Posted on 02/17/2005 8:47:16 PM PST by The Loan Arranger
Since Bush's November victory, which brought GOP gains in the House, Senate and state capitals, confirming the Republican Party as "America's Party," Democrats have seemed adrift and despondent.
Moderates and major contributors are reacting to the election of Howard Dean as party chair as conservative alumni might react to news that SDS had just taken over the campus of the alma mater.
A word of counsel to the disconsolate: Suck it up. It is not all that bad. The Right spent years in deserts more barren than thee have ever known. When this writer went to work for Richard Nixon in 1965, Republicans had lost seven of nine presidential elections, held Congress for but four of the previous 35 years and had carried 38 percent of the presidential vote – in a two-man race.
Goldwater had lost 44 states. A massacre had ensued on the Hill, with the GOP ranks reduced to 140 House seats and 38 senators. Nixon was a two-time loser who had, all assumed, committed hara-kiri in his 1962 "last press conference," where he had rounded on the jackal pack that had bedeviled him since the Alger Hiss case. "Think of all the fun you'll be missing," Nixon railed. "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore."
In 1966, the dark night was suddenly over and the sun came out. The GOP picked up 47 House seats and six senators, and Nixon would go on to lead the party into an era where Republicans would win the presidency five times in six elections, capture both houses of Congress in 1994 and become America's party.
Instead of bewailing their fate, Democrats should study how the Nixon-Reagan new majority displaced FDR's New Deal coalition.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
There seems to be a malady that people who loose the Presidential election fall victim to...they cannot believe they lost and slowly, incrementally, slip in bitter senility.
Pat is pandering to just about everyone these days. He'll make a great president, or not. LOL!
Good. I hope the Dems listen to Pat. If anyone knows how to lose it's him.
The democrat party is not recognizable from the party it was in 1964.
Better yet, don't study it!
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