(I could not let that comment pass without the prime example confirming what you said)
Posted on 03/01/2019 6:19:20 PM PST by Kaslin
There's an old political saying that presidential candidates appeal to their parties' wings -- left for Democrats, right for Republicans -- in the race for the nomination and then appeal to the center in the general election campaign. It was put in canonical form by Richard Nixon, one of only two Americans our major parties nominated for national office five times (the other was Franklin Roosevelt).
The dozen or so already announced Democratic candidates seem to be following Nixon's rule, and with more reckless abandon than Nixon ever did. Maybe they figure that whoever gets the Democratic nomination will inevitably beat Donald Trump. After all, no one they ever talk to would vote for him.
But a skewed sample can produce misleading results. If President Trump's job approval hasn't risen above 44 percent level since March 2017, it has not fallen below 40 percent either this year or last. That's about where opinion was when he got elected. And remember that his national rating is depressed by 2-1 disapproval in California, which casts 10 percent of the nation's votes. He'll never win its 55 electoral votes, but in 2016 he carried the other 49 states and Washington, D.C., by 1.4 million votes.
Like his three predecessors at this point in their first terms, he seems vulnerable. But each of them was re-elected.
Despite this, Democratic presidential candidates have been going out on potentially shaky left-wing limbs, including the Green New Deal sketched out by the exuberant freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Endorsers include putatively serious candidates such as Sens. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The idea is to ban net carbon emissions in just 10 years, which evidently means no gasoline-powered cars, no beef from methane-producing cattle and no passenger airplanes. AOC wants a national passenger rail network "so that air travel becomes unnecessary," as well as guaranteed jobs, free college and government-provided health care, all financed, it seems, by printing money.
Obamacare, passed nearly 10 years ago, is no longer enough for Democrats. In his 2016 campaign, Sanders called for "Medicare-for-all," and he and other declared candidates are echoing that this cycle. When asked about the large majority of Americans who are satisfied with their current health insurance, Harris said they shouldn't have to fill out forms anymore to get treatments approved. "Let's eliminate all that," she said, without getting into details. "Let's move on." More than 100 House Democrats are sponsoring a bill to do just that.
Then there is the issue of reparations for descendants of slaves, urged without much visible effect by longtime Rep. John Conyers and author Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose widely praised best-seller argues that America today is just as racist as ever, and always will be. Polls show this unsurprisingly unpopular, but Harris, Warren and fellow candidate Rep. Julian Castro have signed on for "some form" of reparations.
Support for legal abortion has been a Democratic staple for years. But Democrats have recently moved left to pass laws allowing it up to nine months. They did so successfully in New York and unsuccessfully in Virginia, after Gov. Ralph Northam suggested it would apply after birth.
That's an unpopular position, to say the least. For years, polls have shown majority support for legalizing abortion in the first trimester and prohibiting it in the third. But all six Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate voted against Sen. Ben Sasse's bill to ban ninth-month abortions.
Did this extreme position affect public opinion? A February Marist poll showed equal numbers, 47 percent calling themselves pro-life and pro-choice, a sharp change from January's 55 to 38 percent pro-choice advantage. Maybe this poll is an outlier, but maybe putting the spotlight on ninth-month abortions changed opinion.
An overwhelmingly pro-choice press has long covered for Democrats, refusing to explain that the "health of the mother" exception to abortion bans means (because "health" includes mental health) abortion on demand. Predictably, CNN and MSNBC ignored the Sasse bill vote, and media like Politico provided spectacularly biased accounts.
But liberal media doesn't have a monopoly on megaphones anymore, and Donald Trump has shown himself capable of using invective, ridicule and serious argument to attack extreme positions, as he did Hillary Clinton's on abortion. He has no compunction about raging impolitely against what liberals insist is politically correct.
Democratic presidential candidates, perhaps isolated in liberal cocoons, don't seem to understand their vulnerability on issues like ninth-month abortions and the Green New Deal. They assume their media friends can rescue them. Maybe not.
Except I don’t see them moving to the center after the election or even in the election.
Never underestimate the stupidity of the American voter.
Democrats are fractured. If they Young Turks don’t get what they want from the nominee, there will be a third party candidate. Probably Bernie. Count on it.
They have been out on the ultra-left wing for 50 years or more.
In my opinion, Marxist Liberals already fell off their limb and have fallen straight into hell.
That’s why I soft-pedal the bashing of AOC. For a freshman congress-critter she is doing an incredible job of pulling her party left, shedding more independents and moderate Democrats the farther left the Dems go.
The further out on the limb they go, the less sawing for us in 2020.
yes
Go study the French Revolution.
Hint: we’ve barely started to see how far left the Left will go.
I want them utterly defeated.
I want it so bad for them that when a Leftist starts talking, regular people snort, shake their heads and walk away...
The French Revolution was precipitated by a series of bad harvests, resulting in food shortages as well as a financial crisis triggered by massive government deficits with high percentage debt servicing. Then, the person at the helm, Louis XVI was weak, frequently depressed and out of touch.
Revolutions often occur in a milieux economic distress. If the left gains power, we could have the right conditions. The people on both sides hate the government.
This is the key.
The Progressives have been able to rely on other Progressives in the Media to rescue them, shape the narrative, and decide that which of their enemies has a scandal worth reporting, for 60 years.
That is ending, and they are not used to it.
People have no idea what the progressive template requires.
Conservatives and historians see history as cyclical and repetitive, doing the same thing again and again. They believe that this sinful world will never get it right, never fix the things that are wrong.
Progressives see history as linear, heading toward a future earthly perfection. In order to get there, we must erase whole populations and occasionally make mistakes, but we’ll eventually get it right, with an earth population of less than 500 million politically correct people and just a few farting cows.
There is the danger of an empowered AOC and her generation.
AOC’s ideas:
-Making air transport illegal, building bridges to Europe and Hawaii
-Destroying and greenly re-building EVERY structure in the USA
-Doing away with concrete as a construction input
-Saving money for socialized medicine via fewer funerals
-Eliminating beef-eating pets
-Cross-breeding humans and rabbits so we could all be vegans
I used to trust Barone’s analysis. Since 2012 he seems nothing more than a swamp apologist. Maybe he always was and I’ve just become “woke”. What polls does this guy quote?
Never underestimate the stupidity of the American voter.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
My fear is that most of us over fifty are too old fashioned to take it seriously, like the total end of recorded music we can own and so on.
Author Michael Barone grew up in my home county of Macomb in MI. Home of the original Reagan Democrats who many say led to the Trump voters being energized decades later.
He and Bill O’Reilly say things like Bill’s 2016 remark “Bernie Sanders won’t win anything. America will not go socialist. Never. It will not go socialist.” Without delegate counting fraud by Hillary’s people he would have won (a threat made him ashen faced and he started mumbling about Hillary being ok partway —a secret violent threat to his wife or him, many think.)
Americans learned from blacks to demand full welfare, no work needed for income, and 100% healthcare including surgical costs paid by others always and the rich owe it all as taxpayers. They want that now.
Maybe as always, the party promising the most free stuff will get the votes and win. New Deal,Obamacare, Ocasio Cortez.
Grim.
They need to go REALLY left, the way they secretly want to. Don't just posture.
The Dem party has been full of kooks and kooky ideas as long as I have been paying attention to politics. 30 years. A lot of this “Dems are going crazy” talk is preaching to the Republican voter choir, IMO. They’ve been crazy for decades.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.