"The center-right is in power, and they’re trying to placate the far right, which is necessary for them to have the votes for re-election. " If the far right is getting what it wants, for whatever reason, then it’s in power.
You’re right that Bush got his votes by adopting a roughly-centrist appearance but he hasn’t governed as a centrist, has he?
Not really, no. The Bush administration plays lipservice to the social far-right, but doesn’t seem to have the social far-right’s deeply held beliefs as its core value system. They’re throwing them bones. That doesn’t equate to them being in power. In fact, it equates to them being carefully petted and groomed like a pack of pet voters. They don’t rule the kennel, they’re just allowed to think they do.
Not entirely, no. Bush’s neo-conservative cabal revolves around an awful lot of issues, not all of which are held in the same esteem or with the same values. The “smaller government” plank doesn’t even get looked at. The anti-abortion plank hasn’t really seen a lot of action, either. The tax-cut plank, on the other hand, got heavy activity in the early part of his term. The war-hawk plank is currently at the top of the agenda.
Truthfully, I can’t say exactly where Bush II stand on a lot of issues…his administration values scale seems to be a sliding one. There’s a circus-worthy balancing and juggling act going on in an attempt not to fall off the big ball in the middle of the political ring.
Note that I’m not defending Junior’s administration. I’m no fan of the current crew.
Elvis:
No, he’s not governing as a centrist because he isn’t a centrist. “Center right” means somewhat right of center. But the way a president governs also depends on the situation in Congress. Do you remember the 2002 elections? Not exactly a resounding endorcement for the Dems, was it? Would not the outcome of that election be expcted to shift the politics of this country in the direction of the Republicans?
I’d say it’s the other way around: the social far-right is getting the bulk of what they want, and moderate voters are getting the occasional bone - or, more likely, something that looks like a bone, but isn’t.
Take the judiciary. Chalk up a W in the far-right column.
Take the abortion issue. Partial-birth law? W for far right. Stem-cell research? Ditto. Moderates got something that looked like a bone, but wasn’t; there are far fewer useful ‘lines’ in existence than Dubya claimed, and not really enough to be useful for research purposes.
Take homosexuality. Dubya’s said marriage should be between a man and a woman. His not coming out for a Constitutional amendment is a sop to the center, but you can bet that’s where his heart is.
The tax-cut plank has seen plenty of activity each year, including in this one.
And that’s part and parcel of the “smaller government” plank. The plan is: reduce government revenues to the point where government is starved out of all but the most essential functions. They’re winning, and winning big.
And re the anti-abortion plank, see above.
You left out one key group: business. Talk about a group that’s being serviced (yeah, I chose that word deliberately) very efficiently and enthusicastically by the Bushies. They’re getting Christmas presents out the wazoo - in the Medicare bill, in the tax cuts, in the war appropriations, in the Omnibus Bill to keep the government running, and just about everywhere else you can think of. Those campaign contributions are paying off richly.
In the sense of giving business everything it could possibly want, and eviscerating as much government regulation, consumer protection, worker protection, and environmental protection as possible, this Administration is far-right. Just as they are far-right on taxes and government, just as they are far-right on social issues. Centrists get the occasional sop like the Medicare bill and the No Child Left Behind law, and that’s about it.
Yes, he has. The point being that, to the far left, centrist appears to be extreme right.
Which is something I have said a dozen times. The lefties on the SDMB are incapable of judging what a center-right position would look like to the rest of the country. Anyone to the right of the Greens you consider a sell-out, if Democratic, or a fascist, if a Republican.
Many of our more vocal posters here are not necessarily unanimously left-wing. But they are damn near unanimously anti-Bush. You can be libertarian, providing you take a sort of “a plague on both your houses” attitude towards Democrats and Republican. But a good number of you make it a point to try to shout down any hint of support for Bush.
People with that attitude aren’t qualified to judge what will appeal to the American mainstream. If you think Bush is an extreme, hard Right, ultra-conservative ideologue, you simply don’t know what the terms mean.
Which, as I said earlier, warms my heart. The Left is forming its usual circular firing squad, and pointing fingers of blame at each other for losing in 2000 without learning anything about losing in 2004. And the general campaign hasn’t even begun yet. Wait until Bush gets started. You guys are gonna go nuts.
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Perfect example. The idea that opposition to partial birth abortion is an extremist view, is itself an extremist view.
Regards,
Shodan
RTFirefly, tax cuts don’t necessarily follow to a smaller government plan. The Neo-cons are absolutely in LOVE with deficit spending. They’ll cut taxes to shut the masses up, but don’t cut spending. They don’t have to deal with it, future presidents and generations do.
So? The existence of the American Communist Party doesn’t make Dennis Kucinich center-left. Just because the spectrum keeps going past the 99th percentile, doesn’t make the people at percentile 98 ‘center-(direction)’.
