April 27, 2009
During the April 21 – 24 timeframe, ABC News and The Washington Post conducted a poll to ascertain President Obama’s approval rating. The poll revealed that 69 percent of Americans favor the job performance of our new President. Fifty percent of those polled believe that the country is on the right track (compared with 19 percent just before Obama’s inauguration). This seemed like a particularly strong showing since, just one week before this poll began, we saw the anti-taxation “tea parties” that had been promoted by Fox News.
A recent article by Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin for Politico revealed that in some states, the “tea parties” have helped energize the Republican base:
“There is a sense of rebellion brewing,” said Katon Dawson, the outgoing South Carolina Republican Party chairman, who cited unexpectedly high attendance at anti-tax “tea parties” last week.
As the article by Smith and Martin pointed out, this “rebellion” is taking place at exactly the time when many Republican Party leaders are tacking to the center and looking for someone like Utah Governor Jon Huntsman as a possible Presidential candidate for 2012. Nevertheless, as the article noted, rank-and-file Republicans outside of Washington have no desire to adopt more moderate views:
Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.
Many of those comprising the Republican base appear to be motivated by antipathy toward the increasing acceptance of gay marriage, rather than by a reaction to all of the bailouts that have been taking place. In fact, I was surprised to observe, during the extensive “tea party” coverage, that none of the protesters were upset about the bank bailouts or Treasury Secretary “Turbo” Tim Geithner’s use of the Federal Reserve to manage the bank bailouts in furtherance of his attempts to avoid legislative oversight. I guess Fox News had not primed the protesters for that sort of outrage.
The Politico article by Smith and Martin reveals that “cultural issues” remain as the primary concern of the Republican base. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich is trying to position himself as the next Republican standard bearer. Those touting the “sanctity of marriage” (including the Catholic Church) don’t seem particularly concerned that Newt has been married three times. Newt’s vision for the future is the same vision he was seeing almost twenty years ago: lower taxes. If others within the Republican Party have a broader vision and feel the need to expand their appeal to the voters, they can expect plenty of opposition from the party’s base — and therein lies the problem. Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman has written extensively about how the political primary system works to the benefit of political candidates with the most extreme views. This is because the only people who vote in political primaries are those with strongly held views and most of them come from the extremes. This is why wing-nuts such as Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann get nominated. In the absence of any strong moderate or centrist uprising within the Republican ranks, the GOP could be destined to find itself marginalized. It’s beginning to appear as though the only way for promising, new, centrist Republicans to get elected is to run as independents in the general elections. Once elected, they can reclaim the “high ground” within the party. In the mean time, Republican leaders are either unconcerned by or oblivious to the fact that they are painting themselves into a corner by continuing to pander to their base.
Voters Got Fooled Again
September 13, 2010
With mid-term elections approaching, the articles are turning up all over the place. Newsweek’s Howard Fineman calls them pre-mortems: advance analyses of why the Democrats will lose power in November. Some of us saw the handwriting on the wall quite a while ago. Before President Obama had completed his first year in office, it was becoming clear that his campaign theme of “hope” and “change” was just a ruse to con the electorate. On September 21, 2009, I wrote a piece entitled, “The Broken Promise”, based on this theme:
In November of 2009, Matt Taibbi wrote an article for Rolling Stone entitled,“Obama’s Big Sellout”. Taibbi’s essay inspired Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns to write his own critique of Obama’s first eleven months in office. Beyond that, Mr. Harrison’s assessment of the fate of proposed financial reform legislation turned out to be prescient. Remember – Ed Harrison wrote this on December 11, 2009:
Mr. Harrison’s point about those incumbencies is now being echoed by many commentators – most frequently to point out that Janet Napolitano was replaced as Governor of Arizona by Jan Brewer. Brewer is expected to win in November despite her inability to debate or form a coherent sentence before a live audience.
Bob Herbert of The New York Times recently wrote a great piece, in which he blasted the Democrats for failing to “respond adequately to their constituents’ most dire needs”:
I was surprised to see that Howard Fineman focused his campaign pre-mortem on President Obama himself, rather than critiquing the Democratic Party as a whole. At a time when mainstream media pundits are frequently criticized for going soft on those in power in order to retain “access”, it was refreshing to see Fineman point out some of Obama’s leadership flaws:
Well, people aren’t on board and that’s the problem. The voters were taken for chumps and they were fooled by some good campaign propaganda. Nevertheless, as President George W. Bush once said:
At this point, it does not appear as though the voters who supported President Obama and company in 2008 are willing to let themselves get fooled again. At least the Republicans admit that their primary mission is to make life easier for rich people at everyone else’s expense. The fact that the voters hate being lied to – more than anything else – may be the one lesson the Democrats learn from this election cycle.
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