I do not counsel despair, but that doesn't mean I embrace optimism.
Update: Guiliani got an enthusiastic reaction when he snarled at Ron Paul:
"As someone who lived through the attack of September 11 -- that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq -- I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th," he said.Never heard it before? Osama Bin Laden, despite his antipathy for Saddam, mentioned the embargo of Iraq in plenty of speeches, both before and after 9/11. Here's one from 2004:
"Who are those who have erroneous ideas and who are a corrupt gang? Are they the mujahideen, or are they those who cooperated with America in murdering more than one million children within a few years, during their wicked embargo on Iraq, in what was the biggest massacre of children known to humanity?"Know thy enemy" has been considered sound strategy throughout history. So why hasn't Guliani bothered to learn what bin Laden had to say?
11 comments:
Give Ron Paul credit - he stood his ground up there. I heard that he won the initial polling afterwards, which would surprise me since Fox seemed to be slanting against him.
I think the only reason for optimism for the Dems in 2008 is that a lot of money is going to their candidates.
Last week on CNBC, Warren Buffett said that either Hillary Clinton or Obama would be terrific as President and he seemed to indicate that he would help either candidate if asked.
I urge you not to worry. The Republican Party has destroyed itself over the last six years. They shouldn't even bother to run anyone in 2008.
Don't worry, Joe. The Republican Party has successfully destroyed itself over the last six years. The whole world knows what screw-ups they are.
Barring election theft, the Republican Party has absolutely no chance of winning anything from now on. They shouldn't even put anyone up in 2008. Let the Democrats and the Greens duke it out.
By what standards are you so sure that the GOP is going down?
The Democratic base loves to bash Democratic politicians. It's what we DO. The true liberals won't support the Democrats in Congress unless they get rid of Bush/Cheney and/or end the war.
And the Dems simply cannot do that. They do not have the votes, neither in the Senate nor in their home districts.
More and more Dem voters are going to follow David Lindorff's path of righteous anger. Nose, meet scissors.
Meanwhile, independents are increasingly being swayed by the endless FOX attacks on Pelosi and such. If all else fails, Lieberman will make the switch official in the Senate.
So there's your turnover in Congress.
On the Presidential level, the polling FAVORS THE REPUBLICANS, and that is before the real swiftboating has begun. The amount of money going to Dems may be impressive, but so what? Dems simply will not do the dirty things that the Republicans will do.
Guiliani will put NY in play, which means that the Ds cannot win the general election. The only way to keep NY solidly Democratic is to run Hillary, and Hillary will energize the Republican base elsewhere like nobody else will.
I would remind you that in 1976, in the wake of Watergate, Ford lost by a mere 2 percentage points. This, after Ford ran one of the most inept presidencies and campaigns ever seen. This, after Ford made the biggest gaffe in debate history -- the "Poles are free" gaffe.
And before you say, "Yeah, but Jimmy Carter was a sucky candidate" -- no he wasn't. Whatever you may think about his subsequent presidency is a separate issue: He ran a good campaign, much better than Ford's. Listen to the testimony of someone who was alive and awake and watching politics at the time.
And yet Carter won by a mere 2 percent.
So the reasons for optimism are...WHAT, exactly?
To be fair, Ford was an insider and the incumbent. Carter was a peanut farmer from Georgia, unusually religious (for the time) and maverick enough to interview with Playboy.
I have admired Ron Paul for years. He's one of the very few politicians who insists on talking about the federal deficit and the gloomy future of the dollar. He's not a Republican so much as a Libertarian. I think Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com is correct when he says that TPTB find Paul's recent popularity quite scary. He is apparently fearless.
sofla said...
As I understand the facts, "the polls" do not favor the Republicans, even if a couple do.
I too was of a sentient age in the '76 campaign, and I do not recall Carter as any kind of exciting candidate or even very competent campaigner (and I actually think he was at least a fair to good president, so I bear him no animus from after the fact).
But he was a virtual nobody, a semi-failed ONE TERM governor of a small southern state, until he was given a makeover as the media creation of David Rockefeller's and Zbig's Big Media friends at their Trilateral Commission (they 'adopted' him to be their pet candidate). Carter meteorically rose from under 1% name recognition among Democratic primary voters to leading all candidates for the Democratic nomination, in about 3 months of glowing front page major media profiles, although he hadn't yet won a single primary.
