Even the pro-rape bills? On this planet?
Polling on this subject is incredibly complicated and the results vary tremendously. The wording of the question says a lot. I’ve found ranges of 20-30% (on both sides) of the basic question “Should abortion be legal all the time, some of time, illegal some of the time or all of time?” However, the simple question “Do you support or oppose the decision in Roe v. Wade?” has polled more than 50% “support” for a LONG time now.
I await (with breath not held for fear of dying) any substantive response from you.
Oh, and while you’re at it, could you please respond to post #199?
Then he is incompetent. The republicans were engaging in rampant obstructionism during the 2007-2008 period when Bush was still president.
The democrats are either incompetent or complicit. I go with complicit, because even amateurs could tell the GOP was going to obstruct like hell after 2008.
I don’t understand republicans who think the democrats are liberal. The democrats govern by watering down all bills until the most conservative democrats support them, then they water them down more to make liberal republicans like the northeastern ones support them too.
Will the democrats figure out why they lost in 2010? No. The reason they lost was turnout. It wasn’t that the public at large said ‘lets elect republicans’. Like I said before, in 2010 10 million republicans stayed home, and 30 million democrats stayed home. Did the democrats learn from that? no they didn’t. But turnout was the reason, it wasn’t because the dems were too liberal. if anything not being liberal enough hurt them. Labor, liberals and the netroots (who make up a huge chunk of the volunteers, donors and a big chunk of democratic voters. Labor and liberals alone make up about 30% of the electorate) were not motivated to participate in 2010. Why reelect a bunch of incompetent, disorganized democrats? The dems offered their base very little in 2009/2010, considering how much power they had.
And 1994 was almost 20 years ago. The country has changed drastically. The democrats did learn from 1980 and moved to the right, hence people like Clinton. But the country is now moving to the left. The GOP base is dying of old age, and millennials are liberal on social and political issues. People are more aware this is a rigged plutocracy with a hollowed out middle class. Young people take science seriously and don’t care about religion or culture wars and if anything support minority rights. People have seen the damage of laissez faire capitalism via the 2008 financial collapse of a deregulated banking industry. The Iraq war taught us that we can’t invade a country, then leave a few months later. Considering all those issues, what does the GOP offer?
And the democratic party of LBJ was different. The realignment of the country due to racial tensions hadn’t happened yet. After civil rights all the southern democrats became republicans, which pushed the GOP to the right on economic and social issues, which caused the GOP to become a minority party on the west coast and northeast.
What does the GOP do in 10 years when half the tea party is dead of old age and millennials (who are socially and economically liberal) make up 40% of the electorate? Conservatives want to believe 2008 and 2012 were flukes. They weren’t. What was a fluke was 2010. The GOP will likely control the house for the entire decade due to redistricting, but the senate and white house will probably be democratic for the rest of this decade (or at least the majority of it).
Exactly. Nobody capable of running a successful Presidential candidate could possibly be stupid enough to miss the Republican obstructionism. Obama and the Dems are owned by Wall Street, just like the Pubs, because that’s where all the money is. Their incompetence has all been a smokescreen for their betrayal of their base.
Look at who you have to piss off to be a true liberal progressive.
Millionaires and billionaires - because you support progressive taxes and tax hikes on the wealthy
The energy industry - because you support renewables and oppose pollution
Pharma, the health insurance industry & the hospital industry - because you support single payer
Wall Street and the financial sector - because you support meaningful financial reform, bank nationalization and strong regulation
Low end service sector employers (walmart, target, kmart, restaurants, etc. etc. etc) - because you support a higher minimum wage and making it easier to join a union
Being a true progressive means pissing off individuals and industries collectively worth trillions and trillions of dollars. A presidential campaign costs at best a billion. A senate race may cost $20 million, a house race maybe $5 million. Walmart and the Koch brothers can pay for a senator’s entire race out of petty cash.
So the dems go out and say ‘we’d love to pass progressive legislation, but those mean republicans won’t let us. Give us a few more seats in the next election and then we will pass progressive legislation’. Or if we do get legislation, it is plutocratic. Obamacare was a good start, but it mandates people buy private insurance, eliminates public competition and had subsidies for pharma.
Or the way Obama ran on raising the minimum wage to about $9.50/hr, and did nothing about it when he had 58-60 senators. But now he wants to do something about it, now that he knows there is no chance of it getting passed. At least Nancy Pelosi had the common sense to tie the minimum wage increase to a war funding bill. I love that woman.
We are a plutocracy. But at least we are starting to be honest with ourselves and each other about it, which is hopefully one of the first steps to changing it.
Absolutely the public is in favor of safe, legal, rare, and EARLY abortion. Once you get past the first trimester, support for restrictions is overwhelmingly popular, and even when we’re talking first trimester, things like parental notification laws are also very popular.
The public wants a well regulated abortion industry, just like the way they do it in most of Europe, who I would hope you think isn’t waging a war on women. The Democrats could be constructive and propose a comprehensive abortion regulation bill and thus take it out of the Republicans’ hands.
Or even better, Democrats could call for all business to be regulated the way we regulate abortion clinics. I’d take that deal.
Why can’t they be both?
I think it’s neither. The Democratic Party is a HUGE tent and liberals only make up a small portion of it. People keep on talking about how the Democrats betray their “base”, but they don’t actually have one. Just a disparate legion of groups with varying and often conflicting interests who are unified only by their dislike and fear of the Republicans.
That’s why I don’t worry about the future of the GOP unless we assume they’ll always be stupid. But that’s not the past of the party and it’s not likely to be the future of the party. The party will get smarter and will start to peel off some of those Democratic constituencies.
