| | Dan:
It's odd when you look at those turnout numbers, but they explain our bewilderment; the GOP 'won' the relative enthusiasm battle by losing fewer voters than the Dems...and still lost.
...because all of America is losing with these two parties of power.
The Dem's problem is they believe their own bullshit; the GOP's problem is exactly the same.
As a fringe observer of American political trends, I can't for the life of me understand the broad embrace in the GOP of the following 'tactic:' in Jan 2008 at the GOP Primary debate at Reagan's library, McCain, Huckabee, and Romney -- Mitt Romney -- walked facefirst into ANderson Coopers fair but loaded question: "Tell us why YOU are best suited to RUN THE ECONOMY." And all three GOP frontrunners not only gleefully answered in context, as if this really was the former SOviet Union, but embraced it with dinner and flowers. By the time Ron Paul gave his "W.T.F. are you morons droning on about, this is not the former U.S.S.R. and it is not the function of the POTUS to "RUN THE ECONOMY," it was way too late. And they all grinned at Ron Paul like it was he was the f'n idiot.
Anderson Cooper-- and all of the Dems -- must have been laughing asses off. It was a fair and brilliant question, and exposed the rot that is the modern GOP; false hope for freedom as the alternative to no hope for freedom.
Sometime after that debate, in Spring of 2008, I have a local GOP idiot on my front porch, campaigning for state office. I ask him about the GOP's embrace of this 'run the economy' nonsense, and he confides in me, like it was a brilliant strategy of some kind, that "James Carville's "It's the Economy, Stupid!" is just too much of a political winner, and the GOP just has to roll with it." And then I threw the idiot out of my house, took a long hot shower, and clearly saw the modern GOP for what it is; an atrophied, bloated party of mental midgets, glad handers, lightweights, who don't have the intellectual horsepower to counter a four word bumper sticker from 1992.
Then, the GOP got drubbed in 2008, and in the post-mortem announced that it had to do some 'soul searching.'
And that 'soul searching' resulted in an 18 month pony show of the same old same old, in which the final result was running that same Mitt ROmney running on the exact same argument; that he, as POTUS, was best suited to RUN THE ECONOMY.
And in these resulting 'run the economy' economies, with this president and his abysmal record, the cumulative GOP braintrust could not defeat the Democrats with the argument "We will be better Democrats." Well, no shit.
Followed by, in 2012, the same tired excuses of "the GOP needs to do some soul searching..." Translated: the GOP will run that idiot Chris Christie in 2016 and lose again to Hillary. That is, if there is a 2016 election.
And we wonder why there was no enthusiasm in the Tea Party for Mitt Romney? A nice and decent man, no doubt, he would have been the perfect federal bus driver 30 years ago, coming into office to ride the federal bus and maybe give it a few tweaks. But we're 30 years beyond the time when tweaks around the edges were going to fix anything.
And in the end, he was the only choice we had to 'defeat the real Democrat', and not enough of us held our nose and voted for 'hope.'
But he dodged a bullet, as I said up thread. He was never going to be 'that guy.' RealPolitiks in America demands that the GOP embrace the far religious right and their insistence on trashing the constitution with their injection of political religion into the public debate. We have an absolute right to private and public religion precisely because of our prohibition against political religion...and in their eyes rolled into the back of their heads zealoutry, they don't have a clue that they are selling our freedom with their nonsesne. They come full circle and butt heads with the far religious left -- Scott Nearing's "Social Religion" Progressives, staring at each other over the hostile dividing line of Choice/Life and gay marriage(neither of which are deserving issues of public policy by the state, they are matters for individuals and churches/groups, period under the principles of free association)but otherwise identical religious nuts.
And in that battle to eat freedom, America loses its freedom... has lost its freedom.
Faint glimmers of hope; the protest against both atrophied parties of power evident in the dropping turnout numbers.
My wife, the long time Republican, finally seeing the GOP for what it is. I think I might have finally won over another libertarian; I've been working on her for years.
Ron Paul's observation of gaining popularity on college campuses.
There was more than one lesson just handed the GOP, who pushed aside Ron Paul at its convention, ignored the Tea Party totally in its quest to compete as Triangulated Democrat-Lites(who were -still- painted as TeaParty Extremists, even though they were fully disavowed in this election), and as a result of their lack of active enthusiasm for voting for yet more of the same, narrowly lost the election, and saved the nation from the spectacle of Mitt Romeny becoming the designated fall guy for what is about to befall the US. Will they learn from their lessons? No evidence whatsoever; they are atrophied, calcified, and stuck in the past. They are full boat 1972, plus a website.
And, that is a RealPolitik lesson for any libertarian political movement; it isn't close to having any realistic shot at taking power in this nation on this side of the coming wreckage, certainly not in time to avert this wreck on rails. No, the focus needs to be on post-wreck politics; that is the only realistic future battleground within any kind of reach. That nation will be ready and willing and hungry to flush the parties of power who brought on the wreck, and that is where future political opportunity exists. That is where the real battle of America will be fought. The battle for the old America is over, old news. That ship of state is sinking, irretrievably at this point. Take the best of its lessons and history, and move on.
regards, Fred
(Edited by Fred Bartlett on 11/08, 9:13am)
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