The GOP isn't half the country now, don't act like they are

Great Debates
21

I’ll tell you what’s been bugging me.

These days, I try to watch This Week with George Stephanopoulos every week.

And every week, there are the two Georges, Stephanopoulos & Will, with a rotating round table. Will used to write for Reagan, & takes a certain conservative position; Stephanopoulos inherited him from David Brinkley; fine. Stephanopoulos is a Democrat, but he’s the host; he doesn’t try to take a partisan position at all. Some weeks they have Paul Krugman, some weeks Donna Brazile. Some weeks Sam Donaldson & Cokie Roberts come back & somehow they’re expected to hold up the left side. Cokie’s neither ideological nor wonkish; Sam’s pretty much a general cynic. So that’s fun. :rolleyes: Some weeks non-George parts of the roundtable can be weighted 2 to 1 rightie, favoring various flavors of Wall Street Journal-type economic conservatives. And it’s a bit much. So I’ll be rooting for Krugman or the cute sad-eyed lady from the peacenik left whose name slips my mind at the moment. So much for the roundtable.

The interviews often will be with a Democrat & a Republican, because that’s how it traditionally works. So Stephanopoulos will interview HHS Secretary Sebelius, then Mitt Romney will come on & give his counterspiel.

Now, that’s one show. But it’s one show where the host used to work for a big man in the DLC & Democratic President! So why not pull things back leftward a little bit?

I haven’t watched Meet the Press since David Gregory took over, so I don’t know how it’s being run. And I don’t really have any great complaints about Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation.

Sometimes it seems like tv shows are giving equal time to two groups understood as, “all those Democrats, including the administration,” &, “Republicans.” Well, the Republicans went corrupt & lost people. So why are we treating them like equals?

And then there’s this show I want to like, with a respectable history. When I was a kid, I used to watch This Week with David Brinkley. And it seems like they favor the righties & the out of power now. And I think, really? Why not show how large & diverse the Democratic Party is?

Now, I’ve moved leftward economically over the years, I know. But the “50/50 politics” conceit of the news media is wearing thin for me in a post-W, post-Abramoff age.

When I was a kid, I used to watch Firing Line with Wm. F. Buckley, & he’d do the debate specials between left & right, you know? Maybe it was a false conceit then too. But they were real debates, & . . . yeah, I miss that too.

I don’t know, maybe I’ll just give up & get my commentary from comedians like everyone else…

22

On the rare occasions when the far-far, Pacifica Radio left get onto mainstream media panel shows, they generally mess it up grievously. I imagine many regard media-savvyness as a kind of selling out, and might actually prefer coming off dowdy and strident.

23

I watch This Week as well, and I don’t really know what you’re talking about. Cokie is a left-moderate. So is Sam. But they’re not on that often, and there’s an excellent range of liberal commentators on that show. In the recent past, the panel has included Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Donna Brazile, Arianna Huffington, and Katrina Van den Heuval of The Nation.

If anything, it’s often George Will alone against someone from the far left, a mainstream liberal, and then a left-moderate. The host of the show itself comes from a Democratic administration.

I actually think the This Week roundtable is one of the best of the many similar political round tables on TV. I think George Stephanopoulis goes out of his way to be very fair to both sides, and I think they get a very good mix of panelists from both the left and right. If it skews one way or another on any given week it probably has more to do with the availability of the panelists, last minute cancellations, and the substitution of regular ‘go-to’ people when this happens.

24

Any election is part the two parties’ philosophies pitted against each other, and then the two men themselves. This election was unusual in that it was mostly about neither. It was about Bush, and Iraq. The Republican Party didn’t get beat, Conservatism didn’t get beat, Bush got beat. The Democrats did a great job of framing the election as such, and they won. They also had an attractive, refreshing candidate. But it would serve them well to understand what actually got defeated. And it will serve Conservatives well in the next elections if they don’t.

25

Conservative doesn’t mean conservative, liberal doesn’t mean liberal, most Americans think they’re middle class when they’re not, because that definition has also been hijacked into incomprehensibility just like liberal and conservative. Plus, most people are stupid and are completely contradictory in what they call themselves, what they believe and how they vote. If something relies upon self-identification, it is likely balderdash. People make stupid decisions everyday, like which side to throw rocks from.

26

Don’t remember that either.

Well, that’s what happens to Presidents.

You seem to be saying that the success of Obama’s administration will determine his political fortunes. Well… yeah. When has it ever been otherwise?

27

Chuck Todd of NBC has a nice little book out called HOW BARACK OBAM WON. It is jammed pack with stats and analysis and gives you a state by state breakdown.The most amazing statistic among hundreds in its 260 pages is this one

Democrats have carried 18 states plus D.C. in five straight presidential elections totaling 248 electoral votes, just 22 short of 270 to win. Republicans have carried just 13 states in five straight elections totaling a mere 95 electoral votes. If you include states where Democrats have won in four out of the last five elections the Dem floor rises to 264.

How does the Republican Party deal with that undeniable trend?

28

So even if you assume people are capable of correctly self-identifying their political ideology, which they aren’t, you’ve put forth a bunch of statistics proving that right now many many conservative Americans would rather be Democrats or independents than Republicans. Sounds to me like a really compelling argument… in support of **foolsguinea **.

29

If Obama’s policies work, the repubs will be on the outside for a long time. The repubs have been bitching about medical coverage bankrupting the country for decades. They did nothing to fix it because the lobbyists and corporations getting wealthy off it, would not allow them to. Now the dems are actually doing something about it.
Most people believe the environment is rapidly getting worse. The dems are acting on it.
What do the repubs bring but policies that allow the rich and powerful to loot at will?

