Blumenthal: Bush needs to change the subject

[kskiska]

(snip)

The drama of Richard Nixon's resignation 30 years ago this month has long overshadowed his political achievement. Nixon's criminal White House seemed an aberrant episode rooted in only his pathologies. But Nixon was the father of the modern Republican party.

(snip)

George Bush did not make a new coalition or offer a refreshed Republicanism, despite the trope of "compassionate conservatism". He came to power as a result only of a flawed Democratic strategy in 2000, and even then he lost the popular majority and had to rely upon a skewed supreme court to install him in office. Before 9/11, after only nine months, his presidency was winding down, and he lost the Senate with the defection of a Republican. The war on terror was a substitute for old Republican anti-communism, the ultimate glue holding disparate elements together. Still, the party is coming unstuck, disintegrating in its historic base.

California, the home state of Nixon and Reagan, has disappeared from the Republican coalition. Its demographic transformations, especially the ever expanding Hispanic electorate (two-to-one Democratic), postindustrial economy and social liberalism, make it a forerunner of the future. Bush is so far behind in California that there is no campaign there whatsoever.

In Illinois, a former presidential bellwether, the Republican party has fallen off the map. In his famous 1960 victory, Kennedy won the state, with 65% in Chicago. The Chicago suburbs, two-to-one Republican as recently as 1988, have now begun to tilt Democratic (just as have the suburbs of Los Angeles). Meanwhile, the state Republican party has imploded: unable to find a credible Senate candidate against the star of the Democratic convention, Barack Obama, it has now come up with its own African-American, Alan Keyes. A screeching religious right fanatic, Keyes, who has worn a lapel pin featuring the feet of a foetus, is Jerry Falwell as played by Little Richard. Obama is beating him 67-28, undoubtedly Keyes's peak.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1281237,00.html

[Cha]

1. I like how Sidney Blumenthal says it..

"The turn in Michigan is, if anything, even more distressing for Republicans. West Michigan, home to Nixon's successor Gerald Ford and even today unrepresented by any Democrats in Congress, has John Kerry 12 points above Bush in a poll taken by a local TV station. This collapse is a consequence largely of the desertion of moderate Republicans repulsed by Bush's reckless economic mismanagement and neoconservative foreign policy. These moderates are overwhelmingly mainline Protestants, also offended by Bush's evangelical culture war and faith-based efforts to break down the wall of separation between church and state."

He breaks down for me nice and simple.

[jacksonian]

2. Mr. Blumenthal is a fantastic writer

clear, concise, and always well-thought. I'm envious.

[PATRICK]

3. Leaders are incoherent mediocrities

who despite their derisive scorn for them Dem movie stars, yearn like schoolboys for a movie star to head their ticket so long as he displays malleability and manly fluff to the powers cringing behind the scene.

Not a brain, a new idea, an exciting personality(if they ever get to raising up a guffawing thug to demagogue status), not a dedicated civil servant who recognizes the people and the demands of progress. No, hamstrung by a narrow, lost ideology based on fear it is no wonder they cling to their base refuge in dwindling, insecure numbers, equally narrow- a perfect mirror of irrelevance and failure. Reach out to Latinos says Gingrich, but not sure HOW. Bush lets them in in greater numbers. No not that, scream the RW fear squads! Hemmed in and tearing themselves down.

The Party that Trent Lott touted as the party of the next decade- and on and on.

Before he was taken down as Senate leader.