THE NEW REPUBLICAN MYTHOLOGY
Conservatives searching desperately for a silver lining in the cloud of Tuesday's defeats have tried to argue that Democrats only won because they ran conservative candidates. And they've gotten support from key members of the mainstream news media…
In fact, the Democratic freshman class of the 110th Congress includes a few conservatives, but overall it is made up of candidates who held traditional Democratic positions…All of them support increasing the minimum wage, and all oppose privatizing Social Security. Nearly all support embryonic stem cell research. All except a few are pro-choice. And all of these positions enjoy majority support…
Democrats did not win by moving to the center; they won because at the moment, they ARE the center.
--"The Democratic Center," Paul Waldman, Boston Globe, November 10, 2006
…Most importantly, the American public didn't elect moderate Republicans. In fact, it hammered the moderate Republicans harder than in any election in recent memory. The defeated Republicans in the house were, by and large, from the most centrist third of the Republican caucus. The American public chose to hand power to Democrats, and most specifically a Democratic Party that promised a new direction - out of Iraq.
The campaign by the right…telling people that the incoming Democrats are conservatives, which, in the House, they are not…fails…
--The Center of Attention," Stirling Newberry, blog posting on the TPM Café of Talking Points Memo website, November 14, 2006-11-14
The new Democratic sweep conjures up an ancient image: Furies swooping down to punish bullies.
Angry winged goddesses with dog heads, serpent hair and blood eyes, unmoved by tears, prayer, sacrifice or nasty campaign ads, avenging offenses by insolent transgressors.
This will be known as the year macho politics failed--mainly because it was macho politics by marshmallow men. Voters were sick of phony swaggering, blustering and bellicosity, absent competence and accountability…Men who had refused to go to an untenable war themselves were now refusing to find an end to another untenable war that they had recklessly started.
All the conservative sneering about a fem-lib from San Francisco who was measuring drapes for the speaker's office didn't work. Americans wanted new drapes, and an Armani granny with a whip in charge.
--"Drapes of Wrath," Maureen Dowd, New York Times, November 11, 2006
You know, Republicans are bad losers. And the media lets them get away with it. Now, they're crafting a whole new mythology to explain their humiliating defeat at the hands of the voters this past week.
On a blog posting I read at Talking Points Memo, the point was made that in 1994 when the Republicans made similar gains in the House and Senate, Time Magazine had a graphic on the cover of a Republican elephant crushing a Democratic donkey with the headline about the Republicans sweeping to power in some kind of conservative mandate.
Now, Time puts on its cover something about how "conservative Democrats" have brought the Congress more to the CENTER.
Nobody, it seems, is talking about a Democratic "mandate" or about how Republicans have been crushed or swept or even thumped.
Whereas I do believe that moderation has definitely, FINALLY, made a comback in politics, where pragmatists and common sense centrists have truly "thumped" nasty mean-tempered ideologues, I must admit, the first thing I picked up on during the Sunday news rehashes was the thumpees making their case that the only reason they got thumped was because, as George Will stated on This Week With Stephanopolous, "The Congress is going to be more conservative than ever."
The news media has, in their blind-sheep way, even begun using the terminology. I noticed right off the bat that there seemed to be no such thing as a MODERATE Democrat any more. Why, no. Suddenly, they are all CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRATS.
But closer examination just does not bear that out. Are most of the freshman class flaming liberals? No. This is because it is true that the country is hungry for a common-sense center.
But calling moderate Democrats "conservative" only feeds into the Republican mythology that they didn't really lose.
Or that, Democrats didn't really win.
In FACT, they repeat at nauseum, the election was a true victory for CONSERVATIVES.
Paul Krugman, in his brilliant op-ed to the New York Times, "True Blue Populists" states that the reason Republicans are having so much trouble reconciling their own thumping with what the vast majority of Americans believe, is because they have demonized Democrats for so long as LIBERALS, painting every single progressive or Democrat with the same Ann Coulter/Rush Limbaugh slapstick stereotype, that they simply can't comprehend what a Democrat really is any more.
And somehow, they've convinced the nonexistent "liberal media" of the same thing. As Krugman writes, "In other words, if a Democrat doesn't fit the right-wing caricature of a liberal, he must be a conservative."
The truth is that only 20% of our party actually claim the label, "liberal."
The right-wing driven Republican party simply no longer understands the meaning of the word "moderate." It's just not in their vocabulary. You are either liberal or conservative. Period. This is sad for the Republican party, because although 50-60% of their party claim the label "conservative," the truth is that something like 70% of the American people consider themselves centrists, and it was this group that embraced the Democrats because there was nowhere in the Republican party for them to go. Democrats swept the moderate and independent vote.