But the Republicans don’t want that. They want an abortion industry that is as illegal as they can make it and for legal abortions to be extremely difficult to obtain (especially for the poor) and to involve as much shame, humiliation and discomfort as possible.
You seem to think that the problem here is abortions are still performed in unhygienic back-alley clinics and that the Republicans just want to make abortion safer for women, which is the exact opposite of what all the abortion legislation they have proposed will actually achieve. As such, there’s no reason for the Democrats to try to compete.
In your mind that’s probably clever, but the rest of us have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.
At least you agree that the party is currently stupid. Naturally this cannot continue; the Stupid will either take over the party completely which will then disintegrate and form as something else, or the Stupid will be driven from the party and the newly cleansed GOP will come up with a newer, more intelligent platform. The main question is when, and the evidence at present suggests that it’ll be at least 2020 before this happens, especially if (and I offer no odds on this happening) the Democrats gain back enough local control to do some gerrymandering of their own.
Absolutely. But as long as current law is to the left of even the Democratic mainstream position, and even to the left of European left parties, we have an unusual legal situation that gives Republicans great opportunities to pass popular laws, like the partial birth abortion ban and the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which even NARAL supported(but Barack Obama did not)
Democrats should be taking the lead on regulating abortion precisely because it should be safer and can be made safer, very easily. Heck, you don’t even have to change the law. Just inspect the damn clinics!
The platform isn’t the problem, it’s the rhetoric. And you know its’ true, because Democrats find seizing on the rhetoric to be much more useful to them than actually debating the merits of the platforms. Heck, there are whole liberal websites dedicated to nothing more than giving coverage to the stupid things Republicans say.
PROVE IT or shut the hell up about it.
Parental notification laws are favored by 69%. A ban on partial birth abortion is favored by 68%.
The problem is that he believes the party is stupid for the wrong reasons. He thinks the Republicans are stupid for how they are conveying their message. He doesn’t get that it’s the message itself that’s fundamentally stupid.
If the message was stupid, Democrats wouldn’t be trying to co-opt it come election time. It’s always fascinating how conservative Democrats become in the fall of an election year.
I would say it’s the Democratic platform which is stupid, given how little Democrats want to be associated with it.
You keep saying this, yet it seems to be based on the assumption that the Democrats are liberal to begin with.
Only because you’re comparing it to the “toe the line or be cast into the outer darkness” approach of the GOP. The Democrats are much less dogmatic than the Republicans and much more inclusive in terms of party-wide platform; this isn’t remotely news. You see this as a failing - the Democrats see this as a strength.
I don’t see it as a failing. It’s only a weakness inasmuch as the Democrats have to cobble together a lot of special interests and minorities to win, whereas the Republicans just rely on the 40% of Americans who are conservative and seek to get that last 11% any way they can. In recent years, they’ve been having a problem doing that, and part of that problem is the ostracizing of moderate members.
I also realize that the Democratic Party isn’t a liberal party, although it has a strong liberal faction that is much stronger than it should be given the makeup of the voters who support the party. Republicans tend to draw their leadership from the middle of the party, whereas Democrats since the 80s have tended to elevate staunch liberals, to the point where red state Democrats won’t even say whether they’ll vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker when running for election. Of course almost everyone knows they will, but that’s a lie they have to tell to eke out a victory. Same for Obamacare, good luck getting a red state Democrat to say whether or not they’d support repeal. The answer is “no”, but they won’t say it.
If by “special interests” you mean “everyone who isn’t a rich white Christian” then yes. Also known as “the majority of Americans”.
Note that the Democrats got many more votes than the Republicans in the last election, but due to the current districting the GOP picked up a disproprotionate number of seats. You may argue that that’s all very well and good for political reasons but when you’re arguing from the POV of popular support it doesn’t work so well.
If the Democrats ostracize anyone, it’s the far left wing. The moderates are running the party.
Okay, stop. This simply isn’t true. Pelosi and Reid as “staunch liberals”? I think not - they’re the “moderates” you claim they’re ostacizing.
You really ought to take that mindreading act of yours on the road, if you know what people are thinking even though they say the complete opposite. And given that it has been repeatedly pointed out to you that a majority of Americans either support the healthcare bill or want something that goes further, I’m struggling to understand where you’re getting your conclusions from.
By special interests I mean various groups whose agendas are not necessarily in agreement with one another. And in many cases the Democrats feel forced to side with the minority viewpoint within their coalition because the minority viewpoint carries more money and more dedicated political support. A good example is education reform. The majority of the coalition supports education reform, but the teachers’ unions just want more funding as their idea of reform, even though more funding in the past hasn’t improved results.
Nancy Pelosi is the head of the House Democrats. If she’s not liberal enough, you’ll never be satisfied. The moderates ran the party during the Clinton years, but that’s no longer true.
It’s not mindreading. 100% of the Democratic Congressmen who wouldn’t say whether or not they’d vote for repeal did not vote for repeal. 90% of those who wouildn’t say whether or not they’d support Nancy Pelosi for Speaker supported Nancy Pelosi for Speaker. So it’s pretty safe to say that had Colbert won in SC, that she’d be a vote against ACA repeal. And every single other red state Democrat is a vote against ACA repeal. Until maybe ONE actually votes for repeal.
As for Americans and the ACA, whether they support it going further is irrelevant if they don’t like the bill. If they support repeal, they support repeal.
The failure of your logic is in believing that those who don’t like the ACA also support repeal.