The disappearing Moderate

[BrightNShiny]

@Recovering_Republican

When I post on “Straight Dope” that maybe Obama can’t fix some of the problems, like today’s 9.2% unemployment rate, I get called racist and worse.

You realize that there’s a search function here and we can actually read what you posted, right?

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@BrightNShiny

You realize that there’s a search function here and we can actually read what you posted, right?

And what was posted in response, too.

[Cyberhwk]

The problem I have with this analysis is it’s reliance upon self-identification. I don’t care about how people describe themselves, I care about how they act. If these “Moderates” are leaving the Republican Party (or Democratic Party for that matter), it doesn’t mean a thing if their voting patterns remain the same. I mean, after 2 years of the Tea Party, one of the most conservative blocs we’ve seen in while, identifying themselves as “Independents,” I’d have hoped we’d have thrown out this useless measure by now.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

2010 returned quite a few moderate Republicans: Murkowski, Brown, Kirk, to join the ladies from Maine plus some in the governor’s chair.

[Recovering_Republican]

@Little_Nemo

I’m a moderate Republican. But when I look at my party arguing about birth certificates, holding Tea Party rallies, and offering up candidates like Bachmann, Palin, and Trump for the Presidency, I look to the Democrats for relative sanity and responsibility.

The Birth Certificate thing was largely a self-inflicted wound, since Obama fought tooth and nail against it until he finally revealed it. Kind of like Bush fighting tooth and nail against releasing the Aug 6, 2001 Daily Breifing Memo just fed the 9-11 truthers.

And I’m sorry, when is a 1.4 TRILLION dollar deficit “sanity”? Or 9.2% unemployment?

Like I said, things you never hear me say are calling him “Hussein” or a “Socialist” or saying he’s part of George Soros plot to destroy America. (I guess he’d better hurry up and do it before the Koch brothers do!) But he’s still a pretty awful president, and if you guys were being honest, you’d admit that.

Those folks at TEA Party rallies are your neighbors, and while I think a lot of their anger is misdirected, a lot of it is justified.

Yes, Bachmann (the only one who has actually declared) is pretty much on the fringe, but so was Howard Dean, whom the Democratic based flirted with before settling on Kerry.

[Recovering_Republican]

@BrightNShiny

You realize that there’s a search function here and we can actually read what you posted, right?

Yeah. And a few of you actually comprehend it. Not many, tho.

[Recovering_Republican]

@asterion

What will the pornography ban do to all those nerds thinking of Jeri Ryan?

You actually think she’s attractive?

[pseudotriton_ruber_ruber]

@Recovering_Republican

Yeah. And a few of you actually comprehend it. Not many, tho.

You might consider this as being reflective of your communication skills.

Well, one might. You won’t.

[asterion]

@Recovering_Republican

You actually think she’s attractive?

Well, more attractive than Alice Krige all waxy and bald in First Contact.

And I think you missed the joke entirely.

[Recovering_Republican]

@pseudotriton_ruber_ruber

You might consider this as being reflective of your communication skills.

Well, one might. You won’t.

Hey, my skills are perfect.

My function is to take self-righteous idealogues (right or left) and get in their faces by proving they’re full of it.

Mission accomplished.

[BrainGlutton]

[hijack]

You know, if we had proportional representation and instant-runoff voting in this country, there would be room for a Moderate Party.

What’s more, it would hold the balance of power, being able to vote/ally with the Commie Moonbat Party or the Neanderthal Wingnut Party depending on the bill/issue of the moment.

[/hijack]

[BrainGlutton]

@Recovering_Republican

You actually think she’s attractive?

Sir, you and I must meet upon the Field of Honour. Bring your sword. (I’ll bring my Uzi.)

[Little_Nemo]

@Recovering_Republican

The Birth Certificate thing was largely a self-inflicted wound, since Obama fought tooth and nail against it until he finally revealed it. Kind of like Bush fighting tooth and nail against releasing the Aug 6, 2001 Daily Breifing Memo just fed the 9-11 truthers.

And I’m sorry, when is a 1.4 TRILLION dollar deficit “sanity”? Or 9.2% unemployment?

Like I said, things you never hear me say are calling him “Hussein” or a “Socialist” or saying he’s part of George Soros plot to destroy America. (I guess he’d better hurry up and do it before the Koch brothers do!) But he’s still a pretty awful president, and if you guys were being honest, you’d admit that.

