I’d call Michael Bloomberg a moderate Republican who’s currently in office. But he’s not on the national level.
Qadgop the Mercotan I feel your pain. I always tended toward the Democratic side but we share a lot as to your assessment of the former Presidents. I think Clinton was the first candidate I ever voted for for President that won.
I’ve grown into a middle-aged, well-to-do white man that should have converted to Republicanism by now. The Republican Party as it exists today is repulsive. It’s whole message is a sham that is used to get masses of uniformed or naive people to vote against their own best interests. I used to find reasons to vote across party lines. Now I don’t care. Let them all go down.
You know what? I know a lot of other people like me. We should be rock-ribbed Republicans but don’t want to be associated with the greedy, slimy, crazy, dogmatic, unconscionable assholes that control that mess of a political party. Just look at their mouthpieces. Hannity, Limbaugh, Rove, the Koch brothers, Bachman, Beck, Palin, Norquest, Addelson, and the rest of the mindless idiots that spew fear and hate every day. I want nothing to do with it.
Not that the Democratic Party isn’t without flaws but it’s a whole lot saner than that mess on the right.
Political moderates are a rather recent phenomenon. I think probably as a result of the catastrophes caused by extremists.
The divide nowadays seems to be the Democrats want to “tax and spend” and the Republicans want to “borrow and spend”. Neither is a good idea but of the two, the Democrats are taking a more fiscally responsible position.
Exactly. I don’t know why this hasn’t been out there through the election. Those cuts got through on the promise they were temporary. Despite no evidence of any net Job Creation, they got them extended. The President did say he was only going to do it once.
Enjoyed both those posts…
Tax cuts create invisible fictional jobs, which helps Republicans defeat invisible fictional Obama.
Qadgop, I share your anguish. I too consider myself a moderate Republican. I was raised conservative, but I guess I’ve moderated some on social issues over time. I voted Republican all my voting life until this last election, where I voted Democrat for Presidential and Congressional races. The Republican party has just gotten too extreme and stupid in the last decade and they don’t fully get that they have. The Right Wing’s bias against science is really appalling, and their disregard of women is really off-putting.
Even the term fiscally conservative is a snowjob anymore. I don’t see any real evidence the national GOP is fiscally conservative. Their real agenda is using the deficit as an excuse to break the social safety net. They promote supply side tax cuts and increased military spending as big as the savings from cutting the safety net. It isn’t the same thing.
Fiscally liberal to me implies you want to expand taxes and government programs.
Also I don’t know how moderate Snowe and Collins are since they consistently sided with the GOP in obstructing getting anything done in the senate.
Who cares what party they’re in? If you want to vote for a moderate vote for a Democrat. Why piss and moan about how you can’t vote for a moderate Republican? Nostalgia?
The basic flaw in the Republican dogma is that tax cuts “starve the beast” and therefore force spending cuts. Clearly this is patently false. Any sane and rational person, by this point in the process, would deduce that this is a failed, counterproductive and outright harmful dogma. At no point in the process have we been forced to make spending cuts because we have willfully and idiotically cut government expenditures.
An intelligent, rational and reasonable person would conclude that the proper way to go about this is to make spending cuts first, then if we find ourself with a surplus of income, do we discuss tax cuts. If we find ourselves still short of funds, we can only discuss tax and fee increases to make up the difference, not silly assed tax cuts.
As I have stated repeatedly, I strongly supported the Reagan era tax cuts, reducing the top rate from 70%. If only on the basis that I do not believe that the government should ever take more than half of your income. Period. However, the Republicans have been playing that tune for more than 30 years now, and the top rate is half what it was. They desperately need to stop being Johnny One Note on this subject and fucking knock it off with the constant cry of "tax cuts! tax cuts! tax cuts!.
My co-worker and I had a discussion about the so called “fiscal cliff” rate increases (ie, expiring cuts) and what we would end up paying. Kinda surprised him when I flat out said “I have absolutely no problem paying that. Let’s do it. We need the reduction in the deficit this will give us.”
Because there are no moderate republican candidates anymore. I miss them. The dems are a bit loony, but now they’re the sane party, and I’ve supported their candidates since 1992.
But being a republican used to mean something very different than it does now.
You are right to a point. The Reagan tax cuts were more about tax reform than reducing the rate and the reform was sorely needed. Before the reform you could write off your swimming pool, your car, half of your house, your kids allowance and just about anything else. I remember listening to a tape produced by Shakley that told you how to do it. The 70% tax rate was a total sham. Nobody paid 70%. It was all a matter of how well you played the game and exploited the thousands of loopholes.
The Reagan plan went too far and resulted in an explosion of the deficit. David Stockton, the architect of the plan, later admitted that it was flawed. Measures were taken to correct the imbalance. GHWB faced up to the reality that taxes and expenses had to come back into balance and that may have cost him a reelection. GWB wouldn’t listen to his dad and repeated the mistake. Now we are dealing with the mess. (Daddy’s war was funded by the Saudi’s and the Kuwaiti’s, Juniors war was funded by the American taxpayers.)
