Progressivism, that fond rebranding of liberalism, has gasped its last breath. With last night’s stunning victories of GOP candidates at the House and Senate levels, to say nothing about the takeover of the nation’s statehouses, we can clearly see that the once-beloved donkey is set for a quick and pointless trip to the vet’s needle.
Ha! Ha! I slay myself.
Of course, we heard similar sentiments when Obama swept into office directed at the Republicans. And those were as nutty as the paragraph above. The Democrats retain the White House, the Senate, and more importantly a bunch of ideas that still resonate well with the public. (Unfortunate, but blindly denying the obvious doesn’t help).
I think Rubio said it best: this election is NOT an embrace of the Republican party. At best, it’s a second chance for the Republican Party to do what they claimed to favor all along: limited government. Note to GOP: “limited government” does not mean “spending money like a drunken sailor on payday, but it’s okay because we’re spending on the military.”
Democrats: chin up. You guys have two years to fix your strategy and give it another go. This is just a midterm… 2012 is the prize.
Agreed. “Permanent XXXX Majority” just doesn’t exist in a world of changing circumstances and ideas.
In the end what is important is people of competence in positions of power, and I’m somewhat relieved that most of the victors (at least in the Senate - it’s harder for me to know the House winners outside of my state) are of the mature, competent variety (Rubio, Portman, Blunt) and not the ideological types of unknown competence (O’Donnell, Angle, Miller - maybe).
As I said in the results thread (somewhere between being overly optimistic about PA and IL and scared shitless about my home district MO-3), interesting times ahead politically.
I can’t stand listening to the pundits this morning pontificating on how these results will carry over to 2012.
Just a sentence after they say, “How could anyone have seen this coming after the results in 2008?”
There’s a very basic logical fallacy here. Prior performance does not guarantee future results, and all that. Recent administrations have tended to do very well in their re-election campaigns after disastrous midterms … 2012 is both a long time away and right around the corner.
Excellent OP. I too recall the “ding dong, the Republicans are dead!” posts (and the responses from those with a longer view of history about the application of GAAP to prenatal poultry). This is no more a harbinger of Democratic doom than 2008 was for the Republicans. It’s just the way politics operate in America.
I was also surprised and pleased by Rubio’s comment, given the recent trend in stifling any intelligent comments from GOP candidates. Let us hope his fellow party members also learn from history.
I am happy with the results, and happy that my state threw a seat in the Senate to the Pubs.
What I hope is that Dem leaders wake up and realize that the no one has a mandate, that lots of people disagree or want different things than they do, and they work toward the middle in hopes of finding a solution that most people can agree on.
The worst, most frightening part of Pelosi’s madhouse was the attitude of “We’re in charge here - we don’t need to debate, and we don’t care if 50% of Americans disagree - we’re going to ram this through at any cost”
I understand that Dems have strong feelings about issues close to their heart, but so do Pubs - they’re just different feelings. In order to make America the most just, we need to listen, respect and debate all of the positions before deciding on what and how to legislate.
Oh, how I laughed. Most of the left-wing dream of the day the Democrats stop “listening, respecting and debating” the other side and start ramming through the legislation they campaigned on.
Yes, I agree with this. I think that the Dems actually shot themselves in the foot on this one. If they had just rammed what they wanted through, I think they probably would have done better.
What exactly DOES “limited government” mean, other than abdicating social responsibilities and letting corporations operate lawlessly? Limited government is what caused the recession in the first place, not to mention the oil spill in the gulf.
But you understand that for people on the right, the appearance was that HCR and the like were rammed through. It’s not so much whether the bill passed, it’s whether the bill was debated.
The HCR bill was something the republicans would have patted themselves in the back for the next hundred years if it had been put forward by a republican congress and signed into law by a republican president, what is the point of honest debate when one side simply wants the other to fail with absolutely no regard for the good of the country? What things look like to the other side is something the Dems have no control over because their point of view is in no way shape or form based on reality.
I suspect the opposite is true. This wave of Republican wins was solely based on them immediately fixing everything wrong with the economy. If there is not a dramatic gain in the economy before 2012 the Repubs are going to get cock punched for it. They are not going to be able to keep the Tea Party anger going for two more years after being handed a historic win like they were without it coming back to burn them. in 2012, they will be in the same situation that the Dems were yesterday, where no amount of gains will have been enough.
From an outsider, it looks to me like the Dems want to try and play nice, in my view actually doing the real work of politics which is about diplomacy, negotiation and consensus. The Pubs from the off (and especially through the Tea Party movement) have just attacked the personalities of those in charge, taking every step of negotiation as a sign of weakness and every decision as an example of the bullish socialist wrecking of the country.
With such different approaches and with the media loving the continuous conflicts that causes, it’s really no surprise that the Dems lose seats every time.
Meh, who knows? The swing voters are so fickle in thinking that things should improve overnight every time they cast a vote they could just as easily say “Dammit pubs, we gave you the House in 10’ and the economy still sucks. time to give it back to the Dems.”
At the risk of continuing the hijack, the co-ordinated right-wing narrative was that HCR was “rammed down our throats” - I can’t tell you how many times I have heard that exact phrasing used, which is often an indicator of manufactured outrage rather than spontaneously-generated objections (see also: “wanting/taking our country back”).
As for the extent to which the bill was actually debated and Republican amendments considered, i’m sure there are a few dozen threads here on the subject I don’t want to rehash.
When the HCR “debate” began, I was looking at all of the ideas - and there were not any other ideas, not really. Where was debate on universal catastrophic coverage only? How about debate over the link between employment and insurance? Anything about the very real issues with Medicare/caid funding and qualifications?
No, not really. It was just a giant pissing match, with the Dems versus the Pubs and no intelligent debate in sight. Both sides totally had their head up their ass on this one, and we ended up with a shitty solution that pleases no one, doesn’t really solve any problems, and is a weird hybrid of mostly useless bullshit.
The Pubs screwed up by shrieking like idiots, then the Dems responded by shrieking back, and we all lose.
I’m really happy about the split that came into place yesterday, and I’m hoping it will stop that kind of bullshit.
Yes, I know it’s quite fashionable to paint the Dems as the party of limp-wristed weakness, but in reality it could have been a literal donkey vs. a literal elephant and people would have voted for whoever isn’t the incumbent.
Bad economic times equals swings in power in the US. If the GOP can’t live up to their promises (and they won’t – I can’t see them getting health care reform repealed without the Senate) then we’ll be right back to 2012 with likely a slim Dem majority.
I can’t wait to see what these Republicans are actually gonna cut from the budget now that they’ve sworn not to raise taxes, and to reduce the deficit. Medicare? Social Security? Defense? You can cut all the “pork” and “waste” you can, but if you want to pay for (for example) extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, you’re going to have to dig deeper than that and there’s not a lot of low-hanging fruit.