'Nuff said.
Posted on 08/17/2006 11:48:59 AM PDT by neverdem
In the history of the Democratic Party, the election of 1980 looms large: the year the party lost the White House, the Senate, a generation of Midwestern liberals and, in some ways, its confidence that it was the natural, even inevitable, majority party.
Now, that election has a sequel.
Call it the return of the sons: Chet Culver, the Iowa secretary of state and the son of former Senator John C. Culver, is running for governor of Iowa. Senator Evan Bayh, son of former Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, is organizing and testing the waters for a possible presidential bid in 2008. And Jack Carter, the son of former President Jimmy Carter, has decided at the age of 59 to run an uphill race for the Senate in Nevada, his first foray into electoral politics.
All of them had their political sensibilities shaped, to some extent, by the election that defeated their fathers and began a generation of conservative dominance. The Democratic strategist William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, described it as the first of “a series of rolling shocks” for the Democratic Party that “started in 1980,” when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, “and really didn’t end until 1994.”
They say their values are the same as their fathers’, but their political approach is adapted to a different time. In one measure of the difference, the elder Mr. Bayh and Mr. Culver were invariably described as liberals; the sons, in recent interviews, avoided the term.
“I find the world just too complex to embrace a single ideological point of view,” Evan Bayh said. Moreover, he argued, conservative strategists like Karl Rove like nothing better than to push Democrats into an ideological corner.
“It shouldn’t be about ideology,” Mr. Bayh said. “It ought to be about practical...”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Goody. We defeated the dads, now we get to defeat the sons. Too bad Byah can't be put to pasture in Indiana.
Ya know, I just don't understand that at all. Indiana, the 75% red state! I lived there for 8 years and still don't get it how come this guy keeps getting elected.
'Nuff said.
It should be about correct grammar.
The 1980 election drove the final stake into the heart of the Democrat Party. The old party actually died in 1968 with the rejection of the New Deal/Great Society. With that rejection, the old Democratic coalition of the mid-20th Century came unglued. What it morphed into was the New Democrat Party, which stands for nothing (but which stands against a lot of things, mainly decent things), but is an amalgamation of amoral relativists, labor goons, crackheads, perverts, power lusters, malcontents, baby-killers, cornholers, disease-carriers, nihilists, appeasers, shiftless "victims", sociopaths, race-baiters, radical atheists, journalists, and other ne'er-do-wells of assorted social pathologies. And it represents about 48% of the electorate.
First Dem to blame Karl Rove loses.
Liberals cannot admit they are liberal because no one will accept them.
Homosexuals call themselves gay for the same reason.
End in 1994? It ain't over yet.
Right. Democrats have won every election since. [snicker]
What? nDid you read his book? :P
Maybe she'll lose 50 states and the District of Columbia. That would outdo her father.
One of the greatest lines in movie history.
He says that, but the Dems are never about anything BUT ideology!
This really tells a lot about Democrats. Since they lost the congress and senate in 1994, they've been in complete shock. They've emotionally blanked out about certain unpleasantries since that time, like Clinton's impeachment in 1998, Bush's victory in 2000, their unability to parlay their hatred of Bush into taking back the house and senate in 2002, Bush's election in 2004...
They have become the captive of the Pol Pot/Daily KOS/Cindi Sheehan/Joseph Stalin wing of the party at the very time that the largest population group in history is reaching physical and emotional maturity. Hubert Humphrey must be spinning in his grave at what they have devolved to.
I see nothing good on the horizon for them in the foreseeable future.
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