Just another Reality-based bubble in the foam of the multiverse.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

What are these people thinking?

The 'Merikan political e$tablishment continues to show itself out of touch with what will really work. Digby quotes a "saavy" friend:

...The Bush undertow on the GOP is severe and history indicates an incumbent party with this unpopular a President has difficulty winning another term. Only once in the last five tries (Bush in ’88) has a party succeeded in three consecutive terms. Reagan’s approval numbers were 20 points higher than Bush’s will be next year. The Republican issue agenda is out of favor with the public. So, the GOP and its allies will run a scorched earth campaign with character assassination of the nominee front and center. It will make George Bush’s 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis look like child’s play. An independent media campaign should begin next spring reminding voters of the many failures of the Bush and the entire GOP agenda. The GOP nominee should be tied around Bush, his failed policies, and anemic approval rating.

Hillary Clinton is the most centrist of the major Democratic candidates for the nomination while the broader electorate views her as the most liberal. This is not surprising as this has been the right wing campaign against her since 1992. If she is the nominee, the Republicans will plan their whole effort to make her the issue and to drive up her “unfavorables,” already in the high 40s. Of course they have already thrown the kitchen sink at her so who knows how much further opinion can be driven against her. Certainly she is far more unpopular in red geography that no Democrat would carry anyway. What a white guy in Georgia thinks about her really doesn’t matter. Democrats in red and purple geography though are concerned about the down ballot effect if she pulls out all the haters. The key question remains whether she can dampen negative perceptions through her performance. She managed that in upstate New York in her Senate race. There is little time for that type of retail politics in the Presidential. It is naive though to think there will not be a further smear of Bill Clinton’s private life. Kathleen Willey already has her book ready, and Wolf Blitzer, likely, has the interview already booked.

No doubt, there will be a quasi-racist campaign against Obama if he wins the nomination with an emphasis that he is “not one of us” given that exotic background and middle name. Suddenly, the media establishment has decided “experience” is the central criteria in a President. Too bad that was not the hurdle in 2000...


The DINOcratic e$tablishment has collectively lost its mind if it thinks HillBama will ever win the Preznitcy. The bigots will come out of the woodwork to vote against these two. Despite their Company acceptability (both basically support the plan of Poppy's Iraq Study Group), they aren't really the privateers of corporate choice either.

Once again, I quote Jeff Wells, which bears examination in its entirety though truncated here:

...1. In my experience, people who describe themselves as apolitical are those most likely to repeat right-wing talking points, and call it "telling it like it is."

2. Binary thinking is a mind cancer that retards insight, and unfortunately flourishes in conspiracy culture...

3. Winning the battle for popular opinion might mean something if opinion in America were not so cheap, malleable, and effectless.

4. Embracing a minority position is not an admission of futility or failure. "When great changes occur in history,... when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong."

5. "Big government "/"small government" is an unhelpful construct...

6. With exceptions that probably could be counted on the knuckles of one finger, the Left simply does not exist in Washington...

7. Since I've long held the view that the neocons were intentionally set loose as berserkers to move the goalposts so they could later be scapegoated for 9/11 and Iraq, and the "true conservatives" could return in glory...

8. ... it isn't enough anymore to say the Official Story is a lie, though it is, since the popular unofficial stories are as well. And perhaps told by the same storyteller.

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