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« The Freedom Caucus's possible imprisonment of John Boehner | Main | The Great Unraveling: The GOP examines itself in free fall »

October 19, 2015

Comments

Peter G

That's certainly one scenario, that the electorate will blame a bunch of politicians rather than blame one. It's still easier to get rid of one. Yglesias speaks against complacency and he is right to do so as anyone who watched the Republicans get rewarded for shutting down the government. Or so it appeared.

But that isn't the primary reason I partially agreed with him or why I sent him one of my little missives on what boat he missed. The Democratic party does have a big problem and that problem is reflected in the loss of control of state governments. Romney accused them of being the party of the 47 percent. What they need to be come is the party of about the sixty to seventy percent. They are not socialist enough. Right now their base of support has a lot of divided loyalties and goals. These will not be cured by empty claims to serve the interests of all these factions when they clearly do not. Any party that caves into demands by organized labor to dispense with the Cadillac health tax is throwing the people ACA was designed to help under the bus. Ditto for all the other social benefits that accrue to only factions within the Democratic party deserves to lose and will. If they don't embrace universality they will be easily broken apart.

Policywise I don't think Bernie Sanders knows his ass from his elbow when it comes to things like banking or trade policy. But his larger more distant vision of what social justice looks like has great appeal to me. With globalization essentially unavoidable and unstoppable the alternative to a reborn socialism is a murderous social Darwinism.

Turgidson

I thought they were near hitting bottom in 2009 when Obama took office and they were wandering around like braindead zombies with their heads cut off. But the moment they got everyone on the "oppose everything that Kenyan soshalist does" page, their electoral fortunes turned around.

I don't see why they'd do anything different when they lose to Hillary. They still haven't taken any real amount of blame from the voters for being reckless obstructionists in Congress, and in fact have won big in midterms by encouraging reactionary anger at the party attempting to govern. Maybe Hillary, a more natural and relentless pugilist than Obama, will draw out that contrast more effectively to the benefit of her party. We can hope.

But I'm pretty much convinced that the only way the GOP will decisively lose a non-presidential election is for them to take total control of the federal government and run the country into the ground again. That was how Dems won in 2006 after all. I'm not sure the country's long-term health can survive another drunken bender of GOP overreach and stupidity, though.

Bob

You've probably nailed it. The biggest reasons Republicans have grabbed so much local power are: 1) ALEC, The Club for Growth, The Chambers of Commerce and similar well-funded groups have coordinated the efforts of oligarchs in buying local legislation. 2) The backlash election of 2010 coincided with the census and allowed the Republicans to put Democrats at a disadvantage through redistricting. There won't be another census until 2020, but the demographic tide is turning, as you've taken into account.

The worry I have is that the economy might suffer a downturn. The Republicans fought tooth and nail to limit stimulus spending, and the effects might wear off at a bad time for us. They might even force the Dems to crank up a war.

Bob

All good points, Turgidson. Conservatives will always have the advantages of money and group-think. Let's hope they've gotten so uncharacteristically splintered they won't be able to pull together to cause as much mischief.

Bob

Just to cheer up the comments section:

US appeals court upholds gun laws after Newtown massacre

By LARRY NEUMEISTER

Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) -- Gun control laws passed in New York and Connecticut to ban possession of semi-automatic weapons and large-capacity magazines after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School were mostly upheld Monday by a federal appeals court.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan found core parts of the laws did not violate the Second Amendment because there was a substantial relationship between bans on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines and the "important - indeed, compelling - state interest in controlling crime." ...

Turgidson

Yep, of all the madness that has washed over our politics in the last couple decades, the thing that might be most insufferable to me is the GOP's largely successful gambit of blaming Obama for every conceivable economic ill (effectively pretending the world began in January 2009) while also preventing him from getting any further stimulus spending through Congress, and then blaming him for not doing enough to create jobs. And the innumerate both-sides-do-it media lets them get away with all of it to this day, with lollygaggers like Ron "Severe Dementia" Fournier parroting their talking points and passing it off as wise, detached "centrist" analysis, and then going off about the "debt crisis" which is only crisis to Fournier and the few dozen Village dipshits he converses with.

I need a drink.

Bob

Salud!

Jon Ponder

Here's my take. After Pres. Obama and the Democratic Party failed to respond to the Summer of Rage in 2009, when tea partyists descended on congressional town halls to spew their spittle about Obamacare, Republicans took over state governments nationwide the tea party wave the next year. My home state of North Carolina elected its first Republican Assembly and Senate since the 1870s, for example.

The Republican majorities in those states were elected in the Census year of 2010, just in time to gerrymander their congressional districts to make it hard, even impossible, for Democrats to win.

Thanks, Obama!

Now, the president and the Democrats should focus on time and money on the statewide elections so that wherever possible legislatures are flipped from red to blue before 2020 so that new Democratic majorities can un-gerrymander them. That is the only hope that Dems might take back Congress in our lifetimes.

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