May 22, 2008
Is The Party Over For Republicans?
The Nation: In The Past Two Years, The GOP's Dream Of A Permanent Majority Has Become A Nightmare
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President George W. Bush delivers a speech during the opening of the World Economic Forum on the Middle East, Sunday, May 18, 2008, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)
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Photo Essay Endorser-In-Chief President Bush backs Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain.
Two long years ago, veteran political reporter Thomas Edsall published Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power. In the course of several hundred fluidly argued, thoroughly dispiriting pages, Edsall threw a wet blanket on the hopes of Democrats who thought their party stood a fighting chance of wresting power back from Karl Rove & Co. Republicans were more ruthless, more unified and more generously bankrolled by big business, Edsall maintained, in addition to being inordinately savvier. He was, of course, hardly alone in this view. "Republican hegemony in America is now expected to last for years, maybe decades," crooned conservative writer Fred Barnes after the 2004 election. "We are in a tremendous amount of trouble," sighed a glum Democratic chairman in the New York Times that same fall.
Although the Democrats may still find a way to lose the election in November, no serious observer would suggest today that it would be because they succumbed to an indomitable foe. Less than a full election cycle after Rove's "permanent majority" was said to be upon us, Bush's approval ratings have sunk to the lowest level of any President since presidential job-approval ratings were introduced. Republicans in Congress are streaming for the exits. Surveys show young voters identifying as Democrats over Republicans by double-digit margins, and the 81 percent of Americans who believe the country is seriously "on the wrong track" have conservatives wondering aloud whether Rove's dream has become a nightmare.
"Without change we could face a catastrophic election this fall," warned former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in a May 6 article on the website of the journal Human Events. His prognosis is echoed in several new books written by conservatives that come wrapped in optimistic packaging about how the situation may be righted with the proper adjustments but that are full of gloomy pronouncements about the disaster to come if the same tired formula is pursued. "A generation of young Americans has been lost to our party," worries former Bush speechwriter David Frum in Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, the content of which is far less sanguine than the title suggests. "Conservatives have conspicuously failed to earn [Americans'] trust on most domestic policy questions," write journalists Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in Grand New Party, which argues that Bush's plutocratic policies have begun to alienate even many on the right.
The chastened tone of these books is striking in a movement that could scarcely have sounded more sure of itself a few years ago, when the myriad factions of the Republican Party--libertarians, opponents of abortion, champions of big business, neocons--appeared to be marching in lockstep to Karl Rove's tune. Now Republicans are hurling blame at Bush for betraying conservative principles as they search about for scapegoats. "Everyone is sniping at each other," a member of the House Republican Conference recently told Politico shortly after the GOP lost a special election in Louisiana's 6th District, a seat it had held since 1975. The defeat came on the heels of a similar setback in March in Illinois, in the district formerly represented by Dennis Hastert. These turnovers, and a widely anticipated special election loss on May 13 in Mississippi, cast a grim shadow over a recent meeting on Capitol Hill where Tom Cole, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, warned members there were no resources to "save" incumbents facing well-heeled Democratic challengers.
To some degree, strategic and philosophical tensions among conservatives are nothing new. The priorities of Friedrich von Hayek devotees and James Dobson fans, to say nothing of pro-empire neoconservatives and isolationist paleocons, have never been neatly aligned. In many ways, it's a wonder such disparate groups ever found a home in the same party. Yet every time hopes have risen on the left that the various strands of the conservative coalition might unravel, these hopes have been dashed. The conservative movement that has reshaped the political landscape over the past four decades has proven resilient and enviably adept at pressing forward with an agenda that never seems to moderate. Will now be any different? Will the conservative crackup under Bush come to be seen as a minor detour on the right's steady march to power? Or will it bring an era to a close?
Some who see a lasting realignment under way point to demographic factors, in particular the growing numbers of Hispanics, Asians, professional women and unmarried people who have joined the electorate in recent years and to whom the GOP has done little to endear itself. But while the number of registered Republicans has been falling steadily, more Americans still identify themselves as conservative than liberal. The main problem facing the conservative movement is not demographic. It is doctrinal. It is the problem that confronts any insurgency whose heady idealism comes crashing up against reality once power is seized.
