Well, at least up to the part where two of our embassies were overrun and an ambassador and his staff were murdered. Off the top of my head, I'd say Herman Cain, Allen West, Anne Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachman would disagree. But by all means, if you can prove your claim, proceed. Riiiight. Because when I think of centrist domestic policy, I think of wealth redistribution and socialized medicine. I think the phrase you were looking for was inexperienced and dangerously naive. Anybody with half a brain knew then and knows now that Obama is inexperienced and dangerously naive on foreign and domestic policy.
Speaking of Realist foreign policy, am I the only one that kept thinking of Hamas and the Gaza strip when Romney was talking about elections in the Middle East always being a good thing? Did he learn nothing from Bush's Idealism?
"Oh, yeah, we're the Party of Inclusion. See, we've got a couple of those in the elite ranks, why, yes we do! Never mind what any of them might say or do, just look at how well they photograph in contrast!"
The second from the bottom is former Mayor of Tampa Pam Iorio. Honestly, that bowing thing is just a habit of Obama's. He does it with everyone in power including one's here at home. It's an odd habit, but nothing symbolizing anything.
Your perception that these are his policies has little to do with the reality based discussion we are having. When you make this sort of claim, you sound as deluded as the hopey changy folks you rightly criticize.
Sure, no problem. Game: 92% of registered Republicans are White (compared to 58% for Dems). It's also disproportionately Southern: 49 percent of Republicans live in the South vs. 39 percent of Democrats. Set. The GOP lead among white men has doubled from 11 points in 2008 (51% Republican or lean Republican vs. 40% Democrat/lean Democratic) to 22 points (57% vs. 35%). Match. In 2008, Barack Obama lost among rural voters in swing states by just a little more than two percentage points. According to the latest National Rural Assembly/Center for Rural Strategies poll, rural voters in swing states favor Mitt Romney by 22 points. Double Match? The results in the polls were varied, with the gender gap ranging from 33 points (in a Zogby telephone poll for the Washington Times) to just 8 (in polls by Pew Research and by The Washington Post). On average, however, there was an 18-point gender gap, with Mr. Obama leading by an average of 9 points among women but trailing by 9 points among men. Triple Match: So on the four measures I mentioned race/ethnicity, age, gender, and rural urban the GOP is either the highest they have ever been or tied. Added altogether and as I said before: never in its history* has it been whiter, older, more male, and more rural.
Every trend projected far enough results in catastrophe. There's absolutely no reason to assume that voting blocks today will be the same tomorrow, or that any voting block captured by a party today will remain so.
Which trends do you think will reverse? That whites will start to outpace minorities in population growth? That younger generations replace older ones? An 18 year old in Alabama is more socially liberal than a 65 year old in Massachusetts. That America is going to become more rural? Even during the worst of the 'city bust' from the 60s to 80s, growth only leveled off. It's been on the rise ever since. How exactly do you see pandering to the old white rural male vote to exclusion of others being a winning strategy moving forward?
The trends may not reverse, or may not for some time. But the flaw is thinking that everything else will stay constant as those trends continue. Things will change. The Republican Party will adapt to changing trends (and so will the Democratic Party). It is my hope that it will increase its libertarian aspect, which plays well to the young and to city dwellers. And that's actually what I want: a more libertarian Republican Party.
"Well, at least up to the part where two of our embassies were overrun and an ambassador and his staff were murdered. " The President's current opponent thought going after BinLaden was a bad idea. Of course so did his predecessor, the same one who let the country's guard down and let almost 3000 people be killed by BinLaden and his minions on American soil. It's hard to find ANY positive outcomes for Republican foreign policy so far in this century, when you step back and take a look at it all...
Actually, I was for a couple of months during the run-up to the election. I think I may have even posted on election day, but then I took off not long after. I missed much angst over the Obamesiah.
Wow. You managed to find someone at the Washington Post and the New York Times that shares your liberal views!? I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! In other news Newsweek says Obama is the Democrats' Reagan, so that must be true! Pew is the only marginally credible "source" you have. And it is commonly held that they have a left-leaning bias. That said, they also did a study that found out Republicans are smarter and better informed than Democrats. So I guess that means Old White Men are smarter than everyone else.
