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Had some ideas bouncing around my head after reading far too many blogs and discussion threads:
Some post-election thoughts
1. Coalitions: one thing I’ve seen a lot of in post-election commentary is talking about if Republicans have to kick out their fundie faction or their neo-con faction or their anti-New Deal faction or whatever in order to appeal to moderates better. What I think that this misses is that the far-right wing of the Republican Party is far more unified than the moderate wing of the Republican Party. In most cases people who are nut-ball far right wrt one aspect of the Republican agenda they’re probably at least pretty far right wrt to the rest. There really aren’t that many people who are far to the right wrt Social Conservativism who aren’t also strongly in support of the Iraq War, against progressive taxes, etc. etc. right on down the line. You only really get the split into Foreign Policy Cons, Social Cons and Anti New Deal Cons on the more moderate wing of the Republican Party, which is one of the reasons why moderate Republicans are pretty weak. This will also make it pretty damn hard to marginalize any one specific strain of wackiness on the Republican side since it’s hard to kick out one without pissing off the others.
2. Under the Bush administration a vote that was described as “bipartisan” was usually 100% of the Republicans voting for it and being joined by about 50% of the Democrats. This sort of thing happened again and again, with Obama usually not being in that 50%. What Obama will try to do is turn the tables and get things passed with 100% of the Democrats and 50% of the Republicans voting for it by peeling off the usual suspects (Snowe, Collins, Specter, maybe even McCain). Of course it will be harder to make this work against Republicans than it was against the Democrats but IF it works Obama gets to blather on about being Centrist while redefining that Centrism is and driving the hard right into impotent fits of screaming about RINOs.
3. I’ve seen a good bit of posting about how since Bush was unpopular and the economy went to **** and the Republicans still kept it from being a landslide all they needed was to wait for some time to pass and get someone instead of McCain and everything will be fine for the Republicans. I think this really underestimates how much worse the Republicans would’ve done with anyone except for McCain. Of course the hard right base never much liked McCain so they assume that’s the case for everyone else, but if one of their other primary candidates had been nominated they would’ve been annihilated. McCain was by far the best shot the Republicans had and I don’t think that most of the realize that.
4. Abuse of authority: Bush did some pretty messed up things wrt expansion and abuse of Presidential authority (torture, warrantless wiretapping, secret Eastern European prisons, no habeas corpus, unitary executive theory, Cheney claiming he wasn’t part of the executive branch, etc. etc.). I think that Bush got away with has much as he did as much through http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...fugeInAudacity as much as anything. However messed up this stuff is I’m not going to pretend that it was enough in itself to siphon all that many votes away from the Republicans (which is a pretty sad statement on American Democracy in and of itself). However the sort of people who care about this sort of thing tend to follow the news a bit more carefully, volunteer a bit more and financially contribute a lot more than most people. Look at how Ron Paul raised more money than any other Republican primary candidate for example. I think this is a big part of the reason why the Democrats raised more money than the Republicans for the first time I can think of and it probably helped fill out a lot of Obama’s volunteer corps, phone bankers, etc. Again not that much of a voting base (look at how badly Ron Paul got voted in the primaries) but being on the side of Civil Liberties really seems to help with piecemeal fundraising and grass root organization, which Obama was able to tap in to very well.
I read a bunch of Republican blogs right before the election and a lot of them said things like “when people actually get in the voting booth they’ll realize that Democrats stand for more government power and Republicans stand for less government power and they’ll break for the Republicans.” The idea that there are people out there who are angry at Republicans over how much government power they through around (and not just in term of government pork) didn’t even seem to register nor the idea that a party that supported secret torture and wire tapping doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as the champions of Freedom.
5. Ideological vs. coalition: in America to be successful you need a pretty broad coalition. In fact I think that the modern Republicans are one of the most ideologically unified political party that America has seen in a very long time. They’ve almost got European-style party discipline. This is good for many things, but it really runs against the grain of American politics and it has done things like pretty much annihilate New England moderate Republicanism. Places like New Hampshire and Maine (especially the Maine 2nd District where Bush lost by only 5,000 votes in 2,000 and where I’m from
) really aren’t natural fits at all for the national Democratic Party and they’re places where someone like McCain should dominate yet Obama crushed McCain in both, the Republicans are doing something badly wrong for that to happen...
