The Republican Revolution

HayesStreet,
Wow, you sound emotionally distraught. You sound like a defeated man. I wonder how that happened? sigh


Perhaps that's more of a problem with your own ability to perceive, interpret, and understand other people's posts than it is anything HayesStreet said.

 

He has some interesting points to make...but sadly they get lost due to his style. Try reading through the rhetoric to get to the message (this is directed at everybody...not Major specifically).

 

He has some interesting points to make...but sadly they get lost due to his style. Try reading through the rhetoric to get to the message (this is directed at everybody...not Major specifically).


Oh I agree, but the message is automatically going to be received much worse because of the style. If he wants to have a serious and credible argument, he knows how to do it, and he's always welcome to join in the fun!

 

Seems we are on the same page here Major.

I agree with much of what TJ has to say. But the style just kills it for me...we have all talked about this before.

The banter between TJ and HayesStreet in this thread just sounds like blah blah insult blah. Too bad because I think somewhere in there BOTH guys had salient points to make. Sad that they'll never be known to most of the people who are going to see the barbs traded back and forth and just keep scrolling.

 

Just remember TJ...in the NFL it is never the guy who starts it that gets the penalty. Same thing applies here.

 

(Wow, what a rich thread. I had to find a little time to throw something into this one. One caveat: I haven’t read the whole thread, so I apologize if I duplicate any previous stuff. One more caveat: As much as I would like to, I don't have the time to respond to individual comments. Free pass Trader.)

I was shaken but not really surprised by the outcome. I suspect this has more to do with growing up a Democrat in the late 1970's and 80's than any real feel I had for the race the last few days. At any rate, here’s what I think I learned from this debacle.

1. Dems wasted the Jeffords gift by not establishing clear lines with Bush and going after him from the beginning. When the Dems got the Senate, they were thinking “OK, now we can block Bush’s programs and wait for him to fall under his own weight.” In retrospect, they should have been going after him with the investigative powers of the Senate from the get-go. Even with Bush hovering just above 50%, they should have been trying to drive him into the 40's. I feel a bit callous saying this, giving all that happened to Clinton, but like it or not, it is good politics these days. I think if the situation was reversed, the GOP would not have hesitated to take it to a President carrying the vulnerabilities Bush once had. By not wanting to be like the GOP in re Clinton and hoping Bush would fail on his own, Dems wasted an opportunity that after 9/11 was no longer available. Better to take a reputation hickey early on and wound your opponent than do nothing, look statesmanlike, and increase the power of your opponent. Now, they will never be able to go after Bush unless he wins a second term and Dems can control one of the houses: an outcome I don’t really want. By not being aggressive, they have now put Bush in a position where he has an easy glidepath to the day after the GOP Convention and maybe to Nov 2004.

2. Terrorism is good for the party in power. It can be argued that OK City pulled Clinton out of the fire and conferred some presidential gravitas that had been lacking after the 94 elections. I think a similar argument can be made about 9/11 and Bush. Without OK City, Clinton does not recover as fast and without 9/11, Bush is not nearly as strong. 9/11 made wusses (sp?) out of the Dem leadership, which strengthened Bush more by comparison. I think it was Carville who said something along the lines of “A party that won’t defend itself can’t be trusted to defend the country.”

3. Bush v. Gore II. I think it’s as close to a sure thing that this is what we will see in 2004. There’s nobody left on the Dems that come close now. Gephardt? No way. Daschle? Good Senator and probably a better minority leader than majority leader, but not a visionary. He does a good job of obstructing bad policy but not a very good job of communicating the reasons. Edwards? Too much fluff. Hillary? Too early, too NE. Pending a Governor currently under the radar, that leaves Gore. Look for the GOP machine to misstate positions and smear Gore at every turn between now and 2004.

4. It’s been said before but bears repeating again: When going up against superior forces (in this case, money and Air Force One), you must have a superior strategy. If you just approach it tactically, it’s no surprise when you get beat more often than not. The GOP will always have more firepower, so Dems must have the superior ideas. This is an absolute.

5. The myth of the liberal media has been laid to rest. CNBC had the WSJ editors covering the election, NBC had Rush Limbaugh, Chris Matthews had 3 Republicans balanced with that strong personality Donna Brazile. Tim Russert turned Florida and Massachusetts with much tougher (and in some cases loaded) questions for Dems candidates. Not to mention Faux News.

6. Dems fell in love with demographics, generic polls, and historical trends to the point where they came to rely on these elements to at least maintain the status quo going into 2004. You can never step into the same river twice and historical trends mean jack in predicting what will happen tomorrow. True, they can help explain things after the fact, but you don’t bet an election on historical trends. Dems seemed to read the polls with rose-colored glasses and spent too much time analyzing and not enough organizing.

7. They took no chances with redistricting save in Georgia and a couple of other places. There should have been many more competitive House seats which would have helped dilute the GOP money advantage.

8. The small block of moderate Republican Senators now become the power in any close vote. After trying to blow Dem Senators who sided with him on taxes and Iraq out of the water (and mostly succeeding) there’s no reason for conservative Dems to work with Bush. If Chaffee and Collins can persuade one more Senator to hang with them, they call the shots on any controversial measures.

9. As John Stewart said, with Jesse Helms retiring, it doesn’t matter who holds that seat because any way you look at it, it’s good for America.