For forty years, the most important trait of conservatives of all stripes has been their unshakable conviction that their vision and their ideas are right. Moral permissiveness, a feckless foreign policy, a welfare-dependent underclass: all the viruses that had infected the body politic under the stewardship of liberals would be cured if only conservatives were given a chance. The right was united above all in its belief that a new Eden would dawn when Americans were liberated from the tyranny of government, whose intrusive hands reached unwarrantedly into every aspect of citizens' lives (save, of course, the bedroom, where those hands were needed to prevent overly liberated citizens from indulging the wrong impulses). When Bill Clinton ended welfare and declared that the era of big government was over, the argument seemed to have been cinched: at long last, even Democrats had come to realize the folly of their ways. But something funny happened on the way to making the revolution complete: when Republicans were finally given the opportunity to free the citizenry from the chains of the Leviathan state, the result was crony capitalism, fiscal recklessness and bumbling incompetence on an unprecedented scale. The opportunity to govern without interference from liberals came, and the consequences--in New Orleans, in Baghdad, in neighborhoods ravaged by housing foreclosures, in levels of inequality unmatched since the Gilded Age--have been calamitous.
Conservatives stunned by this turn of events shouldn't be: it's not exactly shocking that a party committed to the idea that government is the problem did not appoint qualified experts to run agencies like FEMA. Or that a party that views the market as a solution to everything found a way to disburse no-bid contracts to the likes of Halliburton and tax cuts to billionaires in the midst of a war. Yet the idea that Republicans could shrink the bloated government down to size without compromising the national interest--indeed, while enhancing freedom--has proved anything but easy to rebut. Ronald Reagan won landslide victories by promising to get big government off ordinary Americans' backs. Democrats were routinely pilloried as "tax-and-spend liberals" who poured voters' hard-earned savings into outmoded social programs that only exacerbated the problems they promised to solve.
It took Bush's ruinous tenure to illustrate that there are some problems--predatory lending, escalating energy costs, natural disasters--for which the government is a necessary remedy and, perhaps, to persuade less affluent voters to think twice before aligning themselves with the Republican Party against "liberal elites." For several decades, Republicans have succeeded in luring such voters into their ranks not merely by promising to lower their taxes but also by tapping into their cultural anxieties on issues like gay marriage, abortion and guns. A few years ago, one would have been hard-pressed to find a pundit in the country who didn't think this strategy was working. Indeed, the evidence suggested as much: in 2004, for example, white working-class women with annual household incomes between $30,000 and $50,000 backed Republicans by a margin of 60 to 39 percent. Their support helped Bush carry crucial blue-collar states like Ohio. Soon thereafter, Time magazine named Bush its Person of the Year.
Two years later, however, this same group of female voters swung to the Democrats, and just like that the GOP majority in Congress was gone. The shift undoubtedly had something to do with growing disenchantment over the war in Iraq. But it's also possible that, at a time when more and more Americans are vulnerable to the dislocations of an increasingly volatile economy, the right's pro-family, antigovernment rhetoric has worn thin. The paradox of championing stability and traditional values, on the one hand, and unfettered capitalism, on the other, is apparently no longer something only liberals find odd. In a cover story in National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru and Richard Lowry observed that on domestic issues "it is almost impossible to exaggerate the Democratic advantage" and warned that ignoring the economic anxieties of working-class voters who've been absorbed into the GOP could prove fatal. "We don't have to support 'universal coverage' on health care," they wrote. "But we ought to talk more about health care than about the budget." Douthat and Salam agree, citing a Pew survey conducted in 2005 that divided the electorate into nine discrete categories. Voters in several of the conservative groups expressed criticism of big business and support for more government involvement to address the economic risks facing families, even if this required paying higher taxes. On domestic issues, they conclude, the Republican Party "isn't just out of touch with the country as a whole; it's increasingly out of touch with its own base."
By Eyal Press
Reprinted with permission from The Nation.
 | If you like this article, check out www.thenation.com for more investigative reports, timely editorials and incisive columns |
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The secrets of tennis legend 
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See all 80 CommentsThe " Culture Club of Corruption" led by Boy George W
will ultimately be recorded as " The Most Inept,Corrupt Era "in the U. S. history.
Students will be in awe as they read about the failures and arrogant criminal happenings of " The W Report Card " days.
As we live and learn,this valuable lesson must never be repeated.Never,under Any circumstances ,let a RepubliCon Occupy the White House. NEVER !