Some post-election thoughts
1. Coalitions: one thing I’ve seen a lot of in post-election commentary is talking about if Republicans have to kick out their fundie faction or their neo-con faction or their anti-New Deal faction or whatever in order to appeal to moderates better. What I think that this misses is that the far-right wing of the Republican Party is far more unified than the moderate wing of the Republican Party. In most cases people who are nut-ball far right wrt one aspect of the Republican agenda they’re probably at least pretty far right wrt to the rest. There really aren’t that many people who are far to the right wrt Social Conservativism who aren’t also strongly in support of the Iraq War, against progressive taxes, etc. etc. right on down the line. You only really get the split into Foreign Policy Cons, Social Cons and Anti New Deal Cons on the more moderate wing of the Republican Party, which is one of the reasons why moderate Republicans are pretty weak. This will also make it pretty damn hard to marginalize any one specific strain of wackiness on the Republican side since it’s hard to kick out one without pissing off the others.
2. Under the Bush administration a vote that was described as “bipartisan” was usually 100% of the Republicans voting for it and being joined by about 50% of the Democrats. This sort of thing happened again and again, with Obama usually not being in that 50%. What Obama will try to do is turn the tables and get things passed with 100% of the Democrats and 50% of the Republicans voting for it by peeling off the usual suspects (Snowe, Collins, Specter, maybe even McCain). Of course it will be harder to make this work against Republicans than it was against the Democrats but IF it works Obama gets to blather on about being Centrist while redefining that Centrism is and driving the hard right into impotent fits of screaming about RINOs.
3. I’ve seen a good bit of posting about how since Bush was unpopular and the economy went to **** and the Republicans still kept it from being a landslide all they needed was to wait for some time to pass and get someone instead of McCain and everything will be fine for the Republicans. I think this really underestimates how much worse the Republicans would’ve done with anyone except for McCain. Of course the hard right base never much liked McCain so they assume that’s the case for everyone else, but if one of their other primary candidates had been nominated they would’ve been annihilated. McCain was by far the best shot the Republicans had and I don’t think that most of the realize that.
4. Abuse of authority: Bush did some pretty messed up things wrt expansion and abuse of Presidential authority (torture, warrantless wiretapping, secret Eastern European prisons, no habeas corpus, unitary executive theory, Cheney claiming he wasn’t part of the executive branch, etc. etc.). I think that Bush got away with has much as he did as much through http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...fugeInAudacity as much as anything. However messed up this stuff is I’m not going to pretend that it was enough in itself to siphon all that many votes away from the Republicans (which is a pretty sad statement on American Democracy in and of itself). However the sort of people who care about this sort of thing tend to follow the news a bit more carefully, volunteer a bit more and financially contribute a lot more than most people. Look at how Ron Paul raised more money than any other Republican primary candidate for example. I think this is a big part of the reason why the Democrats raised more money than the Republicans for the first time I can think of and it probably helped fill out a lot of Obama’s volunteer corps, phone bankers, etc. Again not that much of a voting base (look at how badly Ron Paul got voted in the primaries) but being on the side of Civil Liberties really seems to help with piecemeal fundraising and grass root organization, which Obama was able to tap in to very well.
I read a bunch of Republican blogs right before the election and a lot of them said things like “when people actually get in the voting booth they’ll realize that Democrats stand for more government power and Republicans stand for less government power and they’ll break for the Republicans.” The idea that there are people out there who are angry at Republicans over how much government power they through around (and not just in term of government pork) didn’t even seem to register nor the idea that a party that supported secret torture and wire tapping doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as the champions of Freedom.
5. Ideological vs. coalition: in America to be successful you need a pretty broad coalition. In fact I think that the modern Republicans are one of the most ideologically unified political party that America has seen in a very long time. They’ve almost got European-style party discipline. This is good for many things, but it really runs against the grain of American politics and it has done things like pretty much annihilate New England moderate Republicanism. Places like New Hampshire and Maine (especially the Maine 2nd District where Bush lost by only 5,000 votes in 2,000 and where I’m from
) really aren’t natural fits at all for the national Democratic Party and they’re places where someone like McCain should dominate yet Obama crushed McCain in both, the Republicans are doing something badly wrong for that to happen...
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