Until they become white.
No, he means honest to god Latins. Romans. The candidate with the Latin name, Santorum*, sneers at people who go to college which is where you get to learn fancy-ass Latin.
Evidently he loses the Latinist vote.
Accusative of santorus, second declension, the frothy mixture of…
Or perhaps better, Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People, which I imagine is far more inclusive and exhaustive.
JFK was definitely more liberal than LBJ. LBJ only passed the Civil Rights Act to distract the nation from the travesty he (LBJ) started in Vietnam.
Plus, it was JFK who proposed a Civil Rights Act - not LBJ. The Civil Rights Act passed through Congress on greased skids thanks to JFK’s assassination.
Well, duh. You don’t really think Dobson, Huckabee, etc. give a crap about the religious freedom of anyone else, do you? Maybe Judaism but only as it fits in with their end of days scenarios. They could care less about Muslims, Hindus or anyone else having freedom of religion. And Catholics aren’t really what they consider Christian either.
JFTR, the best evidence indicates that Carter and his team DID negotiate the release of the hostages months before election day, and (according to the man himself) Carter was puzzled and frustrated by the delay of their release (which arguably DID cost him the election).
The (very well-documented, all-but proven) theory that the Reagan campaign, in conjunction with the CIA (who prefered VP and former CIA director Bush to his running mate, according to insider accounts of the time) conducted their OWN secret negotiations (and arms deal) with the Iranian terrorists to KEEP the hostages in captivity until after the election is known as " the October Surprise".
The fact that the hostages were released on Reagan’s innauguration day was, in light of this “theory”, hardly a coincidence. These same guys had no qualms, later, about making MORE secret, illegal arms deals with the Iranians and importing illegal drugs to fund an illegal war (Iran-Contra). Just for the record, lest we forget.
As regards the original topic, the GOP has, SINCE Reagan, pandered to and exploited the “Religious Right” (which they arguably CREATED with the largest mass mailing ever to date targeting Christians with the message that Reagan was the “Christian candidate”…I happened to be in a Baptist school at the time and witnessed the process first-hand) and NOW, the monster is coming back to bite them. Hard.
The GOP establishment finds itself desperately fighting off the “train wreck” (and I quote) of an extremist, far-right, and/or religious nominee. Just enough of their base has moved SO far to the religious and radical right that they threaten to ensure an unelectable nominee and/or defect in droves if a “moderate” with ANY chance of besting Obama (Romney) is the nominee.
Costing them the election either way.
I’m an Independent for Obama, but I personally know several Republicans and right-leaning Indies who are VERY concerned about this SPLIT in the party and a few who have expressed their intent to sit the election out OR vote for Obama, given the piss-poor options on “their side” this time around. Most are not enthused about Romney, but MIGHT vote for him anyway. They will NOT vote for a Gingrich or a Santorum. Any more than they would vote for a Palin.
They are the mainstream moderate base of the Republican party and the Right-wing (the majority) and are aghast at the extremism, ignorance, and/or pandering to religious sentiments going on currently.(e.g. debating BIRTH CONTROL, Obama’s birth certificate, and SATAN taking over U.S. institutions instead of the ECONOMY and JOBS and other serious secular matters).
It’s my conclusion that such social/religious issues are taking the forefront because the right simply can’t BEAT Obama on the economy or foreign policy (not running on the SAME platform of policies that drove the nation off a cliff). ;)
They disagree with me on that (of course; else they wouldn’t BE Republicans/right-leaning) but they agree that the GOP HAS shifted so far to the right and so far into the lunatic fringe that it no longer represents them.
For whatever it’s worth…the view from here.
So LBJ was a time traveler? Cool. I did not know that.
I’m sure that pollsters have a handle on the number of voters that believe as you do. I would suggest, and I don’t have a cite, that for every voter like you that a socially liberal Republican GOP candidate would pick up, he would lose 10 big money donors and never get the nomination to begin with.
I just don’t see the numbers being there. Let’s take the last three losing GOP campaigns: McCain, Dole, and Bush I. Does anyone think that the results in those contests would have flipped if any of these candidates would have been liberal on social issues? I think absolutely not.
Likewise, voters would be unlikely to switch from the Democrat to the Republican, if only they had been more conservative.