It was about the most startling rise to prominence ever, but like some baked goods, it was mainly hot air. Carter got the early publicity boost of 'winning the Iowa caucuses,' which had never been considered worth much before that (New Hampshire being the long-time bellweather contest), and limped along to the nomination, losing a bunch of the late contests to.... Jerry Brown?
Finally, Ford ended the nominating season some 19 percentage points behind Carter, but mainly because Reagan opposed him even into the GOP convention when it was clear he didn't have the votes to beat Ford on the first ballot (hoping for a second ballot).
As to the general campaign, other than the various Ford gaffes, I don't remember the details, exactly, but I doubt Ford ran a bad campaign, if for no other reason than that James A. Baker III was his campaign manager. Carter's, by contrast, was the hapless Bert Lance, iirc.
Nice to know I'm not the only one who remembers 1976.
Carter resonated because he promised honesty. The country was going through a nostalgia craze, and there was a concurrent romantic attitude toward rural life. Think the Waltons; think of Sam Ervin. The country was a lot more liberal then, but it longed for the image of old-fashioned values.
Carter was perfectly attuned to a brief moment in history. He appealed to southern voters (the south had not yet been lost) as well as to the liberals.
Granted, he never really did learn how to give a speech, but he was at his most effective (or least ineffective) before the debates. In the debates themselves, he was pretty dull. He had the good fortune to be matched against Ford, who was unbelievably awful -- he made GWB 2004 look like a genius.
Despite Baker, Ford ran a terrible campaign.
Ford's campaign commercials consisted of shots of marching bands while a chorus sang "We did it before and we can do it again!" To this day, this remains the lamest campaign ad I have ever seen. I cringed when I saw it. We ALL cringed.
Ford kept making one gaffe after another on the trail. He showed up in one town and could not recall where he was. He got the name wrong twice, and ended by saying "Well, wherever we are, we're great to be here!" That wasn't an isolated incident. There was something like that every damn day.
And still Ford came THAT close to winning!
I'm worried about a Republican victory in 2008 as well, but for different reasons.
I'm convinced that low voter turnout is the most significant reason for George Bush's victories in 2000 and 2004. I think that cynicism and apathy is tragically prevalent in those who would support the kind of progressive and intelligent, reality-based candidates that we need in public office. They're either too apathetic to spend a little effort towards knowing the candidates and their positions, or they've bought into the myth that it doesn't matter who gets elected.
Unfortunately the votes of the mouth-breathing authoritarian types (no offense to those with sinus troubles) are easy to control if you give them a combination of fear, religion, swagger, and bigotry. I think an equally well-targeted message is required for the other 60-70% of eligible voters, but our Democratic candidates still think they need to worry about the 30% backwash. This more than anything else turns away the voters who want a clear choice rather than having to choose the lesser evil.
Whatever it takes to get more than 55% voter turnout in a presidential election, that's where the DNC needs to turn their attention.
-Zolodoco
Reason for optimism: if Bloomberg actually spends a billion dollars he's likely to win.
He used to be a Democrat.
Thin reason, I'll grant you.
sofla said...
Comparing eras and epochs is dicey, because there are always differences in signficant measures.
Remember, in Nixon's '72 election, just the cycle before, he'd carried every state in the union except for McGovern's own state, SD, and Massachusetts. Democrats had been branded the party of 'acid, abortion and amnesty,' and the voters had bought the storyline on Democrats as counter-culture, anti-American, and alien. The Democratic brand had been badly tarnished, depressing Dem turnout and party self-idenfification, and the opposite for the Republicans.
The opposite, or nearly opposite, dynamic is in play now. In the past mid-term, the Republicans won NO new seat they hadn't held before. Every incumbent Democrat running for re-election won, and they held every open seat they'd lost to retirement, and the Republicans did not. This could be weariness for the war, or finally seeing how corrupt the GOP is when in power, but going into this election cycle, it is the GOP that is in trouble with the electorate.
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