US continues move to the right; Dems don't get it

[chequita guevara]

It's also hard to endorse a swing to the right in the U.S. when support for capitalism in the U.S. is at an historic low, with only 53% supporting it.

[DaShi]

The name is just suspicious to me. I don't know anything about them.

The graph is all over the place. Are they incompetent or are Americans incompetent?

The graph is all over the place because it is likely to not be recording a trend but random data.

[DaShi]

DanS is right!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/opinion/02herbert.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

May 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Out of Touch
By BOB HERBERT
The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself.

The economy has imploded, the auto industry is in danger of being vaporized and more than half of all working Americans are worried that they may lose their jobs in the next year. So what’s the Republican response? To build a wall of obstruction in front of efforts to get the economy moving again, and then to stand in front of that wall chanting gibberish about smaller government, lower taxes, spending cuts and Ronald Reagan.

It’s not a party; it’s a cult. I’m no fan of Arlen Specter, but if I were a Republican, I wouldn’t be shoving him out the door and waving good riddance. This is the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt (“I’m trying to rise from the ashes”) Gingrich, and the dark force who can’t seem to exit the public stage or modify his medieval ways, Dick Cheney.

It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about.

Americans are aghast at what happened to the country while the G.O.P. was in charge. Iraq and Katrina come to mind, not to mention the transmutation of the Clinton surpluses into the Bush budget deficits and the collapse of the entire economy.

Trickle down. Weapons of mass destruction. Torture. Deregulation. You name it. The Republican-conservative know-it-alls of the past several years (all-too-frequently with feckless Democrats following closely behind) brought destruction and heartbreak to just about everything they touched.

And yet the G.O.P. behaves as though nothing has changed. Even in the face of a national economic nightmare, the party is offering nothing in the way of policies or new ideas that might give a bit of hope or comfort to families wrestling with joblessness, housing foreclosures and bankruptcies.

It’s a party that doesn’t seem to care about anything other than devotion to a set of so-called principles that never amounted to more than cult-like rhetoric. Waging unwarranted warfare while radically cutting taxes for the wealthy and turning the national economy into the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme may be evidence of many things, but none of them have to do with the so-called conservative principles the G.O.P. is always braying about.

When it came to looking out for the interests of ordinary working Americans, the party of just-say-no could hardly have cared less. Referring to the catastrophic ordeal of Detroit’s automakers, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee, told us last November, “The financial situation facing the Big Three is not a national problem but their problem.”

And Phil Gramm, John McCain’s top financial adviser during the presidential campaign, was enshrined in the foot-in-mouth hall of fame last summer when he said the country was experiencing “a mental recession.”

After awhile, it became all but impossible to overlook the madness of these true believers and the incalculable damage they had done to the country. Voters who hadn’t sipped from the Kool-Aid themselves couldn’t help but recognize that the G.O.P. was bizarrely detached from the real world.

It still is. In the place of constructive alternatives to Obama administration policies, it has offered increasingly hysterical rhetoric. Mr. Gingrich warned on television that the Democrats’ moves to stem the banking crisis “gives them the potential to basically create the equivalent of a dictatorship.”

Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, described President Obama as “the world’s best salesman of socialism.” And Mike Huckabee, a former Republican governor of Arkansas and presidential candidate, said of the administration’s economic policies: “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”

This is not a party that can be trusted with the leadership of the country. John McCain was ready to have Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office and reportedly wanted Phil Gramm to be his Treasury secretary. Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, has the strategic sense and attention span that you’d expect to find in a frat house on Saturday night.

“I love the Oscars,” he told GQ. “I’m looking for who’s got what dress on, you know?”

All the talk about the permanent marginalization of the Republican Party is silly. It will be back. Someday. But first it will have to stop fooling itself and re-engage with the real world.

[Ramo]

Dan believes that national Dems are running on gun control?

Dude, what decade do you think we're living in?

[GePap]

The terms of the debate have changed. DanS claims the country is moving in a more pro-life direction, and those numbers seem to indicate that, yet at the same time, where is the legislative change in that direction? Last time I check, all the anti-abortion ballot initiatives in 2008 FAILED, including in South Dakota. Who does one square actual ballot results to that chart? I think that the fact is that even if people say they are against abortion, they aren't going to seek to deny people their choice, which is the point of the pro-choice movement.

As for guns, I don't see the brady bill being overturned - and if anti-gun feelings have declined, it is likely due to the significant drop in random violent crime over the last decade, which shifts the debate to the benefit of gun nuts.

[Ramo]

The Dems are misinterpreting the high tide here. They think that the country is moving toward the left rather than the reality that the GOP is incredibly weak now.

The Republicans lost an election with a grizzled war hero running against a socialist effette urban Muslim Arab negro. Y'all lost the culture wars. Gay marriage and legalized pot are coming, whether you want it or not. If you want any hope whatsoever of winning power, you have to come up with a platform that actually speaks to at least some of the concerns of people under 30. Health care, to pick one salient issue.

[Drake Tungsten]

I also see gay marriage support trending towards acceptance, which is not a "right wing" thing.

Gay marriage is the big exception. Younger generations have always been more pro-gay marriage than the ones that came before them, but they also had been trending more conservative on other issues than the Baby Boomers.

As for the overall issues, I don't think its clear that the country is shifting to the right or the left at this point. I do think the Dems are being far too sanguine about the prospects of destroying the GOP for good. How soon people forget that the topic of discussion a mere 6 year ago was the prospects for a permanent Republican majority...

[Drake Tungsten]

Health care, to pick one salient issue.

The GOP would be moronic to run on health care; it really isn't the most pressing issue to most Americans, despite what the Dems want to believe. It especially isn't pressing to people under 30, who have the least need for health care. The economy has always and probably will always be the most important political issue and the GOP is well-positioned to make headway on that issue once the effects of the Bush/Obama deficits become clear.

[Ramo]

Abortion is really the only issue where young people are somewhat more conservative than older generations (and not by a hell of a lot - the plurality is still pro-choice). The Republicans were crushed among young people and Hispanics. They're ****ed unless they can change their message in some fundamental ways.

[KrazyHorse]

Come to Canada:

Legal abortions, legal guns, semi-legal pot, legal gay marriage, low government spending and balanced budgets.

Canada: your libertarian paradise

[DaShi]

No man's land=well-positioned?

[Ramo]

It especially isn't pressing to people under 30, who have the least need for health care.

Good luck with that.

[Drake Tungsten]

Legal abortions, legal guns, semi-legal pot, legal gay marriage, low government spending and balanced budgets.

Canada: your libertarian paradise

I've definitely thought about it.

[KrazyHorse]

I'm going to continue having fun with this for the next few days, Dan.

I'm sorry if it hurts you.

[Wezil]

It must be all that left-wing political violence pushing people to the right.