I read somewhere else that something like 18 Republican congressmen changed to the Democratic party because they were moderates and they were sick and tired of there not being anyplace for them in their own party.
Not with "the Hammer" at the helm.
Yes, there were two or three high-profile Democrats who do believe in gun rights and are anti-abortion. This does not mean that the whole class feels that way, nor does it mean that because those candidates had been conservative on a few social issues that, in effect, they aren't Democrats at all. Most of them heel solidly in the Blue column on most every other issue.
Since even the media flat-out refuses to use the more honest term of "progressive" to relate to Democrats, I propose we all adopt the more on-target term of "populist" to describe what our party stands for.
(Sen. George Allen), the tobacco-chewing, football-throwing, tax-cutting, Social Security-privatizing senator was only one of many faux populists defeated by real populists Tuesday.
Ever since movement conservatives took over, the Republican Party has pushed for policies that benefit a small minority of wealthy Americans at the expense of the great majority of voters. To hide this reality, conservatives have relied on wagging the dog and wedge issues, but they've also relied on a brilliant marketing campaign that portrays Democrats as elitists and Republicans as representatives of the average American…
This year, however, the American people wised up.
--"True Blue Populists," Paul Krugman, New York Times, November 13, 2006
One of the things that has driven me the most frantic and crazy about this administration is the photo-op governing; thinking that if you just stick the president in front of a bunch of smiling troops, that somehow the American people will be convinced that the war is going well.
Or that, if your president buys himself a ranch right before he takes office, so that he can go pretend to be Ronald Reagan clearing brush and driving a pick-up truck, that the American people will be fooled into believing he's one of them, he's just a good old boy they'd like to have a beer with.
Or that if you land him on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit and stand him up under a banner that reads MISSION ACCOMPLISHED that everybody will believe the war is really over.
I could go on and on and on for pages, but my point is this: by carefully staging every single thing this White House did and timing it to coincide with the evening news, the Republican party effectively dominated the public discourse on every level. Talking points sent out from FOX News to Rush Limbaugh and on down not only guaranteed evening sound bites as well, but also that the Democrats would look like defensive blubbering fools, and it worked. The disastrous candidacy of John Kerry is the crowning emblem of their "achievement."
But as I tried to explain to my family, all politics is not local, it's PERSONAL, especially when aircraft-carrier stunts could get my son--all our sons and daughters in the military--killed.
I think 9-11 just stunned people down to their souls, and they wanted so much to believe that a man standing in the rubble with a megaphone could really inspire and lead them.
And to my way of thinking, the greatest tragedy of the past five years has been just that:
George W. Bush had a precious, priceless opportunity to take one of this nation's greatest tragedies and turn it into inspiration, to lead this nation as FDR led us in a time of Depression and war, or Ronald Reagan led during the downfall of Communism. He could have gone down as one of the greatest presidents of this age.
Instead, he chose to use this terrible tragedy for partisan political purposes, and to ram through a terrible war he and his people had been itching to fight since 1991, and to bully and besmirch anyone who got in their way as "unpatriotic," even heroes like Max Cleland who left half his body in the bloody dirt of Vietnam.
He chose, rather than to lead, to divide our nation into bitter feuding camps of "with us" or "against us." He even went so far as to claim that to vote for Democrats was to "let the terrorists win" and to feed into the insurgency in Iraq.
In effect: to vote Democratic was to become an enemy to this country.
For this and many more travesties, I will never forgive George W.Bush and his minions.
But for years I despaired that the smoke-and-mirrors magic show of Karl Rove and his media machine would so thoroughly hypnotize and mesmerize the American people that our very democracy stood in jeopardy.
Yet through this whole divisive campaign, I clung to something President Bill Clinton said many times, that the American people are so much smarter than they are given credit for by politicians or pundits.
And he was right.
The bottom line is this:
The Republican right-wing media machine can spin up all the mythology they want to explain their own failures, but the American people know better. The Democrats know better. And the new Congress and Senate, which was voted in--not to be more of the same but for CHANGE--will DO better.
In fact, the Democratic freshman class of the 110th Congress includes a few conservatives, but overall it is made up of candidates who held traditional Democratic positions…All of them support increasing the minimum wage, and all oppose privatizing Social Security. Nearly all support embryonic stem cell research. All except a few are pro-choice. And all of these positions enjoy majority support…
Democrats did not win by moving to the center; they won because at the moment, they ARE the center.