30

Next time you cherry-pick some statistics to back your partisan rant, you might want to check the trend line first. 37% is only 3 points shy of the high mark on that poll over the last four years. If you had any sense of reality or context, you’d realize that the fact that it is as high as 37% despite all that’s going on in the world is a sign of Obama’s popularity.

31

Am I the only one who sees the hilarity in lefties saying “Yeah, we won!” and 'pubbies saying “No you haven’t!”? I mean, sure, tribal loyalties and all, but I guess all attempts at impartiality are out the window.

32

Quoth foolsguinea:

I, for one, expect to see bias in the media. Nay, I hope for it. It’s the media’s job to be biased, against whomever is currently in power. Since the Democrats are unquestionably in power right now, that means that I can’t help but see a Republican bias as a good thing, and Fox News is now, despite any effort on their part, finally doing their job.

33

If bias means choosing critical stories over supportive ones and construing assumptions against the administration, then I’m all for anti-power bias. But I’m afraid the Fox News brand of bias is more along the lines of running stories that make their audience happy but have no political relevance or attachment to reality (e.g. most of Glenn Beck’s show) and using misleading or false information to stir up opposition.

34

Using slanted, misleading and false information to hack on the Dems, is Fox’s job. They do that well. They feed repubs what they want to hear, like it is important or true. Mostly it is neither.

35

Well, typing all that out helped me get some perspective. I sound like I’m whining about not very much, & I’m definitely coming from a biased position.

That said: I do think there are three dominant philosophies in the country right now. What passes for the left, what passes for the right, & the actual dominant Washington conventional wisdom, which is compromise. And sometimes I feel like I’m looking at an argument between the right & compromise. With victories like this, who needs defeats?

36

And during the Bush years, the media did whatever it had to for access.

37

Speaking for myself, that’s not what I said.

What I said was that you shouldn’t mistake having the Democrats win an election for a mandate to rule from the far left. Just as the Republicans controlling all three branches of government in 2000 did not give them license to govern from the far right.

The trends are certainly in the Democrat’s favor - young voters are more liberal, and growing in power. As the nation becomes more urbanized, it generally becomes more liberal. But in the end, as of today the U.S. is still a center-right country. The OP could just as easily have been written as, “Even though you won, be careful, because only one American in five identifies as a liberal.”

Elections are won in the center. The center in the U.S. is growing in size and importance. BOTH parties are actually shrinking, and ‘independent voters’ are the fastest growing voting bloc. Whoever gets them, wins. Right now, the advantage Obama had with independents is gone - they are back to swinging 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats.

For example, in this Gallup poll from last week, 85% of Democrats have confidence that Obama can fix health care, and 70% trust the Democrats in Congress. But among independents, that number drops to 53% and 36%, respectively. Republicans are blown right out (it’s funny that only 65% of Republicans have confidence in the Republicans in Congress, which tells you how damaged that party’s reputation is). Nonetheless, these polling numbers do not translate into the kind of national mandate for health care reform that Democrats claim they have.

This Pew Report shows that there is even less support for fundamental health care reform among non-Democrats today than there was in 1993, when ‘HillaryCare’ completely collapsed. And only 38% of independents think the health care system needs to be rebuilt - down 17% from 1993. If anything, the nation has become more conservative about health care reform in the past 16 years. Probably because the population has aged, and because more people today are covered by work-related health care plans that they actually think are quite good.

There is still support for universal coverage by 74% of independents, which is good news for Democrats, but even that support is down 15% from 1993.

Ini almost every measure, the gap between where Democrats are on health care and where independents are is growing. You’re moving away from them, or they are moving away from you. Health care is therefore something the Democrats need to be very careful about, or they could lose the center again.
If you want to win elections, you don’t ask,“What does our liberal base want?” You ask, “How can we keep the huge bubble of non-aligned centrists?” Among that group, there is great skepticism about big government. You can see it in all the polls. The auto bailout is wildly unpopular. The stimulus plan is opposed by independent voters by a big margin. Even health care reform is iffy.

Republicans lost the center, and the election, because they tried playing to their base, and because they got lazy, sloppy, and corrupt. Democrats appear to be ready to do the same thing.

38

Never mind. Tilting at windmills.

39

The reason so few Americans openly self-identify as liberal is because conservatives have co-opted the discussion and made liberal a dirty word. There has been a clear (though not necessarily coordinated) campaign on the part of Limbaugh and his ilk to turn liberal into a virtual expletive.

This is not to say that liberals haven’t tried to do the same thing with conservative and related words, but they’re not very good at it; when it comes to sticking to talking points, the Republican Party and conservatives in general will continue to win the battle, because they always have. See “flip-flopper”, “abortionist”, “President Malaise”, “un-American”, “Godless”, etc., or most recently “socialism”.

40

Polling numbers aside, you mustn’t assume everyone has the same opinion with regard to what constitutes a “mandate.” IMHO, one gets a full mandate unrestricted by anything but the law by virtue of winning an election. The poll that mattered, with regards to Barack Obama, was held last November.

Note that I said the same thing when Bush won the Presidency by much slimmer margins, and have always held the same after Canadian elections. You get a mandate by winning, and the opposition has no right for their opinions to be regarded by the government.

It’s strange that neither Presidential candidate campaigned on a policy of “no bailouts.”