Progressive income tax. It ain’t half by any measure. We need to jack that rate back up to 70%.
I’d rather see the Republican party completely jettison it’s wacko fringe. Let the loonies start their own party and then lose absolutely every national race they run in (and many state and local races, too). Then the grown-ups could get down to the business of intelligently debating real, workable, political solutions.
I used to think this idea would never work because I figured if the GOP ditched the kooks then they would give up so many votes that they could never beat the Dems. Then it occurred to me that if the GOP went ahead with this they would actually take back a lot of voters who are Republicans at heart but have started voting Democrat because the GOP has largely turned into a batshit fringe-fest.
To review my dream for a better America:
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GOP tells the Tea-Partiers and their ilk that they are no longer welcome
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Tea-Party, et.al. creates a far-right Bat-Shit Party which is promptly marginalized
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GOP returns to rationality (and also moves somewhat Center-ward)
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Dems move somewhat Left-ward to distinguish themselves from the “new” GOP, thereby more genuinely reflecting the values of liberal/progressives
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Knuckle-dragging, backward, sexist, racist, theocrats are banished to the wilderness.
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Profit!! (In terms of the American political discourse.)
It’s not nostalgia, but cognitive dissonance. And I don’t mean that as any sort of insult.
I think when a person has historically viewed themselves as a Republican it can be difficult to let go of that identity–even though the GOP has gone waaaaaay extreme koo-koo. Wouldn’t it be nice instead if the GOP would just come back to the positions of the sane Republican voters, and then those voters wouldn’t have to feel that visceral sense of disloyalty and shame as they grit their teeth and vote Democrat?
You’ve pretty much nailed it, though I wouldn’t exactly call it shame. It’s more like, for as long as I’ve known, the Republicans represented my fiscal values whereas the Democrats didn’t, so it’s hard to vote against my party and for the other guy. But nowadays, the Democrats are moderates and the Republicans have gone insane.
Because ideally, I like to have a choice between two sane parties.
Plus I like to have a back-up plan. I was able to vote for Democrats when Republican candidates started going squirrelly. What do I if the Democrats go crazy? Pick the crazy guy who I think will be less effective in implementing his insane ideas? Throw away my vote on some third party and pretend politics doesn’t matter?
In my cases it’s because a lot of politics are local. There are still moderate Republicans in local politics in New York.
I Love Me, I love you, too!
I have always been a Dem, but I yearn for the old days when my side of the aisle (rather than the current chasm) and yours could engage in rational debate and make necessary compromises for the good of the country and its people.
I have never agreed totally with any Dem politician or nominee, so it is with great sadness that I’ve watched as some on the far right have dragged the Reps towards an imminent precipice that they and we cannot afford them to go over. We need at least two viable parties for the process to produce generally acceptable results.
Back in 1960 the Republican Party had a lock on the professional class – doctors and lawyers supported Republicans in a higher proportion than even managers did. That trend reversed itself in 1972. Most professionals still voted for Nixon, but managers supported him more. Since then, the professional class has gotten larger (more health care, more computers, more engineers) and it has trended to a Democratic majority.
Take Paul Krugman. He was a member of the Reagan administration during the 1980s: now he is considered an ultra-liberal, though he really isn’t. He just applies textbook economics. Mitt Romney hired technocrats to reform health care in Massachusetts, then denounced them when he decided he wanted a shot at the Presidency. He pretzeled himself because he had to.
The moderate wing in the Republican Party is dead. It’s been moribund for decades: even the famed Olympia Snowe et al didn’t push for good government so much as a half-way point between one side and the other. Does anybody think that the stimulus package is even better because $100 billion of the funds with the least special-interest group backing was eliminated? The funds that in fact had some of the highest multipliers, since they were aid to the states?
Washington Republicans consist entirely of crazies and those who are afraid of being primaried by crazies. None deserve support: none of them. For those who don’t follow the news in excruciating detail, keep your eyes peeled for a “Good government” Republican: none exist now, but someday one might emerge. The GOP basically ceded this ideological space to Clinton, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t try to take some of it back. The only problem being is that we’ve been through multiple rounds of cuts to discretionary spending: there’s just not a lot of waste there. The fat is in health care and the fix involves health care reform. The ACA was an impressive start. But the Washington GOP has shown no interest in engaging the policy process: their demogoguing on “Death panels” (I’m looking at you Charles Grassley of Iowa) shows their utter lack of seriousness.
State and local is different: that should be evaluated on a case by case basis. Don’t be naive though: there is plenty of craven lunacy on the ground as well.
The interesting part is that the managerial class still votes Republican. It was for that reason that I read the Klaatu thread with some interest. I think you can pull in a lot of votes just by branding yourself as the Daddy party, even if Daddy is an alcoholic blowhard with a history of cowardice at critical, telling moments.
I will politely remind you that the Democrats passed welfare reform during the 1990s, and that the Federal government is basically a large pension plan that happens to have an army. Cutting 100 Sesame Streets won’t do much. Reforming health care might.