--"The Democratic Center," Paul Waldman, Boston Globe, November 10, 2006
…Most importantly, the American public didn't elect moderate Republicans. In fact, it hammered the moderate Republicans harder than in any election in recent memory. The defeated Republicans in the house were, by and large, from the most centrist third of the Republican caucus. The American public chose to hand power to Democrats, and most specifically a Democratic Party that promised a new direction - out of Iraq.
The campaign by the right…telling people that the incoming Democrats are conservatives, which, in the House, they are not…fails…
--The Center of Attention," Stirling Newberry, blog posting on the TPM Café of Talking Points Memo website, November 14, 2006-11-14
The new Democratic sweep conjures up an ancient image: Furies swooping down to punish bullies.
Angry winged goddesses with dog heads, serpent hair and blood eyes, unmoved by tears, prayer, sacrifice or nasty campaign ads, avenging offenses by insolent transgressors.
This will be known as the year macho politics failed--mainly because it was macho politics by marshmallow men. Voters were sick of phony swaggering, blustering and bellicosity, absent competence and accountability…Men who had refused to go to an untenable war themselves were now refusing to find an end to another untenable war that they had recklessly started.
All the conservative sneering about a fem-lib from San Francisco who was measuring drapes for the speaker's office didn't work. Americans wanted new drapes, and an Armani granny with a whip in charge.
--"Drapes of Wrath," Maureen Dowd, New York Times, November 11, 2006
You know, Republicans are bad losers. And the media lets them get away with it. Now, they're crafting a whole new mythology to explain their humiliating defeat at the hands of the voters this past week.
On a blog posting I read at Talking Points Memo, the point was made that in 1994 when the Republicans made similar gains in the House and Senate, Time Magazine had a graphic on the cover of a Republican elephant crushing a Democratic donkey with the headline about the Republicans sweeping to power in some kind of conservative mandate.
Now, Time puts on its cover something about how "conservative Democrats" have brought the Congress more to the CENTER.
Nobody, it seems, is talking about a Democratic "mandate" or about how Republicans have been crushed or swept or even thumped.
Whereas I do believe that moderation has definitely, FINALLY, made a comback in politics, where pragmatists and common sense centrists have truly "thumped" nasty mean-tempered ideologues, I must admit, the first thing I picked up on during the Sunday news rehashes was the thumpees making their case that the only reason they got thumped was because, as George Will stated on This Week With Stephanopolous, "The Congress is going to be more conservative than ever."
The news media has, in their blind-sheep way, even begun using the terminology. I noticed right off the bat that there seemed to be no such thing as a MODERATE Democrat any more. Why, no. Suddenly, they are all CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRATS.
But closer examination just does not bear that out. Are most of the freshman class flaming liberals? No. This is because it is true that the country is hungry for a common-sense center.
But calling moderate Democrats "conservative" only feeds into the Republican mythology that they didn't really lose.
Or that, Democrats didn't really win.
In FACT, they repeat at nauseum, the election was a true victory for CONSERVATIVES.
Paul Krugman, in his brilliant op-ed to the New York Times, "True Blue Populists" states that the reason Republicans are having so much trouble reconciling their own thumping with what the vast majority of Americans believe, is because they have demonized Democrats for so long as LIBERALS, painting every single progressive or Democrat with the same Ann Coulter/Rush Limbaugh slapstick stereotype, that they simply can't comprehend what a Democrat really is any more.
And somehow, they've convinced the nonexistent "liberal media" of the same thing. As Krugman writes, "In other words, if a Democrat doesn't fit the right-wing caricature of a liberal, he must be a conservative."
The truth is that only 20% of our party actually claim the label, "liberal."
The right-wing driven Republican party simply no longer understands the meaning of the word "moderate." It's just not in their vocabulary. You are either liberal or conservative. Period. This is sad for the Republican party, because although 50-60% of their party claim the label "conservative," the truth is that something like 70% of the American people consider themselves centrists, and it was this group that embraced the Democrats because there was nowhere in the Republican party for them to go. Democrats swept the moderate and independent vote.
I read somewhere else that something like 18 Republican congressmen changed to the Democratic party because they were moderates and they were sick and tired of there not being anyplace for them in their own party.
Not with "the Hammer" at the helm.
Yes, there were two or three high-profile Democrats who do believe in gun rights and are anti-abortion. This does not mean that the whole class feels that way, nor does it mean that because those candidates had been conservative on a few social issues that, in effect, they aren't Democrats at all. Most of them heel solidly in the Blue column on most every other issue.