Those folks at TEA Party rallies are your neighbors, and while I think a lot of their anger is misdirected, a lot of it is justified.

Yes, Bachmann (the only one who has actually declared) is pretty much on the fringe, but so was Howard Dean, whom the Democratic based flirted with before settling on Kerry.

Personally, I’d rate Obama as mediocre. But in 2012, mediocre will probably be better than the alternative.

It’s not enough to just say we’re not personally crazy. We need to come out against deceit and stupidity. If we allows nuts like the Birthers, the Tea Party, and Michele Bachmann to run around inside the Republican party we deserve to lose and to keep losing until we clean up our own house.

[Recovering_Republican]

@BrainGlutton

[hijack]

You know, if we had proportional representation and instant-runoff voting in this country, there would be room for a Moderate Party.

What’s more, it would hold the balance of power, being able to vote/ally with the Commie Moonbat Party or the Neanderthal Wingnut Party depending on the bill/issue of the moment.

[/hijack]

Your taste in Trek women aside, you might be on to something here.

[Recovering_Republican]

@Little_Nemo

Personally, I’d rate Obama as mediocre. But in 2012, mediocre will probably be better than the alternative.

It’s not enough to just say we’re not personally crazy. We need to come out against deceit and stupidity. If we allows nuts like the Birthers, the Tea Party, and Michele Bachmann to run around inside the Republican party we deserve to lose and to keep losing until we clean up our own house.

Part of me, the whithering moderate who just gets tired of the abuse, kind of agrees.

But let’s be honest, when the GOP nominates Moderates, it’s not like the Democrats come out and say, “Wow, there’s a man of integrity we can get along with!”

Look at John McCain. For years, I had to listen to the pablum that if only more Republicans would be like John McCain, you might be able to stand having a drink with us.

And we nominated John McCain, and they dumped on the guy, who was probably wondering where all those folks who used to praise him when he tormented Bush went.

Or here in IL. Mark Kirk is a nice, sensible moderate. Furthermore, he was running against a machine crook who was under federal investigation. Should have been a no brainer. But nope, all the usual supsects came out for Alexi.

I would rate Obama as a lot worse than Mediocre. I’ve lived through five recessions, this is the worst of the lot, hands down.

As far as Bachmann, history shows that candiates who excite the base- Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Bush-43, do a lot better than the “Safe” guy who “seems” electable- Bachman is someone people can get passionate about. Romney… meh, not so much.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

Obama, and Bush did not ideologically radically differ from their main opponents and Clinton was far more moderate than his rivals.

[tomndebb]

@Recovering_Republican

My function is to take self-righteous idealogues (right or left) and get in their faces by proving they’re full of it.

Not in Great Debates, it is not.

If you feel the need to jerk other posters around for your own amusement, (however you wish to play CYA with your motives), take it to The BBQ Pit.

[ /Moderating ]

[BrainGlutton]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

Obama, and Bush did not ideologically radically differ from their main opponents and Clinton was far more moderate than his rivals.

On that note, here’s why the GOP should nominate Obama in 2012.

If Obama chose to run for reelection not as a Democrat but as a moderate Republican, he could bring about two healthy transformations in the American political system. The moderate wing of the Republican Party could be restored. And the Democratic presidential nomination might be opened up to politicians from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

In the last generation, the old-fashioned moderate Republicans from New England and the Midwest symbolized by Nelson Rockefeller have been driven out of the GOP by the conservative followers of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Streaming into the Democratic Party as voters, and buying it with ample Wall Street cash as donors, this upscale elite has changed the party from a populist liberal alliance of unionized workers and populists into a socially liberal, economically conservative version of the old country-club Republicanism of the pre-Reagan era. The transformation began under Jimmy Carter, accelerated under Bill Clinton and has nearly been completed under Barack Obama. This is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party. It is your grandfather’s Republican Party of 1955.

In his book “The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House,” Bob Woodward described a Clinton administration meeting in 1993: “Where are all the Democrats?” Clinton bellowed. “I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We’re all Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?”