Agreed, but that is not what the OP is saying and it isn’t a point that any poster here is making.
The hypothesis is that the GOP is in trouble because they keep putting up these right wing wackos that turn off the regular voter and this causes them to lose elections that they might otherwise have a shot at if they just weren’t so damn extreme.
These “extreme” positions that posters here hate are not positions that turn off the independents who decide elections. Likewise, the opposite is not true and these same voters aren’t demanding more conservatism. My point is that it is not a death knell.
Though everyone here talks about positions and issues, that’s not really the way the process works. It’s more like everything about a candidate is thrown into a blender and the final drink is tasted and given a judgement of acceptable or not.
That’s where extremist positions take their tolls. They give a candidate a flavor of “scary.” Most voters probably couldn’t make a connection between Santorum’s calling Obama a snob for promoting college and a specific policy that he would advocate. It’s not even clear how you would rank such a statement on a liberal/conservative scale. But clearly the statement sours his taste.
The effect of this matters far more in close elections. None of the three elections you mention were particularly close. The two elections that Bush II won were far closer. It’s notable that in the 2000 election, Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative,” i.e. a comparative centrist who abjured extreme positions. And the 2004 election was notable for making Kerry into a scary figure. Those are the elections you should be focusing on, because those were the ones in which an extremist Republican could easily have lost.
And it seems certain that the reason why Romney, a candidate that excites almost no one and is rejected by a huge percentage of the base, is going to win is that even within the Republican party he is clearly preferable to the half-dozen scarier crazies that have tried to become the alternative. Extremism does turn off voters, both within party lines and within the unaligned group not settled inside a party. It’s normally not a huge issue in a presidential election because extremists are never allowed to get that far.
Despite that, the trend over the past few elections is to try to tag the other side as the scarier of the two and the scare factor is outside any specific issues. Obama is pictured as scary because of who he is more than what he does. Even if this doesn’t succeed in defeating him, it makes it far more difficult for him to govern. It’s a bad trend, and it’s bad that actual legitimate candidates are furthering it.
Huh? I don’t actually agree with IceQube’s statement, but I don’t see the time-travel involved in it. What am I missing?
LBJ didn’t start the travesty in Vietnam. He merely escalated it.
It’s a simple matter of chronology. Johnson started advocating for the Civil Rights Act as soon as he took office in November 1963. It passed, after much Senatorial stalling, in July 1964.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was the excuse for the major escalation of the Vietnamese war, took place in August 1964. The escalation itself started in 1965.
The first couldn’t have been a distraction for the second unless Johnson was a time-traveler.
If you want to use the word “travesty” better to say that the notion that Johnson’s stand for Civil Rights was a sham to cover up Vietnam is a travesty. It was a major and courageous move that not only cost Johnson much of his good will and political capital after Kennedy’s death but, as he rightly saw, gave the South to the Republican Party for 25 years (now stretching into 50).
Johnson didn’t ignore Vietnam from 11/63 to 8/64 and conspiracists can look back at every decision and move as evidence of a larger motive. I don’t buy it. Johnson did tremendous things his first year in office. No president in history did good over furious opposition just to enact a hidden agenda. You can’t play chess with the American people. Life is too complex for that. It’s tough enough to get anything at all done.
If Johnson had died in July 1964 he would be up with Lincoln. He destroyed his reputation with the escalation in Vietnam. There’s no way to excuse that, even though it’s impossible to think that anybody else in office in those years would have acted differently. Nixon had three years of experience to draw on and still continued it. We’ll never know about Kennedy, but I doubt he could have resisted the almost unanimous push of all the top advisers and generals who advocated greater involvement.
The Civil Rights Act is the great accomplishment of government in my lifetime. Don’t push your conspiracy theories at its expense.
Sacrificing political power in the name of justice. What a concept.
And the droll irony of history is our American myth credits JFK with an aggressive pursuit of racial equality that is only modestly in evidence. While LBJ is seen as bringing forth a received agenda, implementing JFK’s plan.
But what a wonder that a man who clawed his way to the top of Texas politics, with all its ignorance, racism, and corruption, should do anything even half so good.
