Yes and no. Yes in many of the ways that matter most, but a big fat no when it comes to fiscal policy. It’s just that the Republicans they became in that regard were Eisenhower Republicans, not post-Reagan voodoo Republicans.
When a colleague of mine revealed to two obnoxious guests that I was going to vote for Obama’s reelection, and of course they claimed he was a communist, I replied (after a good laugh), “No, he’s an Eisenhower Republican.” And, like Roosevelt in 1938, Obama did cool a recovery by a return to relative fiscal austerity. I don’t think it was entirely forced on him.
Too much of what the Fed does to boost the economy filters through the financial sector. We need to do less of that, but more fiscal measures, which are investments in our future. That means infrastructure, but also child care and universal medical care. Healthy people produce more and, by consuming more as well, act as multipliers of what inures to their benefit.
That accounts for Boren and Nunn, plus some others in those days.
Whereas Moynihan was supposedly a “North-east Liberal Democrat.” As a Nixon aide he had advised the president that “benign neglect” could substitute for “race policy.” As an aide to Ford he helped secure what he himself later called a “shameless Cold War policy” (to abet and conceal genocide). As a Senator he fought the Clintons on health-care reform. And then as a retiring Senator he blithely gifted his seat to Ms. Clinton.
I wasn’t. You should work on your very bad habit of trying to speak for others to bolster your weak arguments. If I don’t express a point explicitly, you don’t get to invent it for me, kid.
This is excellent! Detailed and moving, and just reading it gives one a sense of a journey. That is hard to capture when one is talking about a lifetime of observations and feelings.
One touchpoint stands out to me. Though from an entirely different experience (and making no suggestion that mine is at all equitable), the 1992 conference, particularly Pat Buchanan’s thunderous diatribe of “us vs them,” was a turning point for me.
I was in a young officer in the military, still coming to terms with my being gay and suffering through my first breakup. I was hopeful of Clinton’s pledge to end the ban of gays in the military, which ultimately morphed into “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (a topic of its own). Still, I was becoming aware on a personal level the hatred some held for gays … and its utility as a political lightning rod.
And in the midst of it all, Buchannan appeared on stage, spinning an insidious tale of cultural wars and enemies of the nation. I recall a line about wars of words inevitably becoming a war In the streets. It was chilling and dark, and a full-fledged call to arms to a new cultural war, one that haunts us to this day.
It was the day this child of deep red dixie (tempered by a relatively progressive mother and grandmother) knew I would never vote Republican again. And I haven’t. I’ve never had a reason too, and the chasm between decency and deadly political expediency in the Republican Party has only grown worse in the decades since. Only now, despite the incremental gains for which I am grateful, the targets are broad and sweeping - immigrants, scientists, women and as always black and brown people.
I will never understand, accept or forgive the contempt the Republican party and their devotees have for fellow Americans, and for the Flag they wrap themselves in at every opportunity.
Two decades earlier, Lee Atwater and the Southern Strategy. This has been festering for a long time. Trump was just the needle that pierced the boil that held the festering pus of the GOP.
Dixiecrat might be more accurate yet. When I lived in Kentucky I met dozens of people who declared they were members of the Democratic party but invariably supported and voted Republican; the difference between identity and stance, the former because that’s their family history, the latter because that’s their ideological alignment ever since the 1960’s civil rights era.
When [President Johnson] signed the act he was euphoric, but late that very night I found him in a melancholy mood as he lay in bed reading the bulldog edition of the Washington Post with headlines celebrating the day. I asked him what was troubling him. "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come," he said. (Bill Moyers, Moyers in America)
First, being bad at communicating doesn’t mean there is no communicating at all; in the political arena, such aspects as repetition, consistency, coordination, and clarity significantly impact what the great mass of Americans who don’t follow politics closely hear from the media and directly from politicians.
I’m able to discern what the Democratic Party’s general philosophy and legislative priorities are compared to the GOP because I follow politics far more closely than the vast majority of Americans. That includes doing such things as looking at the party votes on key legislative initiatives, which is something that only a tiny, tiny number of political dorks like myself have any interest whatsoever in doing.
For example, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 was one of Clinton’s initial legislative accomplishments. The vote in the Senate was 71 Yes, 27 No, with 2 not voting.