OUTLAW RepubliCons!!!!!
IT SHOULD be Against The LAW To be a RE-CON!
They should ALL Be Jailed,Waterboarded
There Money to be used for National Health Insurance
They should be Newtered ( Spelled Correctly :)
While in prison,Forced to listen to Rove & Shrub
All their assets divvied up to maintain Arts & Music Schools
CEO`s should be forced to work at Mickey Dees
After their Parole,they`ll live in trailer courts
in weather stricken areas.
At No Time Will They EVER be Able to Hold Political Office !
These CONS Have RUINED The WORLD !!!
BAN ALL REPUBLICONS !!!!!!!!!!!!
CRIMINALS,KILLERS,THIEVES,
LIARS,..ALL RE-CONS!!!
Very well said, sir.
We have a completely imploded presidency and a thoroughly compromised Congress that has until very recently been under total Rethugnican control.
And now we are treated to the grand spectacle of the Rethugnican party wringing their hands in desperation over the sour prospects that loom in November,
Sorry guys (Actually not one iota sorry) You reap what you sow.
This is really megachickens coming home to roost. You were large and in charge. Instead of thinking what the country needed, you focused on what who you needed to stroke and kiss to keep your plush little nest at Capital Hill.
Instead of really protecting us, you goosestepped in formation to let our government spy on us, render us to torture and deprive us of our privacy.
Instead of ensuring the prosperity of the many, you grossly enriched the favored and the few at our expense.
As far as the majority of Americans are concerned, you can all go jump off a very high building.
Do the honorable thing (for once). Do not write books or give speeches. Just collect your overly generous pension and lay low. Try to disappear.
Nation''s Poorest 1% Now Controls Two-Thirds Of U.S. Soda Can Wealth
WASHINGTON%u2014The can monopoly enjoyed by the nation''s poorest one percent highlights the growing and possibly unbridgeable gap between the rich and mega-poor.
People like you , wanting health care, food, a job , are ruining this country. You need to put your faith in the republican party. They gave us: universal default on credit cards, sucked the value out of our 401k accounts by destroying the value of the dollar, shrunk our health insurance while sending medical costs through the roof and threatened to arrest us for going to Canada for prescriptions. I only wish GB could run again I feel so good. Oh, I didn''t even mention the mortgage nightmare, housing crash , Bank bailoutwhilethepeoplesleepinthestreet mess.
There will not be another Republicon president for forty years.
are all one of the same.
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Posted by tylenol6 at 03:25 PM : May 23, 2008
+ report abuse
NOT from where I sit! Social Security, Medicare, Health Care, Debt, War.... I see MAJOR differences between McSame and the other two. IF you can''t see that YOU aren''t looking!!
How about future ex-cons!
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Posted by briannorwood at 02:38 PM : May 23, 2008
+ report abuse
I like it!
are all one of the same.
The disastrous farm bill of last week is a perfect example of "Nancy in Wonderland." The Congressional Record are Diaries of a Mad Queen - taking billions of tax dollars from city dwellers and giving them to corporate tycoons of the prairies.
If that wasn''t bad enough, she is is continuing to pump billions into ethanol production, contributing to malnutrition and starvation so the whole world can be on food stamps.
WAR CRIMES TRIALS ACTION STARTED!
Obama Seeks Red Cross Help On War Crime Charges Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld
Posted by Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscr on Wednesday, May 21st at 11:59 AM
May 20, 2008
Obama Seeks Red Cross Help On War Crime Charges Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld
By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers (Traduccisn al Espaqol abajo)
Russian Foreign Ministry reports to President Medvedev are stating today
that US Presidential candidate Barack Obama has sent one of his top aides
named Valerie Jarrett to meet with officials from the International
Committee of the Red Cross, in Geneva, Switzerland, to what is being
described in these reports as the %u2018preliminary stage%u2019 to begin actions in
the International Court of Justice charging the present United States
President, Vice President and former US Defense Secretary with war crimes.
Secretary Rumsfeld, and other US Officials, were in violation of Articles 3
and 4 of the Geneva Convention and could be tried for Crimes Against
Humanity.
Posted by bluestardad at
Posted by wernet2 at 01:17 PM : May 23, 2008
How about future ex-cons!
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