@old europe,
old europe wrote:
Foxfyre wrote:I did not say that the Republicans have been out of power for eight years. They have been out of power for 2+ years though. Recheck my post as selective reading still seems to be a problem.
I did say that the conservatives have not been in power for the last 8+ years
Alright. Point taken.
Well, liberals obviously have the same problem you seem to have there. Even
Democrats have been out of power since 1994. They had no possibility to shape American politics. No influence at home or in the world. Republicans ran the show. Democrats were forced to watch. And even at the moment, there's only a
Democratic majority in Congress, and a
Democratic President in the White House.
Obviously, that's not an ideal situation. Liberals will probably have to go with that for 4 or 8 years, but then they will have to finally get a
liberal majority in Congress and a
liberal President into the White House. No, wait: whether the President is liberal or Democratic doesn't really matter. He doesn't have any power anyways....
Nixon, Ford, and Reagan all got a lot of stuff done despite having Democratic majorites because 1) the Democrats were far more centrist then than they are now and 2) Reagan especially had the public with him and had no qualms about going over the head of Congress straight to the public. That's something that neither George HW Bush nor George W Bush were able to effectively do.
Bill Clinton got diddly squat accomplished his first two years with a Demoratic Congress. Then the GOP took over and held majorities in the House and Senate for the last six of Bill Clinton's eight years. They literally saved his Presidency because he wanted to be loved much more than he cared about ideology. They dragged him screaming and kicking into welfare reform--I can't remember how many of those bills he vetoed before he finally signed one and then took credit for it. They dragged him screaming and kicking into a balanced budget--he had repeatedly said it could be done but way on down the line after he was out of office--and then of course when it was done he got the credit for that too.
But the GOP Congress in Bill Clinton's tenure were also largely committed to term limits and too many conservative Republicans bailed out; too many RINOs stayed in, and too many CINOs were elected to replace them. Looney fiscally irresponsible policies the first six years of GWB's administration were bad enough, and when the Democrats took over in January 1997, it was far worse because there was NO conservative oversight at all.
It isn't the party name that really matters. It is the values held by those in power, and neither party name means what it did even ten to twenty years ago. The GOP is still far less left than the Democrats but, at least until recently, they certainly were promoting no brand of conservatism that I ever knew.
Again, I think that is why many conservatives are seeing a third party option as the solution to the dilemma. The GOP will be a long time regaining the trust and respect of the people and, while they are still somewhat tempered bypublic opinion, the Democrats can't really be trust with much other than promoting an extreme far left agenda.