Since even the media flat-out refuses to use the more honest term of "progressive" to relate to Democrats, I propose we all adopt the more on-target term of "populist" to describe what our party stands for.
(Sen. George Allen), the tobacco-chewing, football-throwing, tax-cutting, Social Security-privatizing senator was only one of many faux populists defeated by real populists Tuesday.
Ever since movement conservatives took over, the Republican Party has pushed for policies that benefit a small minority of wealthy Americans at the expense of the great majority of voters. To hide this reality, conservatives have relied on wagging the dog and wedge issues, but they've also relied on a brilliant marketing campaign that portrays Democrats as elitists and Republicans as representatives of the average American…
This year, however, the American people wised up.
--"True Blue Populists," Paul Krugman, New York Times, November 13, 2006
One of the things that has driven me the most frantic and crazy about this administration is the photo-op governing; thinking that if you just stick the president in front of a bunch of smiling troops, that somehow the American people will be convinced that the war is going well.
Or that, if your president buys himself a ranch right before he takes office, so that he can go pretend to be Ronald Reagan clearing brush and driving a pick-up truck, that the American people will be fooled into believing he's one of them, he's just a good old boy they'd like to have a beer with.
Or that if you land him on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit and stand him up under a banner that reads MISSION ACCOMPLISHED that everybody will believe the war is really over.
I could go on and on and on for pages, but my point is this: by carefully staging every single thing this White House did and timing it to coincide with the evening news, the Republican party effectively dominated the public discourse on every level. Talking points sent out from FOX News to Rush Limbaugh and on down not only guaranteed evening sound bites as well, but also that the Democrats would look like defensive blubbering fools, and it worked. The disastrous candidacy of John Kerry is the crowning emblem of their "achievement."
But as I tried to explain to my family, all politics is not local, it's PERSONAL, especially when aircraft-carrier stunts could get my son--all our sons and daughters in the military--killed.
I think 9-11 just stunned people down to their souls, and they wanted so much to believe that a man standing in the rubble with a megaphone could really inspire and lead them.
And to my way of thinking, the greatest tragedy of the past five years has been just that:
George W. Bush had a precious, priceless opportunity to take one of this nation's greatest tragedies and turn it into inspiration, to lead this nation as FDR led us in a time of Depression and war, or Ronald Reagan led during the downfall of Communism. He could have gone down as one of the greatest presidents of this age.
Instead, he chose to use this terrible tragedy for partisan political purposes, and to ram through a terrible war he and his people had been itching to fight since 1991, and to bully and besmirch anyone who got in their way as "unpatriotic," even heroes like Max Cleland who left half his body in the bloody dirt of Vietnam.
He chose, rather than to lead, to divide our nation into bitter feuding camps of "with us" or "against us." He even went so far as to claim that to vote for Democrats was to "let the terrorists win" and to feed into the insurgency in Iraq.
In effect: to vote Democratic was to become an enemy to this country.
For this and many more travesties, I will never forgive George W.Bush and his minions.
But for years I despaired that the smoke-and-mirrors magic show of Karl Rove and his media machine would so thoroughly hypnotize and mesmerize the American people that our very democracy stood in jeopardy.
Yet through this whole divisive campaign, I clung to something President Bill Clinton said many times, that the American people are so much smarter than they are given credit for by politicians or pundits.
And he was right.
The bottom line is this:
The Republican right-wing media machine can spin up all the mythology they want to explain their own failures, but the American people know better. The Democrats know better. And the new Congress and Senate, which was voted in--not to be more of the same but for CHANGE--will DO better.
posted by Deanie Mills at 7:33 AM
2 Comments:
SO if all of your condemnations are accurate.....By June we should see a bright future, no more economic problems......no decisions made for "media exposure only"....no leaders killing babies for personal gain.......my, my what a wonderful world it should be...
When in reality taxes will be higher to off set the raising of minimum wage....this will set in motion all the pawns that will enable the government to have us "right where they want us" before elections. Republicans will prevail unless the "new and improved Congress" wakes up, stops campaigning and works for the people....yea like that is going to happen......
Gosh, Anonymous, I'm surprised to see you. You were keeping your head down during all the massive right-wing failures of the past few months.
Nope, I said nothing about "by June" anything, or there being no more problems. Go ahead and delude yourself with all that right-wing claptrap. The rest of us have problems to tackle, hopefully, in a bipartisan way, with the new Republican minority.
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