In Speech Bush Returns to Fear Mongering as Polls Drop

basso, I am going to continue to tell you I and we told you so at least until there is a meaningful shift in a failed (and very deadly) policy. I don't pretend to know the way out of this mess. I agree that, now that the enormous mistake was made, it is everybody's problem. But the onus is not on the opposition (and certainly not on a bbs poster) to have the solution to it. What I know, again, is this: Staying the course with something that isn't working is not the solution. More positive media coverage (or positive posts on a Rockets site - LOL) is not the solution. I am not an expert on the Middle East, war, nation building or feasible exit strategies, so it seems pretty stupid to demand that I come up with a solution. There are experts on all these things on the government payroll. I'd suggest Bush start talking to the people that warned him before this thing started. They were right and he was wrong. They very likely have a better answer to this problem than his various yes men. I only have one idea, which is that any meaningful solution to this quagmire would almost certainly begin with the involvement of the broader international community. That will not happen without some serious mea culpas. John Bolton was, of course, an extra stupid way to reach out to allies we have deeply offended. And I don't expect Bush to ease up on his stubborness about never admitting a mistake, so I don't have much hope of a greater international involvement. But that's where I'd start. Interestingly, it's where Kerry would have started too.

 

So you think its wrong to fight terrorism just because Kerry thinks we should?

 

Where have you been? Batman has said over and over that he wants it done correctly and that we can't abandon Iraq to total chaos. He's also said that he doesn't have any specific answers, and suggested asking the people who predicted and planned for the correct things prior to the invasion of Iraq whom this administration has gotten rid of.

I will also say again that at this point to continue on with a policy that is failing is madness. We can debate what changes need to be made, but to act like we are there so we should stay the course is the one thing that we know is failing.

 

Batman and Franchise, i'm assuming, although i could be wrong, that at some point the democrats are interested in assuming the reins of government again. "This is my anger talking" didn't work so well for the democrats in 2000, 2002, and crashed and burned rather dramatically in 2004. sooner or later, democrats will have to develop cogent policies for the issues that face america. the republicans certainly had their own b****-fest while they were out of power, but they also put together a platform that resonated with much of america, ran on it, and won. one could argue whther they've stayed true to first principles, but the fact remains that the only interesting intellectual and philosophical debate happening in this country now is occuring on the right. no, it's not your responsibility to come up with a ideas for iraq, or indeed any other issue. but one would think you'd want to...

http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=4488724

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Lexington
Hold the champagne
Oct 6th 2005
From The Economist print edition

The Democrats cannot rely on the Republicans' current woes to deliver victories in 2006 and 2008

TALK about trouble coming not in single spies but in battalions. For much of his first term, almost everything that George Bush touched turned to political gold. He even managed to parlay a badly-handled war in Iraq into a vote winner. But now almost everything he touches turns to dust.

The Democrats are quietly jubilant. They are seizing every chance they can get—and there are plenty of them—to brand the Republicans as the party of “corruption and cronyism”. They seem to be recruiting good candidates for next year's elections. Some even wonder whether 2006 may be their equivalent of 1994—when the Republicans won 52 seats in the House and nine in the Senate, ending 40 years of Democratic rule.

They should hold the champagne. Parties don't win elections just because their rivals hit a rough patch. They win them because they win the battle of ideas, because they think ahead and cook up cogent policies, because they offer a positive vision of the future. Bill Clinton did this brilliantly in 1992. Tony Blair did it even more brilliantly in 1997. But, so far, not the Democrats.

Can anyone name a single exciting Democratic idea for dealing with poverty? Or crime? Or reforming the public sector? Or winning the Kulturkampf with Islamic extremism? In fact, can anyone name a single exciting Democratic idea, full stop? The Democrats have squandered their years in opposition railing against the Republicans rather than recharging their intellectual batteries. They may be winning a few political battles of late—largely because of Republican incompetence. But they are losing the vision wars.

The reason for this is as simple as it is potentially lethal: the Democrats are split down the middle on everything from Iraq to gay marriage. Centrists believe in working with business, protecting family values and fighting terrorism. “We believe that the September 11th attacks changed America for ever,” says the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), “and defeating terrorism is the supreme military and moral mission of our time.” Liberal activists believe the opposite: that corporations are bad, family values are hogwash, and the war on terror a delusion.

Worse still, the wrong side is getting the upper hand. A new generation of angry young activists have used their mastery of the internet to tilt the party to the left. Groups such as Moveon.org (which claims 3.3m members) and blogs such as the Daily Kos (which has thousands of partisans venting daily) now colour the whole tone of the political debate on the left.

The teenage scribblers of the left seem to be turning the Democrats into a deranged version of Pavlov's dog—reacting to every stimulus from Professor Rove's laboratory rather than thinking ahead. Look what has happened in Congress, where the combination of a re-energised left and a ruthlessly partisan White House is making life miserable for would-be centrists. In 1994, 102 House Democrats voted in favour of NAFTA; this year, only 15 voted in favour of CAFTA, a more modest free-trade deal.

The teenage scribblers are wedded to a suicidal strategy: they think that their party's best chance of winning lies not in emulating Mr Clinton and moving to the centre but in emulating their nemesis, Mr Bush, and motivating their base. This ignores the most salient fact about American politics: there are three conservatives for every two liberals. The Democrats cannot win without carrying about 60% of moderates.

The other dysfunctional party



Is it really that bad? Marshall Wittmann, of the centrist DLC, counsels against despair about the party's future. He points out that the anti-Bush left has a built-in sell-by date: Mr Bush will not be running in 2008. He also argues that the person who defines the character of a party is its presidential candidate—and the strongest candidates for 2008, such as Hillary Clinton and Mark Warner, are forward-thinking moderates.

There are two problems with Mr Wittmann's optimism. The first is that Moveon et al will still be in full bark against Mr Bush in 2006. That will not help in a contest where the tables are already stacked against the Democrats. In the Senate, they will be defending seven potentially vulnerable seats while the Republicans will be defending five; in the House, 41 Democrats are defending districts that Mr Bush carried in 2004 while only 18 Republicans are protecting districts that John Kerry carried.

Second, even if a centrist Democrat succeeds in winning the party nomination in 2008, he or she will have a huge mountain to climb. In “The Politics of Polarisation”, a new paper published by the Third Way group, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, two centrist stalwarts, lay out the topography. The public is profoundly sceptical of the Democrats on both “values” (only 29% of Americans regard the party as friendly towards religion) and defence (it is no accident that the Democrats have won the popular vote only in recent elections—1992, 1996 and 2000—when national security was all but absent from the debate). The party has also lost ground with two groups of swing voters: married women favoured them by four points in 1996, but backed Mr Bush by 12 points in 2004; a 16-point lead among Catholics became a five-point loss in 2004.

The 1990s showed that left-of-centre parties can climb the highest mountains provided they start early and stick to the right path. Mr Clinton made his political reputation as a reforming governor who was willing to think afresh about everything from education to free trade. No sooner was Mr Blair elected leader of the Labour Party in 1994 than he started tearing up left-wing shibboleths about public ownership and rebranding the party as “New Labour”. So far the Democratic Party has been so paralysed by its internal contradictions that it has wasted its years in opposition. Perhaps it will start laying out a blueprint for government soon. But time is short.