Bush supporters' aftermath thread

<Carter polled at 39% approval in 1980>

The Dems' obsession
David Limbaugh (archive)

August 2, 2005

The Democrats and the Old Media are getting as much mileage as they can out of President Bush's reportedly low approval ratings. But the smart money says they ought to be more concerned about their own problems.

While they preoccupy themselves with trashing President Bush and obstructing his agenda, he remains undeterred and presses forward. While they brag at their success in blocking Social Security and other reforms, he amasses legislative victories, including CAFTA, bankruptcy and class-action.

While they anxiously pant in anticipation of his inevitable irrelevance, they further secure their own irrelevance. Indeed, while they prepare to gloat over his "imminent" lame-duck status when he will have little political capital left to spend, he is busy spending his political capital as if it springs from an unlimited reservoir.

Consider his congressional arm-twisting on CAFTA, his persistence on Social Security reform despite the obvious short-term political downsides, his recess appointment of John Bolton and his unflinching commitment to the burgeoning Iraqi republic.

Ah, yes, Iraq. This is where it gets interesting. The Dems think it's the Republican's Achilles' heel, but it may well be theirs. For the Democratic Party and the press, all roads lead to Iraq. To them, President Bush's "duplicitous" scheme to drag us into war there subsumes every other issue.

So complete is their obsession they apparently don't see the need to develop an agenda of their own. They have no plan on Social Security, which they labeled a crisis as recently as Bill Clinton's presidency. They have no coherent tax policy -- other than to oppose Bush's plan. They don't even have a clue about Iraq -- whether we should stay or leave and how we should accomplish either non-goal.

When discussing Iraq, they talk nostalgically about Vietnam, the Mother of all Quagmires, fervently hoping Iraq will end up being just as bad and the vast quicksand that finally drowns the Bush presidency and GOP dominance.

But again, the profound irony is that while they see Iraq as Bush's quagmire, it has become their own. Just as their self-made myths about Republicans stealing the election in 2000 drove them to a Norman Bates-esque frenzy, their delusional "Bush-lied" ravings have driven them to a blinding monomania.

If you doubt their collective neurosis, do a Nexis search and you'll discover their ingenuity at tying every issue -- John Bolton, Social Security, Wilson/Plame, Judge Roberts -- to Iraq. To them, almost everything the administration does is either to compensate for or divert attention from Iraq.

Columnist Arianna Huffington seems upset that even some of her fellow libs are not in sufficient lockstep on the antiwar message. In a column she takes to task jailed New York Times reporter Judy Miller for virtually conspiring with the Bush administration to exaggerate the case for Iraqi WMD in order to support his decision to attack Iraq.

According to Huffington, the real scandal behind Wilson/Plame is not even Karl Rove. No, it's the reprobates who sent us to war against Iraq. She quotes approvingly from flaming lib NYT columnist Frank Rich. "The real culprit," writes Rich, "is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped up grounds … That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war."

Amy Goodman, host of "Democracy Now," is even more hysterical. On MSNBC's "Hardball," she said Sen. Frist's decision to buck President Bush on embryonic stem cells was all about Iraq, which understandably left guest John Fund rolling his eyes in disbelief.

Goodman said, "I really do think this is much more connected to Iraq than Sen. Frist having a change of heart … Because, I think, right now the Republicans are trying to separate themselves at this point of this lame-duck presidency from the Bush administration's views on Iraq."

The Minneapolis Star Tribune and others have opposed John Bolton's U.N. ambassadorship not just because he was a meanie, but because he "sought to intimidate intelligence analysts who objected to conclusions about Iraq's WMD." Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid obviously agrees, saying in a floor statement, "you can see why we believe it is no small matter for us to learn whether Mr. Bolton was a party to other efforts to hype intelligence."

The Palm Beach Post asks, "Is [the president's] concentration on Social Security meant to divert attention from real crises in this country, such as … the mess in Iraq?"

The examples are endless, but suffice it to say that if Democrats don't wean themselves off their Iraq-only diet soon, even Hillary won't be able to pull their chestnuts out of the fire by 2008.

JustWonders wrote:

<Carter polled at 39% approval in 1980>

Looks like Bush is getting awfully close...

Doing worse than he ever did.

Despite it not being the economic crisis time of the late seventies

Makes ya wonder

Democrats need to hit the trifecta

Monday, August 01, 2005


COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Democrats gathered here last week to begin the hunt for three things vital to success in next year's congressional elections and the 2008 presidency -- party unity, a coherent message for middle America and a viable presidential candidate. It's a tough trifecta, they learned.

About the only thing Democrats here seemed united on was a deep dislike for President Bush. But that won't be enough, they were told by Al From, founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, which organized this "national conversation."

