Posted on 12/03/2004 8:39:28 AM PST by jalisco555
The news has been filled with giddy Republican talk of the 2004 triumph as a realigning election — one that ushers in, as Newsweek put it, "political dominance that could last for decades, as FDR's New Deal did."
The Republicans are living in a fool's paradise. It's true that over the next few years Republicans will have enormous power. In the long run, however, they're doomed. Doomed, I tells ya! Doooomed! OK, I may have gotten slightly carried away there. Perhaps "doomed" overstates things a tad. But President Bush's political formula does carry the seeds of its own demise.
The classic example of a political realignment, as Newsweek notes, is the New Deal coalition. The New Deal succeeded politically because it delivered popular social programs to its constituents. As FDR's advisor Harry Hopkins famously described the formula, "tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect." The Democrats' New Deal coalition eventually died of two main causes. First, it contained both those Americans most adamantly in favor of segregation (Southern conservatives) and those most adamantly opposed (liberals and blacks). The civil rights movement split that fissure wide open. Second, the Vietnam War — and the Democrats' reaction to it — destroyed the party's credibility on foreign policy.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Chait wrote an article months back where he bragged about how much he hated President Bush, and about how that hatred was normal and healthy. He'd sooner nuke the red states than actually visit one of them.
ratmedia droppings.
Boy, this argument is a stretch to say the least. Oh well, as long as the Dems keep thinking up reason why Republicans won't succeed, the less time they spend looking in the mirror and trying to change their own party.
By my calculations, conservative women are out-producing liberal women by 2 to 1. I think we know who is doomed.
Yes, just let the far-left fools at the Left Angeles Times keep raving their fabricated scenarios...it will make for a quicker death for them.
More liberal tripe.
The rest of the article's not there, but I think where he's going with this is that any majority party is really just a coalition with groups that are often at odds with each other. Chait's wrong about the need for providing services to your constituency to get them to vote for you. If anything, the GOP majority wants just the opposite! But what do you expect from a liberal from LA?
Anyway, the only danger I see for the GOP in the next couple of decades is the fact that, like the old Democrat majority of the 60s, the GOP contains two widely disparate groups on social issues. There are some Republicans who are extremely culturally conservative (Santorum), others who are libertarian (Specter), and others who just don't care about social issues (McCain). Now that we're in power, whatever one of those groups does is going to PO the other two with regard to social issues. The Democrats have it much easier because almost every single Democrat is pro-abortion. You have to look under rocks to find a pro-life Democrat! But Bush wouldn't have won without moderate Republicans as well as conservatives. The social issues chasm in the GOP is probably our party's greatest danger to maintaining our majority.
If they stay living in their insane delusional world, they can never win an election again, NEVER AGAIN.
I used to wonder who would win the hearts and minds of the Democratic Party. The far left has obviously won the day. Now I wonder how long it will take for the conservatives in the party to give up hope and abandon the party. How long will it be before we see Joe Liberman with an R behind his name?
A nice thought for a Friday/almost the weekend.
There are many "traditional" Democrats who detest what their party has become, but who just can't bring themselves to vote for or to become Republican. Maybe we need to help them create a new party (as the Republicans were vis-a-vis the Whigs in the mid-19th Century) so they can move to it. We'd probably lose a few of our more liberal RINOs to such a party, but would that be all bad?
The big risk for republicans is economic - we are living in a very high risk time. The dollar devaluation, the trade gap, lack of personal savings, and the growing economic prowess of China don't mean economic disaster for the US, but it could. And if it happens under a republican president, there won't be another republican for a long time, even if there was nothing he could do about it. See Hoover/FDR as example.
Probably by even more when you include all the abortions the lib gals have had
You said "The big risk for republicans is economic - we are living in a very high risk time. The dollar devaluation, the trade gap, lack of personal savings, and the growing economic prowess of China don't mean economic disaster for the US, but it could. And if it happens under a republican president, there won't be another republican for a long time, even if there was nothing he could do about it. See Hoover/FDR as example."
Potential problems, for sure. But, if GW handles the Social Security mess with some parial privitization and all else keeps chugging along as is, we are in for a golden age not seen since Reagan.
Why go on reading after a line like that? It confirms the impression that the New Republic is written by children. If he knew that we know that, he might have gone for a little more gravitas.
It's hard to go wrong predicting that the party on top will be on the bottom sometime. Every governing party oversteps itself. But timing -- knowing when a group is still on the upswing and when the decline has begun -- is everything.
Eventually Republicans will lose the White House. And at some point Democrats will control Congress again. But it's worth noting that with 51% Bush isn't likely to be tempted into the kind of hubris that destroyed Johnson or Nixon. More likely his second term will resemble Eisenhower's or Reagan's, perhaps a holding pattern, but not a failure.
To be sure, Bush is younger and more ambitious than Reagan or Eisenhower, and he will attempt more, but I don't think he'll stumble in the way that Nixon or Johnson did. At least, he seems able to step back a bit from the Washington scene and his own ambitions and see things in perspective.
One can only hope.
I think Bush will have the most consequential second term in modern American history. He will simply defy the skeptics again and again. By the time he's through Social Security and the tax code will be reformed and American foreign policy will be irreversibly oriented in the direction of promoting freedom and democracy abroad. His opponents will be left dizzy by his refusal to be defeated. History will look back at his presidency as one of the five or six most important in this nation's history.
Mr. Chait is certainly one of the more unpleasant RATS in a party that's full of unpleasant people. However, his op-ed
-- aside from his hatred for Republicans -- really isn't far off the mark. It points to some serious problems for the GOP. We do well to look squarely at our challenges,
not ignore them because the messenger is a bad guy.
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