Posted on 10/21/2003 3:15:40 AM PDT by kattracks
EWTON, Iowa — In the current issue of The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes argues that we have seen the birth of a Republican majority. In 1992, Barnes points out, Republicans held 176 House seats. Today, they hold 229. In 1992, the G.O.P. controlled 8 state legislatures; now it controls 21. In 1992, there were 18 Republican governors; now there are 27.But the really eye-popping change is in party identification. In Franklin Roosevelt's administration, 49 percent of voters said they were Democrats. But that number has been dropping ever since, and now roughly 32 percent of voters say they are. As Mark Penn, a former Clinton pollster, has observed, "In terms of the percentage of voters who identify themselves as Democrats, the Democratic Party is currently in its weakest position since the dawn of the New Deal."
The Democratic presidential candidates wending their way through Iowa, New Hampshire and the other primary states are offering theories about the party's decline, and what can be done about it.
Howard Dean argues that the Democratic Party has lost its soul. If it returns to its true fighting self, instead of compromising with Republicans, it will energize new and otherwise disenchanted voters.
Dick Gephardt argues that the party has lost touch with the economic interests of working men and women. Instead of offering bread-and-butter benefits to lower-middle-class workers, it endorses free trade policies that destroy job security.
Joe Lieberman argues that the party has become too liberal and too secular. It has lost touch with the values of the great American middle.
John Edwards has the most persuasive theory. He argues that most voters do not place candidates on a neat left-right continuum. But they are really good at sensing who shares their values. They are really good at knowing who respects them and who doesn't. Edwards's theory is that the Democrats' besetting sin over the past few decades has been snobbery.
Edwards came by this outlook autobiographically. On the campaign trail, Edwards will mention — every five minutes or so — that his father worked in a textile mill and his mother retired from the post office. He didn't grow up poor. But he does say that his parents were not treated with the respect and dignity they deserved.
Edwards's father rose to become a mill supervisor, but with only a high school degree, he was perpetually underestimated by the college grads around him. Edwards seems to have been raised by folks who know what it feels like to be condescended to.
His campaign is based on the argument that the Democrats need to nominate a person from Middle America, not from the coastal educated class. "My campaign is a different Democratic campaign," Edwards said in his announcement speech. "Not only will I run for the real America, I will run in the real America. . . . Democrats too often act like rural America is just someplace to fly over between a fund-raiser in Manhattan and a fund-raiser in Beverly Hills."
Edwards draws an implicit contrast between himself and Howard Dean and John Kerry by pointing out that he worked for everything he has. He loaded trucks to pay for college. "It didn't hurt me at all," he says.
He draws an explicit contrast with George Bush, arguing that the Bush administration rewards wealth and punishes work. This is not about economics, he says; it's about values. The Bush administration disrespects working Americans. It lowers taxes for people who sit around the pool and collect capital gains, while shifting the burden to people who wake up early, work hard and hope to get rich.
Obviously Edwards's campaign has not caught fire. (Although it is far too early to count him out. One thing I learned last week in Iowa is that voters are far more interested in Gephardt, Kerry and Edwards than we in the national media.) But that doesn't mean Edwards's theory is wrong, or that Democratic primary voters accurately understand their plight. When I interviewed people during the 2000 campaign I found many voters preferred Democratic policies to Republican ones. But they didn't trust Al Gore because they thought he looked down on them. They felt Bush could come to their barbershop and fit right in.
Except for Bill Clinton, Democrats have nominated presidential candidates who try to figure out Middle American values by reading the polls, instead of feeling them in their gut. If they do it again, the long, slow slide will continue.
He's kidding, right? clinton and his co-president wouldn't make a move without first conducting a poll.
Where to begin?
Why would anyone HOPE TO GET RICH in this country, so they can become public enemy number one of the Democratic party?
Advice from a guy that thought it would be a great joke to jump aboard a slow moving truck that, instead of stopping as he thought it might, took off with him hanging on for life. What a jokester that Dean guy is.
Also, I remember reading a comparison between FDR's 16 points speech for the New Deal and the Communist manifesto. Twelve of FDR's goals were almost word for word from that manifesto. The conversion of the Democrat Party to the National Socialist Party was consolidated then (with the added bonus of having FDR becoming el Presidente for life). The New Deal also confirmed the trend of Republicans no longer resisting the DemoRats but instead, consolidating Dems Socialist gains and pre-empting Dem issues for Republican electability.
