Herding Cats
| Fri Dec. 4, 2009 9:54 AM PST
A friend emails to recommend this statement of the obvious from First Read:
Was Will Rogers right about the Democratic Party? With multiple reports today (in the NYT and National Journal) about how liberals are upset with Obama’s policies (on Afghanistan and other issues), it makes us
wonder if it’s much easier to be a Republican president rather than a Democratic one. Consider: Because there are more self-described conservatives than liberals, GOP presidents are freer to play to their base and not rely as much on the middle to win national elections. In addition, Republican presidents typically don’t face much dissent from GOP members of Congress. Even as the Iraq war became an albatross for Republicans, almost all of them followed George W. Bush off that political cliff in 2006 and 2008. And on issues that Republicans now say they disagreed with Bush — the spending, the deficits, No Child Left Behind — the criticism was barely audible while he was office. By comparison, a Democrat has been in the White House for just 10 months, and the left is freely criticizing Obama over Afghanistan, health care, the economy, judicial nominations, you name it. Many liberals and Democrats would probably pat themselves on the back for this kind of independence. Then again, maybe there’s a reason why Republicans have controlled the White House more times than Democrats have over the past 40 years...
Sometimes it's worthwhile to repeat the obvious, just in case anyone has forgotten. Which they seem to do with stunning regularity. So yes, Virginia, the Republican Party really is different....
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Comments
Hope this doesn't exhaust the
Submitted by David in NY (not verified) on Fri Dec. 4, 2009 10:01 AM PST.
Hope this doesn't exhaust the day's catblogging. :(
What do you or Obama expect?
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri Dec. 4, 2009 10:43 AM PST.
What do you or Obama expect? He has shown absolutely no leadership.
Instead of setting goals and metrics for bills, he just hands the whole thing over to Congress and asks them to write and debate the whole thing with no guidance.
If he refuses to lead, I wish he'd just step down.
Lead or get off the pot, but this guy is too afraid to lead.
By the way you should review
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri Dec. 4, 2009 10:45 AM PST.
By the way you should review your why the hate us thread.
We have defenders of the Taliban in there eager to help tear down the statues of Bamiyan, as well as those who insist the 16 wahabiists of 9/11 weren't really Muslims, and didn't do it for Islam, just mere criminals.
Interesting reality based liberals....
Last Comment by Anonymous Reaks of Nonsense
Submitted by Detroit Dan on Fri Dec. 4, 2009 11:01 AM PST.
But the Republicans did revolt in at least 2 instances:
- Harrient Myers
- Immigration
Business corporations, Wall
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri Dec. 4, 2009 11:12 AM PST.
Business corporations, Wall Street, and rich special interest lobbies like NRA and AIPAC overwhelmingly prefer conservative policies. So Republicans can please their funding sponsors and their voters with the same policies. Democrats on the other hand cannot. If they please business corporations, Wall Street, the NRA or AIPAC, they are almost certainly offending Democratic voters. Too bad that funding from business corporations and Wall Street is allowed.
(sorry if this is a duplicate - it seems I have to post every comment twice)
This is just blinkered. The
Submitted by M. (not verified) on Fri Dec. 4, 2009 11:30 AM PST.
This is just blinkered. The left is more critical of Obama's judicial nominations than the right was of Bush? Doesn't anyone remember Harriet Miers? The constant mumbling by the religious right that Bush's nominees weren't consistently anti-abortion enough?
Republicans walked in lock-step from 2001-2009 on deficits and NCLB? Hardly.
This is what happens when the different sides of the blogosphere start to rely solely on each other for their information. As someone who reads both, I can say confidently that whoever wrote this e-mail hasn't read anything from the conservative side for a long, long time, and therefore has no idea what he/she is talking about.
Yes, this is a real problem
Submitted by Danny (not verified) on Fri Dec. 4, 2009 11:36 AM PST.
Yes, this is a real problem for us. For one thing, we on the left love to make perfect the enemy of good. I should not need to mention more than Nader for president '2000. But time moves quickly and people forget.
With all due respect Kevin, you yourself are a prime example of how much more progressives prefer to feel good about there own intellect and specificly their "intellectual honesty", than they want to work to see progressive policies succeed. Here we are, what 10 months into the Obama administration, and you are already comfortably settled into a routine of contrarian bitching and whining on democrats in general and Obama in particular, only taking a break once in a while to bitch about republicans.
But I guess you never really longed to be a "partisan" or and "advocate"... For all I know, maybe that's why you got out of WM and got this gig, hoping to have the freedom to pontificate about this and that and no shackles or responsibility.
I guess that's all fine. What bothers me is that conservative columnists, bloggers, pundits, talk radio hosts and even "journalists" are always partisans and advocates first - whatever else their job description might be. They took rethorics 101; they got their marketing skills; they know how to speak to the base and to the middle at the same time while always pushing the superiority of conservative policy as well as the superiority of any conservative politician at any time.
Deep down I know the reason for this state of affairs comes down to how the conservative base and the progressive base works. We just love to bitch and moan and to feel intellectually honest. We hate to put our thought process and honesty in second place to goal oriented advancement of our policy goals.
That is why conservative pundits get rewarded again and again for sticking to the script while our pundits don't, and that's why the other team remain so terribly superior in getting their narratives accepted by the MSM and getting their shit done.
That's what bothers me basically...
big tent & self-ID
Submitted by srush (not verified) on Fri Dec. 4, 2009 12:00 PM PST.
I'd say this is just a manifestation of the fact that Dems have a much bigger tent than Reps. Repubs tend to be more uniform in their opinions and values, well really a coalition of 2 or 3 groups with different priorities that don't conflict.
It certainly doesn't have anything to do with greater Repub self-identification, as this simply isn't true. See this Pew poll, showing Dems consistently outnumbering Repubs for at least the last 8 years (length of graph shown).
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/773/fewer-voters-identify-as-republicans
In the end, though, maybe it comes down to the fact that Repubs are simply more comfortable with an authoritarian structure, which is more consistent with their ideology, and which offers significant advantages of working in lockstep, with a few high-profile exceptions (where the public leader strayed from the party line). In contrast, Dems are also being consistent with their ideology--a commune of ideas where everyone has an equal voice, not an authoritarian, strict father structure. Dems tend to have a much more messy processes, and likely get less done, but what they do get done tends to benefit a wider range of people.
if u want more informations
http://www.ok-iraq.com/vb/
Of course its harder to be a
Submitted by Terry (not verified) on Sat Dec. 5, 2009 6:14 AM PST.
Of course its harder to be a Democrat president than Republican. One need only look at the 2003 prescription drug vote to see that to be a partisan republican serving in Congress under a GOP president is to see your role as a staff member, as opposed to elected official on behalf of your folks back home, who probably loathed the idea of a huge new entitlement for prescription drugs, but there was no less than Tom Delay holding the House open all night twisting arms to get votes for it from his fellow "conservatives".
Never in a million years would Obama, Clinton, or any future Democrat president be able to enjoy such subservience from his party, and I'm glad about that!
If running a true national party means some votes are going to be tough to get, so be it. I'd rather have the problems of the Democrat party, than the other side who has to sound almost like a band of militia members in order to "excite" the base, while horrifying everyone else.
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