I am bored now - can we talk about cookies instead? There is such a large amount of possible cookies that one could make.
Not unless you’re an absolute idiot like Mourdock or Akin.
Except Mourdock (and Macahon for that matter) were essentially repeating the Republican platform. No abortion exceptions for rape victims. It was Romney who broke ranks on the issue.
But abortion was just one example of my overall point. Adaher said that as long as you were winning on economic issues the social issues would fall to the backburner. But that isn’t the case at all. Even if the Republicans came out tomorrow with the greatest economic solution of all time they’d still struggle to win elections as long as they oppose things like the Violence Against Women Act or the Paycheck Fairness Act. No matter how great your ideas in one area it’s going to be very hard to get people to listen when your ideas for them in another are so terrible. When the people in charge of bringing in one demographic quit to back the opposition because they think you’re actively hostile to them, you’re in trouble. Until the Republicans can at least move to the middle on social issues they will struggle to ever win the Senate or the Presidency.
“No abortion exceptions for rape victims” is a defensible position. “Any pregnant woman who claims she was raped is lying, because rape doesn’t cause pregnancy” is not.
Bullshit. There’s always been a consensus on economic freedom in this country. Nobody’s ever suggested eliminating basic ideas like the right to own property (with one admittedly notable exception) or the right to choose your job. These are things that everyone in the mainstream agrees on.
The differences between Republicans and Democrats (or liberals and conservatives) are over economic policies not fundamental principles.
You’re talking about fringe issues which were never part of either party’s platform. There are a handful of liberals who support eugenics just as there are a handful of conservatives who support white supremacy. Neither group represents a major party.
As a rule of thumb, anytime the Democrats suggest that “the people in this group should have the same rights as everyone else” they always end up being right in the long run. The Republicans should look at that and consider what it implies for their opposition to same-sex marriage. Thirty years from now, the Republican party will agree that gay people have the same right to get married as straight people have. So why are they choosing to be wrong on this issue now?
Clearly it’s not. Or Mourdock, the Republican candidate, in a Republican majority state, who was leading in every poll, would have won. To help highlight how little it resonates with the majority of voters, Mourdock had previously called for an end to direct election of senators even as he was running for the Senate. This did not hurt him in the polls.
This was what Akin said. It’s not what Mourdock said. Mourdock was under no delusions that you can’t get pregnant from being raped. Mourdock parroted the Republican party line that there should be no abortions for rape victims. A plank that is still part of the party platform. The obvious solution for Republicans is to at the very least move to the left and take the position held by their last presidential candidate, but instead they seem to have doubled down on the social conservatism.
I read the article that you linked to and I think it’s wroth noting that although the author does identify the problem, he’s way off base on the root cause(s) of the situation:
Women in 2012 had not been hit hard by Obama’s policies. Rather, they were still hit hard by the collapse that occured during Bush’s last year in office. This wasn’t at all unique to women, either, as the country is still under recovery.
He mischaracterizes Obama’s “You didn’t build that” line, as Republican’s were (and are) wont to do, but here the author is talking about “the sad truth” of things, and he’s not being truthful himself; his take on things isn’t just wrong it shows a lack of integrity.
And the ACA hasn’t crippled anyone with tax hikes. Not this year and certainly not last summer, nearly two years before the ACA is set to take effect.
This is the single biggest problem that Republicans face: their delusional views do not coincide with reality often enough.
What got Mourdock in trouble was that he said that pregnancies, even from rapes, were gifts of God, and something God intended to happen. And even though he didn’t mean it that way, people took him to be saying that God wants women to be raped, and, especially after the Akin comments, it resonated.
The reason Republicans keep bringing rape up with regard to the abortion issue is that they would very much NOT like to make an exception to abortion bans in the case of pregnancies caused by rape. If you take the position that abortion is murder, you have quite a moral dilemma on your hands, and a quickneasy solution is SOOOO appealing. So they buy into this shit about women’s bodies being able to reject the sperm implanted in them by rapists, and every woman and sensible man who has a wife or daughter does the 20 seconds or so of thinking needed to realize it’s bullshit, and the candidate loses all support.
They could just say something like “The possibility of unplanned pregnancy makes rape all the more tragic and heinous, and gives extra motivation for trying strenuously to do everything we can to minimize the incidence of rape.”, and then list all of the things they want to do to decrease rape. More funding to police to catch rapists, education campaigns to stress to men that no really does mean no, whatever. Heck, they could even draw in another of their favorite issues, and say that they’ll decrease rape by ensuring that more women are armed so they could defend themselves.
Or rather, they could do that, if they weren’t drooling idiots.
There’s also the element of magic thinking. When people hear about somebody being the victim of some terrible event like rape or cancer or the death of a child, they don’t want to consider the possibility of the same thing happening to them. So they come up with a reason why the terrible event happened to that person: “She got raped because she was wearing a miniskirt” “He got cancer because he ate a lot of red meat” “Their kid died because they didn’t buy the right car seat”. And then they reassure themselves that they wouldn’t do the thing that they’ve asserted as the cause and therefore the terrible event won’t happen to them. They’ve protected themselves.
In addition, the party’s core values are based on denying help to the less fortunate on the basis that they deserve less help, on the basis of some moral failing or other. To accept that bad things happen to good people too, that it isn’t their fault and that the bad things could happen to you too, would be to accept a moral worldview that leads more to Democratic attitudes and policies.
I believe I’ve commented on this before, but it’s because the Democratic party is a coalition of single issue, low information and tribal voting blocs. Usually all three.
And that would be an example of why the answer to the question forming the thread title is “No.”
We already know the CW on this. When Democrats lose, it’s due to “structural reasons” having nothing to do with the quality of the Democrats’ platform. When Republicans lose, it’s a stern rebuke to the right-wing.
Considering how Liberal and Democratic values soon become common American values, I think you’re describing reality
When Democrats don’t have to pretend to be conservatives to win national elections, I’ll believe that.
Democrats win by saying, “Those are the crazy right-wingers! We’re the reasonable right-wingers!”
And you prefer the crazy ones?
Well, yeah.
I’m a Republican. But I often end up voting for a Democrat in national elections because all too often the Republican is a crazy right-winger and the Democrat is, for all practical purposes, a reasonable Republican.
Well, yeah, someone’s got to occupy the center ground. If one party’s going to go way off into cuckoo land, the other is inevitably going to end up being relatively moderate. This is surprising?