Employing statistics from the national census and the 2004 presidential election, From hit his audience, including some 300 elected Democratic officials, with this grim picture of why he believes Democrats need a new act:

For every two Americans who say they're liberals, three are conservatives. Democrats lost 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in the country last year. Small cities and most suburbs buried the Democratic ticket. Ditto married couples with children. The Democratic vote among the Hispanic population fell 40 percent from 2000. And it collapsed among voters earning more than $40,000 a year.

Noting that Sen. John Kerry got a bigger vote among Democrats in losing than Bill Clinton did in winning, From declared that "the Democratic base is not big enough to win. The country is more conservative." Which is why GOP strategist Karl Rove prefers highly divisive elections emphasizing morally and socially sensitive wedge issues, he added.

How can Democrats win? With a tougher, pro-military stance on security, From said, and a platform that makes sense to both "the working class (labor) and the learning class (information workers and academia). Globalization of work is going to be a big issue over the next 10 years." And to capitalize on dissatisfaction with Washington -- and Bush -- Democrats, From said, must be the party of reform.

"Democrats must change," he said.

But change could put party unity to a severe test. That was apparent here in the angry reaction of several black participants to the heavy emphasis cultivating the Hispanic vote.

For decades Democrats have built their national campaigns around an electoral base that included a heavy black vote. But Hispanics, now the nation's largest minority, are seen increasingly by both parties as a key to electoral success. As From discovered, some blacks see the Hispanic rise as a zero-sum game -- the more Democrats court the Latino vote, the less they're likely to court African-Americans.

Mary Flowers, an African-American state representative from Illinois, delivered an impassioned speech warning Democrats they risk losing black voters to Republicans busy courting the black church vote. Still another black speaker complained that African-Americans, despite their long support for Democrats, "always get the short end of the stick." Of the DLC focus on Latinos, she said, "I'm offended."

Some liberals and a few black leaders, notably the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have long been critical of the DLC because of its closeness to corporate America -- the source of much of its money -- and its message that beating up on business is no way to create jobs. For example, Democratic National chairman Howard Dean, a darling of the party's vocal liberals, was a conspicuous absentee. He was invited, From said, but declined. A prior commitment, no doubt.

Even as the DLC was stressing Democratic unity here, a couple hundred miles away in Chicago unity was suffering a body blow. The giant AFL-CIO, a major labor supplier of money and manpower for Democratic candidates and causes, was breaking up. Some of the federation's largest and richest unions, including the Teamsters and the growing Service Employees union, pulled out over how the AFL-CIO uses its cash. The breakaway unions want more money devoted to signing up new members and less to direct politics -- which presumably means less labor cash for Democratic campaigns.

Then there's the quest for a winning presidential candidate which, considering the thin Democratic bench, is asking a lot. The usual suspects were on hand here -- Govs. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, the new DLC chairman, and Mark Warner of Virginia and U.S. Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana and Hillary Clinton of New York. Vilsack, a low-keyed Midwesterner popular at home with a wonderful life story (he was an orphan), was impressive. But Hillary, as expected, stole the show, a potential downer for Democrats.

She's smart as any political figure in America. Her aborted drive for national health insurance a decade ago looks far-seeing today as corporations struggle to shed health care costs in the new global economy. But her public image as an over-the-top liberal, however inaccurate (she's a born-again moderate, even supporting Bush's war), is political poison. Democrats don't have a natural presidential candidate for one reason -- their loss of so many big state governorships over the last decade. California, Texas, New York and Florida, the megastates that might produce a national leader, all are led by Republican governors.

Unity, a message that makes sense, and a charismatic candidate -- it's a stretch.

Source

Interesting, KW. Perhaps you'd like to expound on why Air America Talk Radio has tanked big time. Even in markets such as New York City and Boston, the ratings are a disaster.

Maybe the average person doesn't want to listen to a bunch of angry lefties basing Bush 24/7? That appears to be the only message they have.

A question aside:

do a lot still listen to AM broadcasts?
(Here, since decades, it's all on FM and nowadays on digital radio.)

Interesting, KW. Perhaps you'd like to expound on why Air America Talk Radio has tanked big time. Even in markets such as New York City and Boston, the ratings are a disaster.

Nice going, JW. When in doubt, press Favorites and go to Scrappleface.

Now that that is over, do you have any of your own thouights you care to relate, as opposed to the prepackaged satire you just fed us?

IMO, conservative talk radio sells because, apart from a very few newspapers with limited coverage, it is essentially the ONLY consistent media outlet that is not hostile to conservatives..... The lefties have NPR, AP, Reuters, most of the international media, most of the big city newspapers, and all of the alphabet channels to get plenty of anti-Republican, anti-Bush inference if not overt rhetoric.