Of the 71 Yes votes, 55 were cast be Democrats and 16 by Republicans. Of those 16 Republicans were ten (Chafee, Cohen, Danforth, Durenburger, Hatfield, Jeffords, McCain, Packwood, Roth, and Spector) who were moderate-to-liberal Republicans in their political careers regarded with contempt by hardline conservatives from the Reagan era to today. Jeffords eventually left the GOP and caucused with the Dems for the last part of his Senate tenure.
Of the 27 no votes, there were just two Democrats—Hollings of SC and Heflin of AL.
The partisan breakdown of the Senate vote on this particular bill is entirely consistent with the vast majority of liberal legislation that’s been passed since Clinton’s administration. The notion that “Democrats are just Republican-Lite” isn’t supported by the legislative record.
[T]he RNC spent the first day trotting out its diversity speakers. Georgia State Representative Vernon Jones is a lifelong Democrat, but he spoke at the convention to bring up a very valid point: Democrats take the Black vote for granted.
Employing the “leave the plantation” sloganeering made popular by Trump shills “Diamond & Silk,” Jones said “The Democratic Party does not want Black people to leave their mental plantation. I have news for Joe Biden: We are free, we are free people with free minds, and I’m part of a large and growing segment of the Black community who are independent thinkers, and we believe that Donald Trump is the president that America needs to lead us forward.”
Jones is not entirely wrong…You could imagine Jones wielding a legitimate wedge argument against the Democratic Party to cleave away some of the Black vote… But it’s hard to make that argument on behalf of a Republican Party that is still fighting for preserving Confederate monuments and keeping brown kids in cages…
This is a superb example of “both-sides” journalism / opinion-writing.
I personally enjoyed reading the perspective of a Republican person of color (and I am so myself; also born in The US, but have watched politics from the Democratic perspective.) I have always wondered why a POC would think to be a Republican. POC were always looking in from the outside with this promise of inclusion and equality, and have never seemed to achieve a level of equality in my 60 years. I remember the trickle-down theory, and was enlightened by my parents that it would never work (and they were right.)
The two party system is an enigma in that although they are supposed to represent opposite methodology and to meet in the middle somehow, there really only exists one good methodology for calamities such as government corruption, poverty, lack of proper education, crime. However, the only party that seems to be proposing different ways of evolving to fight these issues is The Democratic Party. The GOP is lost in the 50s dream that never even existed except for those with a megaphone.
Now that everyone has the megaphone of Twitter, Facebook, etc. we can see that the have-nots are as numerous as the hungry in third world countries.
In his first appearance I was immediately struck by three overlapping contradictory thoughts about Governor Bill Clinton: A) I really, really liked this guy for some reason, B) I knew he was lying to me, and C) I was — somehow — okay with him lying to me. He was even more charming because of the lies.
This part stood out to me both for how relevant it is for the attraction to Trump, and how it contrasts to my own feelings. I despised Clinton for his obviously fake glad-handing, oily “charm”, and frequent lies. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he won over Bush and Dole, but he wasn’t in my top three choices in the 1992 primary, the first time I could vote. I guess some people prefer to be lied to and told everything is going to be great.
Also, on top of what others have pointed out about the claim “Democrats have now become Republicans”, Clarence Thomas is by no means “thoughtless”. If you read his opinions it’s clear he has a lot of disturbingly original thoughts, all of them utterly insane even by conservative standards.
Yes, and they were old-school, post-Nixon Democrats from the supposed golden age when according to the leftists, “Democrats actually stood for something”. Not Clinton-era “third way” types.
The claim is that ‘Democrats’ are keeping ‘Blacks’ on a mental plantation and taking their votes for granted…Now, Clyburn is a Democrat if anybody is, so in what way is he taking the black vote for granted?
And that question reveals a fundamental problem with that lie: Blacks make up a substantial portion of the Democratic Party and have a strong role in the leadership.
Respectfully disagree Mr./Ms. J. He (Pres Obama) was dealing with a bunch of lunatics who actually wanted to default on the public debt in 2011:
Some Tea Party Caucus and other Republicans, however, (including, but not limited to, Senators Jim DeMint, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee, and Representatives Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, and Allen West) expressed skepticism about raising the debt ceiling (with some suggesting the consequences of default are exaggerated), arguing that the debt ceiling should not be raised, and "instead the federal debt [should] be ‘capped’ at the current limit…
Not surprisingly their attitude change 180 degrees when Don the Con became President.
