I don’t know about the rest of you, but this current presidential election cycle feels like it has been going on for the last four years or so. I am so sick and tired of all of it that I can’t even stand to watch the news for any more than five minutes before I turn the channel. I am finding it harder and harder to care about what is going on in politics and Washington, D.C., regardless of whether it is being done by Democrats or Republicans. I have absolutely no enthusiasm for the upcoming election, and as much as I want Obama to lose, I am finding it very hard to see the differences between him and McCain.
If I had to sum up what I’m feeling, I’d have to say that I feel abandoned by the Republican Party.
The conservative principals upon which the Regan Revolution and the Contract for America were built seem to have been abandoned by the party “leadership.” When these principals were used as the foundation of the party platform starting in 1980, the Republican party enjoyed great success with the electorate. When Bush The Elder deviated from these principals, the Republicans lost the White House. When Newt Gingrich brought the party back to these principals in the 1994 mid-term elections, the electorate once again rewarded the Republicans with their first Congressional Majority in decades. Now, Bush The Younger has once again deviated from these principals and the Republicans will pay for it come election time.
Of course, McCain didn’t do himself any favors by adopting almost all of the Democrat agenda into his campaign. It seems as though he is going out of his way to alienate himself from the people he needs to get elected. Unfortunately for him, he’s doing an excellent job.
None of this is a secret to the Republican Party “leadership.” It’s been hard to look at a conservative blog or other publication over the last year or so without seeing somebody comment on all of this. So, the question becomes: Is the Republican base being ignored by those in the GOP who think that they know better?
Of course they are. Which leads to this question: Will it take a landslide loss in the 2008 Election on all levels for the GOP to realize the need for new and responsive leadership? Probably, but as I’ve noticed for the last year or so, the current “leadership” is heavily in denial and is refusing to see the obvious. A landslide loss may not be enough of a disaster to remove them.
So, thanks to the total abandonment of conservative principals by the GOP “leadership,” we’re all looking at having a President who associates with known racists, associates with known terrorists, associates with known anti-Semites, and has no clue regarding foreign policy, the economy, or healthcare. In fact, without a teleprompter, he can’t even speak as well as the current President.
Change isn’t always a good thing, especially when it’s made for it’s own sake.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Cheer up, Nick! You’re just going through what we liberals have been experiencing for the last 30 years or so and we survived. ‘Course there’s always the Sarandon Solution.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:50 am
I can understand why you are unhappy with the state of the presidential race since your party is going to get whooped real bad this November. Check out this item where the chairman of the NRSC sets a goal of only losing eight Senate seats in the next election.
But you are way off base on the reasons why the GOP is going to be thrashed.
It is not that the party leadership turned away from the conservative principals of Reagan. Indeed, I would argue that they have blindly and stubbornly heldfast to those principles. The real problem is that these “conservative principles” have been proven time and time again not to work.
But maybe we aren’t talking about the same thing, so let me back up and ask you what you mean by “conservative principles” and what are some examples of the current GOP leadership abandoning them (as opposed to what Reagan did for instance).
Are you referring to supply-side economics, the misguided notion that tax cuts as a rule always spur economic growth which results in increased revenue flowing into the government’s coffers? Because as I recall the Republicans under Bush have gotten every tax break that their hearts desired these past eight years and so far it hasn’t done squat to jump-start our economy or balance our budget. Instead, we are once again drowing in debt and facing an economy on the brink of recession to boot.
This is the thing that astounds me. That someone as smart as yourself would continue to support a party that is slavishly wedded to an economic policy that has failed so miserably everytime that it has been implemented. Supply side economics is a complete, utter, dismal failure. I can’t stress that enough. It is an even bigger disaster than the neo-con’s foreign policy in the Middle East. It is wrecking our economy and tearing at the fabric of our country. Please make them stop. Please stop encouraging them to continue this nonsense by always giving them your votes.
As for McCain supposedly adopting the “Democrat(ic) agenda”, could you give me some examples? Because I just don’t see it. McCain may have a reputation as a “maverick” who frequently breaks with his party, but it is largely undeserved. In fact, as Paul Krugman notes here, Barack Obama is closer to the middle in his voting record than John McCain is.
Oh, and as for the differences between Obama and McCain, perhaps I can help you out. McCain is the one who cheated on his first wife and then dumped her to run off with a wealthy heiress who is 18 years his junior.
Finally, your last graph attacking Obama is entirely unfair and unfounded. Rev. Wright was not a “known racist” when Obama first joined the church and he has renounced the objectionable things he has said when they came to his attention. “No clue regarding foreign policy, the economy or healthcare”?? Surely you are confusing him with the current administration.
Oh, wait! My apologies. I see by your final sentence that you were making a joke all along. “…without a teleprompter, he can’t even speak as well as the current President.” HaHaHaHaHa! Good one, Nick!
June 10th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Ann:
I love my country too much to abandon it merely because someone I don’t like has been elected President. Running away is something liberals do, not conservatives.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Mike:
Well, it is obvious that you’ve drank so much of the Obama Kool-Aid that there will be no way to reason with you. However, just in case you’re interested in the facts and not the liberal talking points being fed to you by the DNC:
1. One of the big misconceptions about Regan’s economic policy is that it only entails tax cuts. This is false; it entails both tax cuts and spending cuts. One without the other only yields minimal gains. The GOP leadership has abandoned Conservative Principals because they have not enacted the necessary spending cuts to allow the tax cuts to work.