Anyway, see my response to jayjay; I was responding to you, too.
ExTank, my friend, you’ve stepped into a partisan thread here: this is pretty explicitly a discussion among left-leaning persons about the appropriate course for taking on the right. The assumption of this thread, unlike your normal GD thread, is that left-of-center is largely good, and right-of-center is largely not. When Karl Rove and other GOP political strategists get together to debate strategy, I don’t expect even-handedness from them on issues. Same deal here.
**
The Democrats have to pick a candidate who is a centrist-liberal, not a leftist. Do you know what percentage of the vote a fanatic like Kucinich would take in the general election? About 10%. Maybe 15%. He’s such a nut that you’d have the unions endorsing Bush.
Politics is the art of the possible. You have to get behind a candidate who can win, not just one who is orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the surest way to get the other side elected. If you don’t mind continuing to fracture the center-left coalition, thus allowing the right to win every vote, then by all means, go ahead and vote Green. When the Dems lose by a razor thin margin again, don’t blame Dean for the rape of the environment. Blame those who put political purity ahead of political efficacy.
The Green movement is backfiring. They’re helping to elect more conservative politicians by fracturing the center-left coalition, and in fact are making the Democratic party more conservative. You’re further marginalizing your concerns, not helping them.
If it were a race between Bush and Nader, with no Democrat, Bush would get at least 90% of the vote.
I don’t think you Green fanatics realize just how far afield you are from where American politics is. You have no broad support.
To vote for a fanatic who meets 100% of your desires, but loses badly and siphons enough votes away from the more mainstream, center-liberal candidate to give the vote to the right-winger, is to commit political suicide.
If the Greens want a voice in politics, they should run candidates for Congress, not the presidency. You have enough concentrated pockets of support across the country to mount feasible Congressional campaigns. But you have to set aside orthodoxy for efficacy in a nationwide race. You have to accept that to win a candidate has to appeal to the middle as well as their edges.
Shodan, any chance we can commit you to a big ole helping of crow next Thanksgiving if your predictions about the Democrats turn out false?
Daniel
I don’t know - what are you willing to commit to in return?
Of course, if the Green candidate wins, I will be glad to admit that I badly misjudged the temper of the electorate. Hell, if Kucinich or Sharpton or another, more extreme Democrat, gets nominated and wins, I will admit the same.
How about you? Supposing Bush is re-elected - what are you willing to pony up?
I offered a gentleman’s bet to (IIRC) scotandrsn that Bush would not cancel elections, which was predicted by some on the SDMB. He declined, it would appear wisely.
What are you offering?
Regards,
Shodan
Care to define ‘centrist’? I’ll await the laughter.
Might it look like John McCain?
As a former moderate Republican who left the party when it was clear the Reagan wing had won, I’m still pretty comfortable with the rather modest moderate wing of the GOP. Used to be people like Howard Baker and Bob Dole; now it’s people like McCain, Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins.
I would sleep well at night with people like that running the country.
See above.
Nor do I think people like John Warner and Dick Lugar are objectionable, even though they’re solidly conservative. They’re not locksteppers who put ideology ahead of everything else.
Bush is not only governing from a position far to the right of the image he projected when he ran, but he’s been extremely partisan about it, which was exactly what he said he’d take us away from (remember “I’m a uniter, not a divider”? Haw haw!!), and he’s governing in a way that’s divorced from reality in most major respects: fiscal reality, military reality, environmental reality, you name it.
He’s a True Believer who is out to get his way, regardless of the cost to our future. Such a man ought to be in a loonybin, not in the Oval Office.
(Dean for President - Not Insane!)
The Democrats won a plurality of the votes in 2000, losing de jure by a combination of flukes. (EC geography, funky FL ballots, Greens.) The center-left candidates combined for a popular majority.
If we win, we win; if we lose, we lose. With respect to this thread, there’s just one thing I want to prevent: losing another election on electoral system design issues if a majority of the American people should once again indicate their preference for a candidate who is somewhere to the left of the GOP.
Let’s put it this way: it’s not the center-right that cares enough about it to even make it an issue. This one’s the far right’s baby, so to speak.
You want to ban abortions after 24 weeks, except to protect the life and physical health of the mother, that’s one thing. But by outlawing a technique, without respect to time of gestation, they took a position that makes no sense except to pro-life true-believers, who want to get rid of all abortions.
So sure, it’s an extreme position. Moderate conservatives would have asked, “does this make any sense?” IIRC, they did exactly that.
Ditto what RTFirefly said – IMO, it’s a poor sign of the Republican Party when folks like McCain and Dole are being pushed to the “fringes,” to the point where they’re almost ready to bail on the party all together.
Clinton might have been a left-centrist (or even a mild right-centrist in disguise), but at least the bulk of the party was in line with his position.
