I think of GWB and BO as a pair.
Posted on 12/14/2009 3:21:31 AM PST by rabscuttle385
Conventional political wisdom pegs Republicans as the most threatened by pollster Scott Rasmussen's shocking finding that a Tea Party party would draw more support today than the GOP, but Democrats have even more to fear.
Consider the situation facing Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., an incumbent representing one of her party's most reliable congressional districts in the country, thanks to the 18 point registration advantage Democrats enjoy over Republicans.
Her district is so solidly Democratic that Titus has voted with the liberal Democratic majority on all three of the major issues before Congress this year, including President Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade, anti-global warming energy bill, and the House version of Obamacare.
In normal circumstances, Titus should cruise to re-election because her voting on the big issues of the day appears to match the views of her constituents. But guess what -- the latest Mason-Dixon poll finds Titus in a dead heat with Joe Heck, a relatively unknown Republican.
Titus' poor showing can't be ascribed to ethics problems. As RedState.com's Leon Wolfe notes, "Titus does not have any major corruption or personal issues driving up her unfavorables like Jon Corzine did or like Chris Dodd does."
And, as Wolfe further notes, "it also can't be that voters are punishing Titus for the failure of the Democratic legislative agenda in general; the House passed all three measures and Titus was a contributing factor to all three."
The fact is that most of Titus constituents in a heavily Democratic district oppose what she is voting for in Congress. The Mason-Dixon survey found voters in the district oppose Obamacare 47-41 percent.
Now let's look at Rasmussen's numbers. Most of the media coverage focused on the fact 36 percent of the respondents picking Democrats for congressional voting, compared with 23 percent going for a Tea Party-endorsed candidate, and a mere 18 percent opting for the GOP candidate.
That's significant news to be sure, as it shows just how sorry a state into which the Republican Party has fallen since the 2004 election. Frankly, it looks like the GOP is permanently branded as the party that promised but failed to get Washington spending and corruption under control.
The GOP now has the same problem faced by General Motors and Chrysler ever since American cars and trucks became indelibly branded among consumers as having less quality than Japanese vehicles.
GM -- and Chrysler to a lesser extent -- closed the quality gap years ago, but the second-rate image remains among the biggest threats to the two firms' prospects for ever regaining buyers' confidence. That both had to be bailed out by government and are now effectively controlled by Washington bureaucrats and the United Auto Workers union only makes it worse.
But wait, it gets worse for the Democrats, too, thanks to the abandonment of the Obama Democrats by independents. The Tea Party candidate gets the nod by 33 percent of independents, compared with 25 percent for the Democrat and only 12 percent for the Republican.
Most significantly, Rasmussen found 41 percent of his respondents overall saying the Democrats and Republicans are so much alike that a new party is required to represent the American people. Among independents, 60 percent say a new party is needed.
We are witnessing a widening, cross-partisan voter rebellion against Washington deficits, taxes, spending, regulation, and cronyism incited by two major factors. First came the earmark-powered spending splurge and congressional corruption under George Bush and the Republican congressional majority.
Voters threw the GOP out of power in Congress in 2006 and out of the White House in 2008. But then the second factor came into focus when the Obamacrats got it exactly backward by concluding those elections proved voters wanted to turn America into a European welfare state.
Voters wanted "change," to be sure, but that meant lower spending and taxes, less bureaucratic meddling in their lives, fewer federal boondoggles, and no more corruption or coddling of special interests. Obamacrats are instead giving them monumentally more of everything they don't want.
That is why the worst thing that can be said of a Washington politician these days isn't "Democrat" or "Republican," it's "incumbent."
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott's Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.
You described the problem in a nutshell. For some reason, a huge portion of our population seems to think that no matter who gets elected, the U.S. will just go on as before with only a few minor changes of course. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “I’m just not interested in politics,” but I can tell you that every last one of them is lamenting their situation today, from loss of job to inability to sell their homes for the prices they paid for them. I like to remind them: their state is the RESULT of not only politics, but of too many people not being “interested” in politics.
What a government will do while the people are otherwise occupied has filled history books and libraries, with Hitler and Pol Pot being only among the more recent cases—but not at all isolated.
“What a government will do while the people are otherwise occupied has filled history books and libraries, with Hitler and Pol Pot being only among the more recent cases—but not at all isolated.”
Next time ask them if “Dancing with the Stars” will cure their notice of default?
“Yep, I despise the fact that W considered it beneath the office to actually defend himself and his policies from the lies of the left.
He and this attitude are 80% responsible for the election of 0bama.”
Don’t forget BBB....Bush Butt Buddies....
McCain
Graham
et. al
By the way, good post.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and I’m going to keep on saying it. The Tea Partiers are the last chance to save the Republican Party from itself.
The Tea Partiers need to flood Republican caucuses at the grass roots and outvote the RINOs. They need to get their candidates nominated, and then they need to support them with the hard-earned money and valuable time.
As sympathetic as I am to a third party, there is no realistic chance of that happening because when all of the people willing to attend protests sit down in a room to hammer out a platform they’ll have so many differences and so little experience in how to resolve them that they’ll fracture into a dozen cliques and never accomplish anything. Furthermore, even if that hurdle could be overcome, building the machinery for a third party from the precinct to national level and everything in between is a monumental task costing tens of millions of dollars.
It would be far, far better to take over the machinery of the Republican Party, and that really wouldn’t be all that difficult. All it would take is for several million people to get up off their butts, resolve to be committed to the task of changing things, and go to every party meeting that exists and outvote anyone else there.
I think of GWB and BO as a pair.
A pair of idiots!
Interesting analogy. The GOP's promise and failure to get Washington spending and corruption under control is akin to Lee Iacocca promising better quality, then delivering the K-car.
Romney will try to purchase the Tea Party movement.
I believe the purpose of the Tea Party is to wake the GOP up and convince it to align itself with the conservative principles that are supposed to be the GOP’s platform. Either the GOP has to represent conservatism, or another party must take its place. The GOP sans conservatism is impotent.
That was extremely well done.
Not quite true. It looks like "for Obama care" is the worst thing you can say right now. Republican incumbents aren't facing defeat in 2010 (except for Joe Cao).
It's clear to path to victory for Republicans is to become the Tea Party so to speak, not just pay lip service. They better listen.
The only real danger is Socialist, Communist, and the Nazis of the DEMS.
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