The DemoRat decline is not a recent event (much more gradual) nor is it close to a point where they will self-implode with faction fighting like the USSR's Communist Party. Unfortunately, the Republican Party doesn't offer much of an alternative. Socialism has been good to them.
Is that near Es Moines or Edar Rapids?
The fact that there is an offer destroys the vision set forth by the framers of the Constitution.
What many Americans have not yet grasped is that the constitutional experiment began to fail with the ratification of the 16th and the 17th amendment to the Constitution. The failure is not recoverable.
America will slowly move toward becoming a democracy and then the failure will be complete. The 16th amendment gave the government unlimited power to directly tax the citizen. The 17th amendment then caused the Senate to become beholding to the citizen for votes. The downward spiral toward Democracy began.
Democracy leads to socialism and socialism is no more oppressive than capitalism when capitalism is not tempered with a modicum of morality.
Someone asked me what political party was the correct party to support. I answered that the political party that upheld the Constitution was the correct party and they reminded me that there is no such party.
The concensus of journalism--what defines journalism's outlook--is driven by commercial (but remarkably little by any particular advertiser) considerations. That commercial interest of journalism as a whole produces a cult of celebrity in which all who attain notoriety are welcome to participate.Those who do not participate--go along to get along--pay a heavy price. The price of admission is to never see anything which is outside of journalism's superficial, negative outlook. That is, you cannot have a celebrity good guy image projected by journalism without being a liberal. And since the individual journalist is simply a celebrity, that restriction emphatically applies to the individual journalist. Whoso would break out of that concensus does not become a more conservative journalist, nor even a former journalist--they become an unperson who never was a journalist.
The liberal politician, that is, is a celebrity good guy by vitue of being useful to journalism in precisely the same way that any individual journalist is useful to journalism--by edifying the impression of the public that journalism is the
gospelobjective truth.Even granting the truth of journalistic reports, journalism can be no more than a portion of the truth. The entertainment value of a report lies not in its historical significance but, far more typically, in its atypicality ("Man Bites Dog") or putative cause for concern ("Is Your Drinking Water Safe?"). Journalism is anticonservative precisely because its filter passes to the public only entertaining reports. The everyday blessings of God are great--and conservative--truths. But they don't make "good copy" and are simply not information of interest to journalists.
All of which is the long way of saying that although liberals are not paragons of wisdom they have the system for appearing wise down pat. Liberals are "elitists" only in the sense that they project that appearance; in fact they are sophists ("wise" in their own conceit) rather than philosophers ("lovers of wisdom"). They are indeed therefore better characterized not as "noble" but as "lacking nobilty."
In the context of a school largely for the education of the sons of noblemen, those lacking title of nobility were designated as such. As the French word for "without" is "sans", the customary abbreviation for such youth--notorious for putting on airs to compensate for being considered out of place--was "s. nob".It is the nature of a liberal to be a snob.The record of the journalistic manipulations in the Nixon and Clinton impeachments--and in covering for vote fraud in the 1960 Kennedy victory and making Florida 2000 as close and judicially contested as it was--is perfectly clear to liberals. Think of it! Liberals heard, without any hint of exception from the journalism establishment, the son of a noted machine politician declaiming in the middle of Election Night that the Democrats actually had won Florida. Mr. Daily's declaration as fact of something which, as a matter of law, he had neither ability nor legal right to know would have created an uproar if said by a Republican operative in remotely similar circumstance--and liberals approved.Liberals consistenly manifest a cavalier attitude toward (essentially uniformly Democrat) vote fraud. Liberals know and approve of the fact that journalism will go all out to install Democratic presidents and defeat Republican ones. Ultimately liberals consider the PR power of the journalism establishment, and not individual voter decisions reflected in election results, to be the center of political legitimacy.
Although liberal contempt for ballot integrity is directed at Republicans in the first instance, contempt for ballot integrity is contempt for the vote itself--as much exploitation of the Democratic voter as cheating of the Republican. It is contempt for the voter.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.