The Obama administration is the third Clinton administration – or perhaps the fifth Eisenhower administration, following the four combined terms of Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton (by comparison to both, Richard Nixon, as president, was a New Deal liberal). Under the influence of Treasury secretary and master fundraiser Robert Rubin, the Mark Hanna of the modern Democratic Party, Clinton scrapped the “putting people first” agenda he had run on in 1992 and focused on rapidly balancing the budget – a longtime obsession of fiscal conservatives in the Eisenhower-Rockefeller tradition, rather than supply-siders in the Reagan-Kemp tradition. Similarly, Barack Obama supported a stimulus that was only a quarter as big as necessary – half of the $2 trillion that his advisor Christina Romer estimated was necessary, with about half of that wasted on ineffectual tax cuts. In spite of the prospect of years of mass unemployment, Barack Obama, in the spirit of the budget-balancing Rubinomics of the 1990s and Ike-onomics of the 1950s, has called for freezing discretionary spending except for defense. He has allowed the conversation to be shifted from recovery to long-term fiscal consolidation, which conservatives will try to use as an excuse to partly replace Social Security and Medicare with mandatory private accounts that will generate lucrative fees for Wall Street and the insurance industry from a huge captive population of American fee-payers.

If he were to run for the Republican nomination, Obama could point out that in the past few years he has already done far more to thwart American liberalism than any of his rivals in the GOP primary have done in their entire careers. He could boast that when liberal economists called for the temporary nationalization of insolvent megabanks, forcing shareholders to swallow their losses and firing their managers, he stood firm and protected Wall Street.

In the area of job creation, too, Obama can honestly tell Republican voters that he never supported massive public works job creation programs, like those of the New Deal. To the extent that the Obama administration has had any job creation policies at all, other than an inadequate stimulus and diversionary rhetoric about training today’s children for high-tech jobs in the 2030s or 2040s, it has consisted of payroll tax cuts – a supply-side measure that practitioners of voodoo economics like Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp would have supported.

[Little_Nemo]

@Recovering_Republican

Part of me, the whithering moderate who just gets tired of the abuse, kind of agrees.

But let’s be honest, when the GOP nominates Moderates, it’s not like the Democrats come out and say, “Wow, there’s a man of integrity we can get along with!”

Of course not. There are die hard Democrats who will never vote for a Republican. And there are die hard Republicans who will never vote for a Democrat. There’s no point in trying to reach out to these people.

But there are plenty of people in the middle like me who would be happy to vote for a Republican or a Democrat. But for some reason the Republican leadership has abandoned us in order to appease their conservative base. So the Democrats get our votes by default.

Admit the truth for a minute - the only genuine liberal who ran in 2008 was Dennis Kucinich. Obama, Clinton, Edwards, Biden, Richardson - these guys are about as liberal as Eisenhower. The Democrats, once again, ran to the middle.

Meanwhile, the Republican candidates all compete to see how far to the right they can get. McCain was considered a non-starter in Republican circles because he was only 90% conservative.

So what happened? The voters chose the least conservative Republican candidate in the primaries. And then chose the Democrat over him in the general election.

Where does the GOP get the idea that the voters want a conservative candidate in 2012? How many times do we have to lose the White House before you guys get it? Has anyone noticed that more people voted for the Democrat in four of the last five elections? The last time a Republican beat an incumbent Democrat was over thirty years ago. But you’re claiming it’s a sure thing.

So we’re heading down the same road again. The Republicans are once again acting like the key to winning the White House is to pick a candidate who is really really really really Conservative - in fact let’s make if five reallys just to be sure. So they get a nominee that 40% of the voters think is perfect. And then on Election Day, 60% of the voters pick the Democrat. And the Republicans scratch their head and wonder what went wrong. Our guy must not have been conservative enough - we’ll try seven reallys in 2016.

[DSeid]

@Little_Nemo

… The Democrats, once again, ran to the middle.

Meanwhile, the Republican candidates all compete to see how far to the right they can get. …

But long term this moves “the new middle” farther and farther Right. People tend to think that the right approach must always be between the two positions being represented. The Democratic position is usually last cycle’s middle and other side is farther and farther Right. Thus the new middle gets consistently shifted Rightward. Enough so that “the middle” is now “conservative” - smack dab between the Democrats mostly moderate positions and certainly moderate self labeling and the looney tune Far Right that gets all the press. Those of you who are the moderate conservatives who used to vote Republican might not get a GOP White House, but you do end up with someone who seriously respects and listens to your POV and is willing to compromise with them to very great degrees. Because they ran to the middle which is now conservative by default.

Now as a radical moderate (okay, slightly Left of current “center”) who reliably votes Democratic (except once, and that was against Blago … I went Green that year) I have no problem with having such a moderate in charge, but the shifting of the middle farther Rightward, and the diminishment of those who feel they are in the middle, is, I think, worrisome for the future of my moderate desires.