2. If you think that the massive tax hikes Obama will enact once elected are going to do anything except drive the economy straight into the ground, you’re sadly mistaken. There is absolutely no way to boost the economy by having the government confiscate more of the people’s money. By taking more money away from corporations and top income earners, all that will happen is that companies will stop hiring people, as well as start letting people go, and also stop investing in expanding their businesses. If you think the economy is bad now, wait until Obama has been in office for two years. I predict that the nation will once again experience double-digit inflation as well as double-digit unemployment rates ala Jimmy Carter.
3. McCain has adopted several of the left’s positions over the course of his campaign. His immigration proposal was everything that the conservatives did not want. His adoption of the Global Warming scam also lost him huge amounts of credibility with the conservative base. In the past, his support for so-called “campaign finance reform” also offended those of us who believe in the freedom of speech guaranteed in the Constitution. All-in-all, McCain is the definition of a RINO.
4. Obama sat in the Trinity church for twenty years while Wright was spewing his racist garbage and never said a word against it until a couple of months ago when a tape of Wright’s sermons was found by the press. Obama willingly exposed his children to this guy’s racist preaching on a weekly basis, and only now does he find reason to denounce it? It’s fairly obvious that had that tape never surfaced in the media, Obama would never have denounced Wright or his church; rather Wright would still be a part of his campaign. Say all you want about McCain, but at least he doesn’t freely associate with demonstrated racists.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Nice article. Its amazing to see what crawls out from under rocks when discussing the GOP. Seems like their hatred knows no bonds. It must be the hatred that is reserved for heretics for certainly Bush is closer to the policies of the Obamaists than Reagan.
No matter what happens I think conservatives will prosper. McCain winning will only cause conservatives to rally to prevent his policies from being passed. If he losses the RINOs can be purged along with their neocon allies.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Nick:
1. One of the big misconceptions about Reagan is that he was this big champion of spending cuts. That is demonstratably false as Michael Kinsley shows here:
When Reagan took office in 1981, federal receipts (taxes) were $517 billion and outlays (spending) were $591 billion, for a deficit of $73 billion. When he left office in 1989, taxes were $991 billion and spending was $1.14 trillion, for a deficit of $153 billion.
It is true that Reagan cut spending in some areas (mainly domestic areas favored by Democrats), but they were mostly inconsequential and were more than swamped by the huge increase in military spending that he supported.
So once again, what has the current Republican leadership done or not done that is so different from Reagan?
2. First off, Obama is not proposing “massive tax hikes.” Nevertheless, something will have to be done to patch the huge hole in the federal dam left by Bush’s fiscally irresponsible tax giveaways to the super-rich.
Second, lets look more closely at your contention that companies will stop hiring people if the government takes any steps to put its fiscal house back in order. I’m sure you recall that one of the first things Bill Clinton did when he came to office was to push through a modest tax increase on the wealthy - one that was vociferously opposed by the Republicans. And the first thing that George W. did when he came to power was to push through the first of his major tax cuts. Here is the question, and I want you to think about this carefully. How did businesses respond specifically in terms of job creation?
This chart gives you the answer.
3. So McCain is a pariah on the right because he takes a slightly less radical position on immigration reform and is not in complete denial about the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting the need to do something about global warming. That and his butt-covering efforts to try and make up for his complicity in the Keating Five scandal.
That’s it? He has the eighth most conservative voting record in the Senate and is rock solidly right-wing on every other issue foreign or domestic. Boy, you guys really are sticklers about having everyone toe the line and walk in lockstep with every little aspect of your ideology.
4. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright did not stand in his pew every Sunday for the past 20 years and “spew racist garbage.” That is complete and utter bullshit.
Obama’s detractors have combed through every sermon that Wright has ever given, every recorded utterance in his long career in the pulpit, and all they have come up with are a small handful of instances where he made objectionable comments during sermons (which were then stitched together in a YouTube video and repeated over and over and over on CNN.)
What that tells me is that 99 percent of the time Rev. Wright’s sermons were completely unobjectionable and talked about Jesus and love and ministering to the poor and so forth. The few times that Wright said things that were objectionable, Obama was not present. When he was made aware of the comments, he did object to them. He was NOT subjecting his family to racist preaching on a weekly basis. That is absolute nonsense.
June 17th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
A combination of things brought us to this point.
Even during the Reagan Revolution I knew we would be where we are today. Conservatives have given up the strategic ground. They have allowed liberals to control the press, the network news, Hollywood, colleges and universities, high schools, grade schools, major foundations, and almost every important leverage point for politics and culture that there is.
The media bias provides operational cover for Democrats like air power gives cover to the Marines. See if you can imagine Democrats getting away with what they get away with if the media had an ideological balance.
Until the imbalance is addressed, you will find “Republicans” like John McCain taking an incoherent mix of Republican and Democrat positions in order to be “strategic” or “tactical.” The effect is that hard-core Democrats can govern from the extreme left, while Republicans govern from the middle.
If you want to see the future attitudes of Americans, look at Europeans today.
June 19th, 2008 at 11:37 am
He was NOT subjecting his family to racist preaching on a weekly basis. That is absolute nonsense.
It may have been possible to delude yourself into believing that (and for Obama to lie about it) prior to Wright’s National Press Club appearance, but not after. In that speech, Wright himself took complete responsibility - proudly - for each and every anti-American, white-hating utterance with which he had been charged.
That’s why Obama threw him under the bus the next day…duh. Meanwhile Obama’s famous speech on race, which was supposed to be recited by every schoolchild for generations? Phhhhht. “Utter bullshit.”