One factor is that the whole "Occupy" business set a meme in the public consciousness that was quite fortuitous for the Dems when the Republicans ended up nominating a guy who might as well have "I AM the 1%!" tattooed on his forehead. Such a conjunction of events makes it real easy for the Dems to sell the idea that even if you are not crazy about Obama, surely you don't want the black-hat wearing, mustache twirling Snidely Whiplash dude in there.
The Golden Voice belongs to Ted Williams. After all the fame and opportunity for fortune that fell on him after he became an internet sensation, he fell right back off the wagon. The last I heard he had gotten himself dried out and was working for the New England Sports Network. He was in pretty deep so I'm sure that for him "recovery" is a day to day thing.
This is really the last stand of the Republicans as we have known them. They've drifted further to the right, into territory they haven't occupied ideologically since the 1920s...and they've become increasingly the party of older white men at a time when the voting public is becoming more multiracial, more religiously diverse and majority female. Demographic change in America is not on their side. They know it. They've been able to grab power disproportionate to their numbers up to now because of their money. But this may be the election cycle when demographics finally catch up with them, and overwhelm their money advantage--they may have pulled the Citizens United scam with a compliant Supreme Court majority one election cycle too late. It may also be too late for them to re-adjust and moderate their message. They've exiled too many of their moderates to reconstitute the party in a more centrist and less plutocratic mold...some, especially younger voters, have either gone over to the Democrats (an increasingly comfy home for moderates) or out of the ranks of party registrants at all. The Republicans are in the process of disappearing as a competitive force in New York, California, much of New England and the Pacific Coast already. They're fading fast in Illinois and the upper Midwest...and within a few years they may no longer be able to contend in enough states to elect a President. Their last stand will be in the old Confederacy, but the two biggest Southern states, Florida and Texas, may also be beyond reach in a decade because of a kind of growth that will make both states far more diverse.
How are these automatically mutually exclusive -- Reagan having been a right-winger, but still saner than the shrieking loons we see today?
In some ways yes. On social issues I am pretty sure that half a century ago Kennedy was right of Romney. Progress is a good thing. I'm also sure that Kennedy was a more fervert anti-communist than Romney, but considering soviet style communism only exists in one small country, pretty much completely under the thumb of the US and our allies, I'm not sure how relevant that is to our lives. On terms of economic opportunity though, that's where the big break would occur. I think you would have a hard time convincing Kennedy that economically the best path forward was to slash the programs that made the American middle class what it was in 60s, the programs that allowed the poor to move into the middle class to begin with, just to give the megamillionaires a bigger tax subsidy.... that I think is where Kennedy would have had a problem. B/c while yeah, he wasn't a socialist by any means, he wasn't a kleptocrat or one of their water carriers either, which are pretty much all that constitute the modern Republican party. Well that and their deluded followers.
Ancalagon responded pretty well to this. I can give a bit more detail, but it's certainly true that in ways not so relevant 50 years later, he can be seen as conservative. By the true meaning of the word, he certainly wasn't -- he wanted to move the country in a direction that represented change, which is to say that he was a progressive, even though some such policies then might be seen as conservative today. At any rate, it's worth looking at Kennedy's earlier campaigns, when he first ran for Congress and Senate, then the VP nomination in '56. His base was the labor wing of the Democratic party, and his policies were geared to favor the working class. When he ran for Congress in '46, his biggest task was convincing the local ward and labor bosses that he would represent the interests of the working man. He made that case and then his voting record cemented the impression. He lost the VP nomination in '56 to a Southern senator because JFK was seen as a Northern liberal too similar to Adlai Stevenson, and therefore not suitable for balancing the ticket.
Trying to find our thread on the Free State Project (was it pre purge or over at TBBS?) and stumbled on this one. Worth a reread a decade on IMO. Biggest thing I missed was the shift of non-college educated whites (and now men of color) away from the Dems while suburban and educated whites are moving the opposite direction.
