possible that something could happen in the next few years that could change that significantly, but typically once a cohort attaches itself to one party or the other its later voting habits become fairly predictable. The generation that came of age during the Bush years and overwhelmingly backed Obama is not going to become receptive to movement conservatism.
On average, Millennials’ underlying social and political views put them well to the left of their elders. If you dig into the full report, you will see that the recent Republican resurgence owes almost everything to the dramatic shift among members of the so-called “Silent Generation,” whose voting preferences on the generic ballot have gone from being 49-41 Democrat in 2006 to 48-39 Republican for 2010. There have been small shifts in other age groups toward the Republicans, but by far it is the alienation of voters aged 65-82 that has been most damaging to the Democrats’ political strength*. As we all know, these are the voters who are far more likely to turn out than Millennials, which is why Democratic prospects for this election seem as bad as they do even though the Pew survey says that Democrats lead on the generic ballot in every other age group. Among Boomers, Democrats lead 46-42, and among Gen Xers they barely lead 45-44. In other words, the main reason why the GOP is enjoying any sort of political recovery is that many elderly voters have changed their partisan preferences since the last midterm. Republicans remain behind among all voters younger than 65. That does not seem to herald the future revival of movement conservatism of the sort Gardiner is so embarrassingly praising.
It is mainly among these voters that the conventional wisdom is half right that that the push for health care legislation has proved to be very damaging to the Democrats. Of course, this is not because of some instinctive horror at excessive spending, which does not exist on a large scale in any age group, but because health care legislation is seen as a threat to the entitlement spending from which voters from this age group benefit. As a matter of pure electoral politics, the GOP’s transformation into the defenders of the sanctity of Medicare has been completely in line with the interests of the elderly voters who have come running back to the GOP in the last year. Of course, this is exactly not the profile of a party and movement of the future, but one attempting to preserve the status quo for the benefit of the oldest among us at the expense of our future. http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/02/losing-the-future/
Basically the GOP can only win future elections* by doubling down on the old white racist demographic, bashing gays, immigrants etc. And the one thing you can say about the CPAC/Teabaggers? All anti-immigrant. So how will that play out in future elections? :
Republican strategists talk with increasing urgency about wooing Hispanics, who are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population and who vote mostly Democratic.
“If you don’t go out and bring more Hispanics to our party, the math isn’t there to win, no matter what the other side does,” said Bonilla, who has argued the case in one-on-one meetings with Republican leaders in Congress. “If they’re too blind to recognize that, it’s their own selves doing them in.”
Bonilla should know. He lost in 2006 to another Hispanic candidate, a Democrat.
The Hispanic population is expected to increase by nearly 200 percent by 2050, with non-Hispanic whites accounting for about half the U.S. population, down from 69.4 percent in 2000. From 1988 to 2008, the number of eligible Hispanic voters rose 21 percent – from 16.1 million to 19.5 million.
“The numbers don’t lie,” said Whit Ayres, a GOP consultant. “If Republicans don’t do better among Hispanics, we’re not going to be talking about how to get Florida back in the Republican column, we’re going to be talking about how not to lose Texas.”…
The clock, Gillespie said, is ticking. He said Bush received 54 percent of the non-Hispanic white vote in 2000 and finished in a dead heat with Al Gore. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) got 55 percent of that vote in 2008 and lost the election by seven percentage points. “If the current voting percentages among white, black, Asian and Hispanic stay the same,” Gillespie said, “the Republican nominee will lose by 14 points in 2020. We have to be more competitive.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/19/AR2010021902615_pf.html
For generations the GOP won easy votes railing against immigration. Their wonderful new generation and new grassroots movement are as uniformly white and anti-immigrant as you can get. The generations of demonising immigrants for political gain is now going to bite them endlessly in the bottom.
*There’s a good chance the economy staggers along with more bailouts, more periods of recession, continued high unemployment etc. This may gift the GOP the occasional future election but the long term situation for them is not very good when you consider the above two articles, is it?
The claim was not that they are “better” selling books. The claim was that they are best-sellers. I want Sam to tell me the metric he used to make that claim.
You need to read more carefully. I very specifically said that the poll was only representative of the people at CPAC, and also very clearly said that they are not representative of the Republicans as a whole.
Man, I’m getting tired of this reflexive ankle-biting.
I’d say hitting #1 on the Amazon fiction and literature list qualifies it as a best seller, wouldn’t you? Or hitting #16 out of all books sold on Amazon?
Sorry Hentor - your ‘gotcha’ tactics missed again.
Nobody’s voted for either yet- and I highly doubt that anyone as divisive as Rubio can actually win an election, rather than a poll- but Crist was unpopular with the hard right even when he was a conservative.