I’m not sure we could accurately measure the hypothetical. In the last election cycle I watched all the debates rather carefully and was consistently left waiting for some meat on the bone from McCain. His focus on social issues and lack of presentation of anything else other than the vaguest of talking points really frightened me. Not because I thought he didn’t have any plans in place; but rather because his unwillingness to expand upon them at every opportunity demonstrated to me that he either wanted to keep it under wraps, or it was simply a very low priority for him. OTOH, his continual, and very focused harping on social issues and divisive politics soured his appeal to me at every presentation. I know of quite a few other people who thought the same way.
If he had ignored or downplayed that side of his campaign and focused more upon important issues I have no idea how I would have voted. I was never given the opportunity to evaluate him on those merits, the fault of which lies squarely with his own campaign. His voting record, and the candidate I was presented were two very different people. One was distasteful on soical issues but showed a moderate stance and a willingness to buck his own party. The other was a totally different angry old man who wrapped himself in the flag while saying the Lords prayer instead of talking intelligently. His running mate was a bad joke and characterized his campaign in general. All flash, feel good and apple pie with no substance to discuss or evaluate.
Obama’s great success was in engaging us younger voters into the process. It wasn’t just with snappy slogans and baloney promises either, despite the protestations from the hard right. During the debates he presented himself as a thoughtful, competent, if idealistic candidate who always gave* some *detail about his plans for any given issue. Combine that with being on the “correct” side of social issues as the left sees it and it’s no surprise to me that he won a significant block of swing voters. McCain didn’t give us anything to consider.
Don’t think I’m just dumping on the right here, I’m pretty pissed with them all in general right now. I have NO idea what Obama is thinking with his current positions on military action in Iran for example. The public as a whole is sick and tired of war, and only Ron-Freakin’ Paul has the stones to say he wouldn’t support an action there. The current crop of GOP candidates are taking the McCain road and it won’t go well for them with us independents.
To use a less inflammatory issue though why not examine energy policy? Most People I know that feel the way I do politically are not categorically opposed to drilling within the US at all. We DO want to ensure that it is done in an environmentally responsible, low-impact manner. We would like to ensure that a good portion of that money is re-invested into alternative fuels so that when resources DO run low we will be well seated into a transition. This isn’t a crazy or radical position. There is plenty of money to be made and saved here. Yet we don’t here about a sensible plan of action. We hear obstructionism from the Left, and a return to the days of flaming rivers from the Right. The Right could demolish the left on this issue, yet they just don’t for some reason i can’t fathom. The only thing left for me to consider is that they are simply unable to control their lunatic fringe even on simple bread and butter matters. They just don’t engender any TRUST.
If the Republican party hasn’t been veering further and further right, then how do people explain all these former Reagan officals criticizing the current republican party?
No cite, all evidence is anecdotal, and I didn’t mean to imply an organized movement. I’ve just hearing been a number of self proclaimed Republicans complaining that their party has moved too far to the right and considering a vote for Obama than I have Democrats saying that Obama is too far to the left and considering a vote for Romney.
The current shift among social conservatives to objecting, not just to abortion, but to contraception, gives Democrats a HUGE club with which to bash them. I agree with the notion that most independent voters are indifferent and not too bright, but every last woman voter, right, left or center, is gonna be alarmed at the GOP coming after her birth control pills.
THIS is the shift to the right that is a Bridge Too Far. It alienates far too many voters, and the only ones it attracts are the ones who are already so deep into the social conservative camp that they can’t see, well … anything.
If the Democrats have any common sense they will use this club to bash the GOP Presidential candidate AND the GOP Congressional candidates. However, the Democrats as a whole lack both common sense and conviction. So we shall see.
You make it sound like LBJ brought up civil rights out of nowhere. In fact, Civil Rights was a far bigger issue than Vietnam in the early 1960s.
While the assassination may have helped, the Civil Rights Act passed because LBJ was a master politician with long experience as Senate majority leader. I’m not sure I can think of a president better at this game than he was. FDR, the only challenger in the past century, had a massive majority to help him.
Read LBJ’s biography to see how he conquered his racist upbringing in order to do this. I suppose JFK was more liberal, but on this issue LBJ had further to come and merits almost more applause.
Plus everything that Exapno Mapcase said.