The Rightward Drift.

“What you saw, I think, anyway, was…the end product of thirty years of a Democratic Party that has slid so far to the center-right that a Democratic president found himself arguing with a ‘severely conservative’ Republican candidate over the issues of how much the Democratic president had cut out of the budget, how many regulations he’d trimmed, how much more devoted to the middle-class-kick-in-the-balls Simpson-Bowles ‘plan’ he is, and how he would ‘reform’ Social Security and Medicare — and, frankly, a Democratic president losing some of those arguments to his left.“

Hey all. Haven’t given up on the blog again, but I am in the midst of the final ascent on the old dissermatation. (With two more hopefully brief chapters to go, I just rounded page 1055. Yes, I know. This whole thing has just gotten out of hand. Ohhhh well. Everybody needs a coping strategy.) Anyways, between that and work GitM is back to being neglected for a few weeks. In the meantime, I strongly endorse this Esquire piece by Charles Pierce on exactly why Obama stunk up the bed so badly in the first Republican primary debate general election debate.

Basically, if you give America a choice between a Republican and a Republican, the Republican will win every time. The problem wasn’t Obama had an off night. The problem is this former great hope of the left actually believes Simpson-Bowles is a good idea (it isn’t) and that the deficit is a huge problem (it’s not.) Even while the Obama campaign is trying to convince us to get more than just a wee bit cult-y “For All”, the Grand Bargain train is already leaving the station.

In short, we seem to have reached a point where so many top Democrats have spent so many years doing the protective camouflage thing that they’ve completely forgotten which way is up. As a party, we are now clearly to the right of Nixon and verging on being right of Reagan. The president’s stinker of a performance on Wednesday was just a clearer-than-usual, real-time manifestation of the Democratic Party’s deeper dilemma: We have lost our way.

6 thoughts on “The Rightward Drift.”

  4. Also, Fritz, I agree that the decay/outsourcing of our manufacturing base is a problem. The type of problem we should be solving by investing in infrastructure, energy R&D, rebuilding the domestic manufacturing base, etc. Fixating on the deficit doesn’t solve any of this.

  5. I am on the fence on the this

    I wish I had a link to a Jim Rodgers video regarding the calamity of debt but I can not find it.
    I do not think a printing press will solve it, I do not see it as hysteria more like common sense, if the ship does sink then the thinking becomes clear, hindsight 20/20 right now no one holds the oracle, the main vector is greed not the universal good

    Ahhhhhh infrastructure

    What I could have done with all the billions we wasted in the
    Moon craters of Iraq

    We could have high speed rail across the country, teachers paid as much as football quarterbacks…but that is too sane never happen

Comments are closed.