Bush needs to slip on his pajamas, It's bedtime for the republicans.
DontTreadOnMe wrote:not gonna happen. it could get down to somewhere around 23-27%, certainly no lower than 17%, which would be the core "values uber alles" crowd.
Gorbachev was down to 17% by the end of his stint...
Gorbachev didn't have no Karl Rove . . .
nimh wrote:DontTreadOnMe wrote:not gonna happen. it could get down to somewhere around 23-27%, certainly no lower than 17%, which would be the core "values uber alles" crowd.
Gorbachev was down to 17% by the end of his stint...
was he ? wow. in his case it just shows that no good deed goes unpunished, doesn't it ?
Long before the failed 1991 coup, Gorbachev had thrown Yeltsin out of his office as the head of the Moscow Central Committee. I'd have to go look it up to see exactly when that was, but i did read about it in the NYT at the time. When the coup leaders attempted to take over in Moscow during Gorbachev's absence, Yeltsin mobilized the disaffected among Moscow's politically saavy community, and they in turn acted as ward heelers to get the people out into the streets.
From there, it was downhill all the way for Gorbachev, who was portrayed by Yeltsin's apparatus as ineffective and irrelevant. He was in the way, and Yeltsin was headed to the top. Like all good gutter politicians, Yeltsin handed out favors to those with wealth or the prospect to get wealthy, all the while publicly decrying the exploitation of the common folk, which made him very popular with older Russians who genuinely feared the disappearance (and with good reason) of the Soviet "safety net" upon which they had counted all their lives.
Nothing new here, and nothing which should surprise anyone.
A quick search online shows Yeltsin as "resigning" from the Politburo in 1987. According to the article i read in the NYT at the time, he was removed from his post as Chairman of the Moscow Central Committee, and that would have been in 1988.
OK, here we go, from Indiana University:
Yeltsin sharply criticized the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU for slow pace of reforms at the October, 1987, plenary meeting of the Central Committee. As a result, Yeltsin lost his positions in Moscow City Committee and the Politburo. He was hospitalized with a heart trouble, when, on the order of Mikhail Gorbachev, the KGB agents made Yeltsin leave the hospital and escorted him to a plenary meeting of Moscow City Committee of the CPSU, where he was sacked. The next year, Yeltsin was appointed First Vice Chairman of the State Committee on Construction, minister of the USSR.
(This text was prepared by a Russian student in the Computer Science Department at Indiana University, and is a part of an archive which deals with the 1995 elections--i was unable to link it.)
Basically, although Gorbachev and Yeltsin both entered party leadership at the same time, Gorbachev rose far more quickly than Yeltsin, and became Yeltsin's patron. Yeltsin took to the perestroika (restructuring) movement with a will and promptly stepped on way too many toes, including those of Gorbachev. But Yeltsin had always kept in touch with "the man on the street," and the dramatic scenes of Yeltsin standing in front of the tanks only increased his popularity throughout the country.
It was a piece of cake for him to subsequently do a hatchet job on Gorbachev.
