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.
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.
Sorry, it’s not ending. Big Tech has taken the progressive baton and with top cover for the GOP engages in a historic assault on our civil rights. With quite a bit of success so far. Many voices have been silenced. We need a new bill of rights for the 21st century. Stat.
the bottom half of the American electorate will vote Democrat no matter what they propose, as long as they get their free stuff.
They’ve lost control of a monster they created. They created an alligator to hunt Republicans built of lies, hyperbole and flawed ideology.
The problem is that beast has grown bigger than they anticipated. They have too many people that believe the constant lies. AOC really believes she is righteous and good. There is no more implacable foe than one that operated from a position of moral certitude.
I think the idea was to sort of pay the alligator to eat them last but kill the alligator before he finished the job.
The only real hope is that the alligator does not live up to his end of the bargain starts eating mainline democrats before turning on Republicans. That looks like it may be happening.
I am over 50 and I can tell you I am deathly afraid of this country becoming socialist!! The younger generation are ALL going to universities in this country that are filling their heads full of propaganda, however today they are being indoctrinated from kindergarten on!!! Parents are busy working and their kids are being indoctrinated right under their noses, the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts have also become total leftist organizations anyone that thinks this country will NEVER become a socialist country better WAKE UP!!! Look at how much we have lost in this country in just a few short decades, and that is because MY generation NEVER dreamed this country could ever become what it is today AND we didnt fight back!!! These BASTARDS have slowly taken over our entire court system, education system, freedom of speech and words and language we are ALLOWED to use!!! WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!
Conservatives do not see history as cyclical. (Unless they are Hindus) Educated people know history is linear. It appears to repeat because there only so many things that can be done but each event is unique and not a simple repeat of the past. We don’t live in the movie Groundhog Day, which would be necessary if history were to repeat. History had a beginning and will have an end.
The difference is that true thinkers know that history provides lessons for us. The left believe they just never had the right guy in charge. The left deny history because they don’t want to deal with explaining the fruit of their ideas.
The Demonicrats already steal oxygen and exhale lies, support the slaughter of unborn children (and now infanticide), and give aid and comfort to the enemy.
Forget the limb. The Demoncrats need to be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced.
We do learn things, and there is a beginning and end.
But Solomon said that nothing is new. It’s been done. People just microwave ideas and give them new names.
Nothing new under the sun does not mean cycles. And, I might add, Solomon never microwaved anything. He couldn’t have. The microwave had not been invented to be forgotten and then cyclically reinvented again.
That scares me a lot.
What scares me just as much, or maybe even more, is rampant Democrat fraud and “ballot harvesting.” The sanctity of our elections is kaput. It’s getting harder every election to defeat the margin of fraud.
Combine those two and we are possibly in deep doo-doo.
It’s gonna be more fun than a barrel of monkeys to watch the 593 Dem presidential candidates trying to out-leftist each other ... and the primary “winner” is gonna wind up being more leftist than Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Lenin, Castro, Chavez, Maduro, and Marx combined ... and it’ll be a bridge WAY to far to move that far left to anywhere near the center in these days when ever word of every candidate is recorded on video forever and ever and ever ...
For that to happen, you need an America where the last two or three generations were not steeped in Hate America marxist propaganda from high school through college.
Don’t forget the lefties want to confiscate all of our guns. Revolution succeeds only when its opposition is completely disarmed.
AOC and Ihlan Omar will be sounding off on “common sense gun control” shortly. They can’t keep their big lefty mouths shut.
Meanwhile, buy ammo & head for the range. Terrorist targets can be found online.
Leftists always overreach. They cannot do anything else... nor have they.
The Democrats don’t want to move to the center.
They are moving far to the left in terms of their views. Period.
good. we can saw it off and get rid of the whole bunch at once
Wasn’t it Napoleon who said, don’t interfere with your enemy when he’s making a horrible mistake?
Saikat Chakrabati writes AOC’s talking points. She just does the talking and the voting.
Chakrabati is her chief of staff and the brains behind her neo-communist operation. They call themselves Justice Democrats. Cenk Uygur, of the Young Turks, is one of the founders.
What they are is a good argument against any more 3rd world immigration before they manage to wreck the whole country.
Michael Barone has always been a GOP establishment hack. You probably just weren’t watching for it in the past.
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