Some people here have suggested that Greens shouldn’t run a presidential candidate, but should run candidates for congress. With all due respect, this is a bad idea for exactly the same reasons. If the center-left vote in a district is split between a Democratic candidate and a Green candidate, a Republican candidate would have a much easier time winning, perhaps with as little as one third of the vote. For the Green party, as for any third party, popularity is self-defeating.
The fact is, under our present electoral system in which all offices are decided by a straight plurality vote (ignoring the idiocy of the Electoral College in the presidential vote) any increase in the popularity of a minor party will serve primarily to aid the major party with which they most disagree — in the case of the Greens; the Republicans. This will produce outcomes opposite to those the Green Party supports. This is a fundamental flaw in our system, but I don’t see how anything can be done to fix it. Neither major party will ever support reforms; such as instant-runoff voting, approval voting, or proportional representation; that would reduce their power. No minor party will gain sufficient power to change the situation by complaining about this because issues of electoral design are too arcane to interest the average voter. The tendency of minor parties to — in the degree that they are successful — undermine the very policies they support will prevent them from gaining enough popularity based on other issues to force such a reform.
Basically, the system is broken, and any attempt to fix it by supporting a third party will inevitably make things worse. The only hope I see of a way out is that some dramatic crisis could destroy the existing power structure and justify the creation of a completely new constitutional order, in which it is just barely possible that the electoral system could be made more friendly to multiple parties. I can’t say I wish such a thing to occur, because it probably wouldn’t be very pleasant to live through. For now, the best you or I can do is work within the major parties to change their policies whenever possible, and learn to live with those things we can’t change.
Dole was pushed to the fringes? You mean when they nominated him for President?
Regards,
Shodan
Oh, I have no doubt any definition I could come up with would be instantly redefined as extreme right on the SDMB. But that was sort of my point - to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To an extremist, everything he disagrees with even a little bit looks extreme.
Although you may want to think if promising in advance to laugh at anything centrist is a good way to establish your credentials as a moderate. YMMV.
Regards,
Shodan
How do I put this without breaking the forum rules?
I’m willing to commit to not counting my chickens before they hatch, howzabout it?
I’m willing to commit to not jumping constantly into threads about conservative thought and gloating about how much we libruls are gonna kick conservative butt in the next election.
Since I commit to that, I don’t need to commit to eating crow if Republicans win. I completely acknowledge that Republicans MIGHT buy – ahem, excuse me, win – the next election. They might even do it fair and square this time.
You, with your – how do I say this and stay in the forum rules? – ubiquitous gloating about how badly liberals are going to lose, are setting yourself up for a big fall if you’re wrong.
Hubris, my friend, has a famous partner.
Daniel
Gee, that was clever of you to overlook the rest of my post. I discussed particular noteworthy Republicans, and said how I could be quite comfortable if folks like them were running the country.
How you translate that into “To an extremist, everything he disagrees with even a little bit looks extreme” is a frickin’ mystery to me. I certainly have no clue whatsoever how that helps prove any point you made, since your point clearly wasn’t “leftist Democrats are capable of having high regard for moderate Republicans.”
Learn to use a dictionary. Look up ‘await’.
So we are completely irrelevant or to blame for everything. Which is it? If I had to choose I’d take the former. Irrelevant is how I felt as a Democrat. I gave them my vote and didn’t feel I got any representation in return. So I stopped automatically giving them my vote. Now I will only vote for them if they give me reason to. That the other guy is worse isn’t a reason. It doesn’t make them worthy. If they really believe the other guy is so bad then you would think they would be willing to throw me a frickin’ bone to gain my vote. If not I am OK if the election doesn’t turn on my vote. At least I will know I did the right thing.
As for the idea that Greens will be responsible for the success of the Republicans, I don’t see how. I don’t see how if Greens and Democrats can’t come to an agreement on how to best oppose the Bushistas the onus can be placed on us. We aren’t their bitch anymore. They don’t get to tell us what to do. We are willing to compromise. We have offered to back the right ( left ) Democrat. Have they responded? No. If they don’t like the offer they could make a counterproposal to garner our support. Have they? No. They just put the mark of Cain on us as a warning to our potential supporters. Arrogance isn’t going to convince us to work with them. If they want to demagogue rather than talk then that’s their fault not ours.
And lets not forget who has colluded with the evil agenda. Without Democratic support in the Senate Bush wouldn’t be able to pass one tax cut or install one conservative federal judge. Don’t lie down with dogs like Zell Miller and then claim we have the fleas.
I fear that the Greens may push the Dems so far to the right that they pass Patrick Buchanon on the way.
Gore lost the election because 3000 votes in a West Palm Beach Jewish community went for–Pat Buchanan. When the Democrats in Florida set up a system that allowed Black votes and Jewish votes to be wasted like they did, the Democrats deserve to lose. And I am a registered Democrat.