Category: Politics

“Republican Moderates to Blame” – Now THAT Was Predictable

The rats are out of the ship, now that Senator McCain has lost.  Although they are on all sides of the spectrum, here is an article from CNN that demonstrates just how fast the Family Research Council has started complaining that moderates are to blame, and that Republicans should shift right.  While anyone’s 20/20 hindsight is less than interesting, as we discussed prior to McCain’s loss, his problem was that he tried to advance two separate strategies and alienated both of his bases.  John McCain did not simply run a moderate race.

Arguably, however, the reckoning will go the other way: President Bush’s administration is about as unpopular AND as far to the right as one could possibly get in America, and John McCain could not run farther from it.  As proof, where was President Bush the last month of the campaign?  Answer: he was hiding, keeping a low profile, as we previously discussed.  Elizabeth Dole, a conservative, lost her seat in the Senate, and Virginia has gone blue.

The fight for the soul of the Republican party is on.  Whether they will remain right wing conservative will very much depend not only on how the electorate views the McCain loss, but how President Obama and the economy fares in the first two years.

Obama Wins: Another Barrier Broken

In 1861 a group of rogue states went to war with the Union based on the election of Abraham Lincoln, a man who believed that slavery was wrong.  Some argue that it all boiled down to economics, as in “who will tend our fields, if not slaves?”  Whatever the case may be, it wasn’t until 1865 and over 600,000 deaths later that the war was won by the north.  Days after the end of the war, Lincoln lost his life, and racism raged in the United States for one hundred years or more.

Yesterday America elected another man from the Land of Lincoln, Barack Obama, to put another nail in the coffin of America’s tragec era.  While it would take great effort for him to be as awful as his predecessor, it will take even greater effort for him to get us out of all of the messes that have been left for him.  We live in a divided country, as Mr. McCain received approximately 47% of the vote.  One can hope that of that 47% only a small handful were racists.

We have a huge ballooning deficit that will cripple our ability to address great problems of the day.  We have troops at war in two – four countries, depending on how you count, and we have an economy that is in a recession that many experts believe will last from three to five years.  If it lasts even three years, President-elect Obama will have great difficulty being re-elected.  In the process of fixing all of the above, he might be able to deal with education, healthcare, and national infrastructure.

One thing he has already done has been to shatter the image that a black person cannot lead the country.  Maybe next time it will be a hispanic or jewish woman.  One could only imagine the day when our president is a muslim.

Past Political Themes: Compassionate Conservative

Some time ago – in fact just over eight years ago, Governor George W. Bush started describing himself as a “compassionate conservative”.  Here’s the question: what was so compassionate about this president?  Did he actually help the poorest members of society?  Did he help those who were most disenfranchised?  I see no evidence of his doing so.  Perhaps it is unfair to judge him in this light given that he now seemingly defines his presidency as how he responded to the attacks on September 11th.  Or perhaps we should simply not speak ill of the lame duck, not because it’s in bad taste but simply because it is not worth our time.  But feel free if you like.

Update: Obama now up by 14

This according to a new CBS/New York Times poll. Why?  For the precise reasons I’ve been writing: McCain has managed to dirty himself with the mud he and his running mate have been throwing.  The funny thing is that the mud just keeps on coming.  The next trick will be a new message from the McCain campaign.  We call that “too little too late”.

Now some people are talking about The So-Called “Bradley Effect”, where Tom Bradley ran against George Deukmejian for California Governor and peaked too early and lost.  This should not be confused with the Tom Bradley Blunder of the Lee Atwater Invitational Dead Pool.  In the case of the Bradley Blunder, one of the invitational entrants mysteriously requested that Tom Bradley’s name be struck from her list of people to die.  It later emerged that she had met the former mayer of Los Angeles and liked him.  The lesson: never meet people who you bet money will die.

And The Mud Continues to Fly…

Yes, it seems as though the best chance Senator John McCain thinks he has is to throw mud, and he has begun the slinging by continuing the nonsensical charges about an association with someone who was a sixties radical that has been debunked in the major press outlets.  Meanwhile, those same outlets (Reuters, CNN, New York Times) are reporting a gross abuse of power by McCain’s running mate, Governor Sarah Palin.  What’s the chance that he has actually associated with Mrs. Palin?  And this is the thing that scares me the most about this Republican ticket.  Normally, I could care less about the VP pick.  However, as the current VP has demonstrated an unhealthy predilection to abuse his power, I would like to see the practice stop.  Worse, McCain is no spring chick.  He could actually die in office, and this woman would then be able to continue her perssonal crusades, not from the Governor’s office, but from the Whitehouse.

In the meantime, President Bush is nowhere to be found, except in a sketchy piece in today’s New York Times, in which he told people that it’s a good thing he’s still president and that he wouldn’t have wanted to deal with the economic mess his own deregulation helped create day one in office.  The problem with this statement is that he has spoiled nearly everything he has touched: our budget, education, foreign policy, our Constitution & Bill Of Rights, our standing in the world, and many other things.  Please let’s hope the damage can be contained by a prompt change of power.