Dollars and No Sense, Except for Newt
16 November 2008 3:15 pm by Taylor Marsh
BY TAYLOR MARSH
Following after John McCain, who said the fundamentals of our economy are strong, right before the biggest economic collapse in modern history, yet another Republican gets caught with his stupid exposed. Poor Saxby Chambliss, he doesn’t know what a recession means. Not exactly a reason for Georgians to send him back to the Senate.
George Will has a whole other problem, of which Paul Krugman quickly disabused him.
Sean and Rush’s obsession of clinging to Ronald Reagan, especially by trumpeting the persona of Sarah Palin, has been making me giddy lately. Their inability to understand that Reaganism is an idea whose foundation collapsed with the recent economic crash, deregulation proved to be a complete disaster, giving Democrats an opportunity for policy gains. As these radio blow hards continue to seduce their listeners to make the Republican Party a minority by reverting back to 1980s economic ideas now proven faulty, the reality of what’s taken place comes into clearer focus. After all, it was Reagan who invited the religious right into the GOP tent in the first place. Now we see some of what this has wrought. Jon Meacham becoming just another traditional talker, who in “Newsweek” recently claimed we are “America the Conservative.”
That was until Missouri revealed it was a red state, finally failing to predict a president, even when the Democrat was elected in an electoral rout from North Carolina to Indiana to Nevada. Missouri left as another fallen conservative symbol, as the country moved left. We are a center-left nation, with Republicans caught with their Reaganism in tatters. Tod Linberg (an informal foreign policy adviser to the McCain campaign) today:
Here’s the stark reality: It is now harder for the Republican presidential candidate to get to 50.1 percent than for the Democrat. My Hoover Institution colleague David Brady and Douglas Rivers of the research firm YouGovPolimetrix have been analyzing data from online interviews with 12,000 people in both 2004 and 2008. It shows an overall shift to the Democrats of six percentage points. As they write in the forthcoming edition of Policy Review, “The decline of Republican strength occurs by having strong Republicans become weak Republicans, weak Republicans becoming independents, and independents leaning more Democratic or even becoming Democrats.” This is a portrait of an electorate moving from center-right to center-left.
Newt gets it. The Sarah Palin wing will sink the Republicans further. How he gets this through to Hannity and Limbaugh no one knows.
“I think that she is going to be a significant player,” said Gingrich during an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation”. “But she’s going to be one of 20 or 30 significant players. She’s not going to be the de facto leader.”
