As long as I could recall, we Democrats have prided ourselves on being the “Big Tent” party. This probably stems from a combination of deft political maneuvering by FDR and a singular hatred of the Republicans after the stock market crash of 1929. The downside of the big tent is that nobody inside agrees on much. Here is an article by Peter Baker and David Herszenhorn of the New York Times that talks about how allies in the U.S. Senate are criticizing President-elect Obama and his team about a stimulus package that they claim looks a little too much like trickle-down economics. Everyone agrees that we need more jobs created. Even Republicans! But nobody agrees on how to go about it. President Bush was the darling of the party (not to mention their leader), and was able to set the agenda. But he certainly did that with a lot of support from Republican congressional leaders. Obama doesn’t seem to be doing the same.
This does not bode well for the next administration. If Democrats form a circular firing squad, as they did in 1994, we can expect a Republican Congress just two years from now.
As an American living abroad, very few people ever asked me what I thought of President Bush. They all have their opinions, it seems. And while few Swiss generally share their opinions with me, they are very intrigued about my own opinion of the incoming president. To this question, I’ve developed a pretty stock answer: “I don’t know. Ask me in a few years.”
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.