Why the GOP Will Rise Again
The strange business that is going on in New York's 23rd Congressional District, which occupies some other universe than the one commonly associated with New York, wherein the designated middle of the road Republican fell to a crypto-fascist sort conservative, is meant to signal, at least for liberals, an internecine death struggle within the GOP. The hardliners, along with Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and Fox News, will force the party so far to the right that it will be merely an oddball outpost.
At the same time, the changing color and changing demographics of the US mean, almost inevitably, a vast new Democratic majority. Not to mention that, even as doubts surround the president, every poll shows ever-greater disdain for and fast-dwindling identification with the Republican Party.
The liberals, in theory and after so long, finally have it made.
But I have lived through this before and, counter-intuitively, somehow the stranger the Republicans get, the more out there, insular, obsessive, and even rather fetishistic they become, the more they bounce back.
This is partly about the power of true believers, no matter how wacky. In a sense, the wackier the better--the wackier you are the more you have got to believe. But it is also about showboating and grand gestures and a sense of drama--the Republicans know their media.
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What needs to be remembered is this is not so much a Republican vs. Democrat situation, but an "anyone but the old crowd" scenario.
Being a NY state resident, we've seen gross mismanagement to the point that we have the highest per capita real estate tax, and we are either first or second in total tax burden. Yet it is not enough.
Once any party strangles the golden goose and complains it's not enough there is going to be backlash. If a Republican acts like a Democrat in this instance this is what will happen.
Again, it could have been the reverse party situation if the Reps had mismanaged to this degree.
We're tired of it.
Unfortunately theatricality will only take you so far because you can't argue with the results that competence brings. Katrina conclusively demonstrated that showmanship doesn't send medevac helos.
Despite the record low approval of Bush, a poor ticket, and a very attractive Democratic candidate, over 45% of the electorate voted Republican last November. They are not going anywhere.
Plus, the democrats and Obama started back stabbing their progressive supporters from the beginning, what with the Rick Warren invite to the inauguration, the joke of health care reform, with single payer dis-invited from the planning sessions, the bailout of the rich oligarchs who caused the economy to fail in the first place, etc. etc. etc. And it just keeps getting worse.
The democrats deserve to lose, and then maybe we can bring up a new type of democrat along the lines of Alan Grayson.
People often ask "Why do we always have such duds running for office? Why can't we get anyone better?" Now we have our answer: those same people say you "deserve to lose" if you start being a friend to everyone, not just the people who voted for you.
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