10. Much of the success Tuesday was Rove picking moderates to run. Witness the Minnesota race. I don’t think they can keep a lid on the Cons for the next two years. When the Cons overstep, that’s when the pendulum will start the other way.

11. Being put in a position of betting on the GOP acting in a self-serving, imperious, gloating manner is a sucky position to be in, but it’s not a bad bet either.

12. Dems are not dead. There is no Republican Revolution. Many good Dems made it back and while the GOP’s going to do a lot of damage over the next two years, 2004 is going to be competitive and loads of fun.

On another note, the quote war in the front of the thread doesn’t mean much because the definitions of liberal and conservative have changed so much over the last century.

That’s all for now. Carry on.

 

Boo hoo. Give us a break. The energy players make billions upon billions providing that 'fuel' to the world economy. At the same time they deny and obsfucate the damage they cause to the environment much in the same way the tobacco industry denied the damage from thier products. Destroying the environment is NOT imperative to the mission of providing energy.

I am neither a member of a radical environmental group nor do I owe some misplaced alliegence to large energy MNCs. As such I feel I am infinitely more well placed to be objective on the issue than you are, TJ.

That is the single most moronic sentence I have ever read on this board.

Hardly. These corporations spend a paltry percentage of their profits on environmental issues merely to forestall strict government regulation.

 

Uh, yes there are questions about that statement. We import less than 3% of our oil from Iraq (about 1 million barrels a day). That amount is easily replaceable from other sources (the list is long - Canada, Russia, Venezuela). OR, and yes this is stunning, a 3 mile per gallon increase in fuel efficiency in our cars would reduce our oil imports by a million barrels a day. But there I am being on the 'lunatic environmental fringe' again!

And of course NONE of the oil from the Artic Refuge would be available for TEN YEARS, which makes these 'national security' and 'economic' arguments ridiculous.

The question is why do we want to continue to entrench old, dirty methods for energy? WHY? Because the industries that currently profit from that arrangement would rather continue on with the status quo. Remember, the oil market will INEVITABLY COLLAPSE. And when it runs its course, with price shocks, shortages, and corporate gouging along the way, where will we be? It makes infinitely more sense to stop pursuing NEW oil fields and start pursuing RENEWABLE energy sources. It makes NO SENSE in a national security framework to be dependent on oil. Opening the Arctic Refuge will NOT solve this dependency. In an economic framework it does not make sense to be dependent on oil, and opening the AWR only perpetuates our reliance on 19th century technology (which has massive negative impacts on our environment).

"Every man who appreciates the majesty and beauty of the wilderness and of wild life, should strike hands with the far-sighted men who wish to preserve our material resources, in an effort to keep our forests, and our game-beasts, game-birds, and game-fish -- indeed, all the living creatures of prairie and woodland and seashore -- from wanton destruction. Above all, we should recognize that the effort toward this end is essentially a democratic movement."

Sadly, this may essentially be a 'Democratic' movement now.

 

I couldn't agree more. I have often thought that we could get our oil a hell of a lot cheaper from Russia and at the same time help the Russians to resurrect thier economy.

I see the analogy, but there is a huge difference. The tobacco industry added chemicals to their product designed to keep people addicted to the product. No such thing has occurred with fossil fuels.

I totally disagree. Reform did not happen under the Democrats either. They love to give the rhetoric...but when it comes time for action they like the oil company money as much as the Republicans do.

 

Ref,

re: Russia - If we MUST continue to use oil, I agree that we certainly have to get it from neither the ME nor the AWR. Russia and the Caspian Basin are more than capable of meeting our short term needs.

The point is that if you look at MOST if not all major industry sectors, when they are discovered to be committing some error, offense, destruction, whatever...they always deny first. Then they attempt to slow reform. That's what corporate apologia IS. The tobacco companies, regardless of the later controversy on additives in cigarettes, denied that FIRSTHAND smoking was harmful. Was it any less predictable that oil companies would claim global warming is not happening?

Ah, I was just kind of playing with the words there, Ref. But on this specific issue of the AWR, the Republicans are the party pushing to open it, not the Democrats.

 

Sure. I understand that. It is much more cost effective to deny and fix than it is to accept legal liability up front. That doesn't make it right...just understandable.

I'm really agnostic on this point. I don't want to see a slew of dead animals everywhere, but I sure would like to see the potential job creation, particularly during the recession we are currently in.

 

A few more things about the ANWR

"The Arctic refuge is the only remaining 5 percent of Alaska's North Slope not already open to drilling. Oil exploration there would be like drilling in Yellowstone National Park or the Grand Canyon. Big Oil wants to drill on the refuge's coastal plain. That's the biological heart of the refuge. Called "America's Serengeti," it is home to polar bears, musk oxen, wolves, millions of migratory birds, caribou and hundreds of other species. The industrial disturbance would be immense and spills inevitable. Polar bears could abandon their dens, leaving cubs to die. BP's facilities at nearby Prudhoe Bay constitute one of the world's largest industrial complexes, and in one year alone it had 293 spills of 44,551 gallons!

For all these reasons and more, at least two-thirds of Americans believe the refuge should be protected from oil drilling, according to recent public-opinion polls. The non-partisan League of Conservation Voters, for instance, recently hired a team of pollsters -- the Republican Terrance Group and the Democratic Greenberg Quinlan Research – to perform an unbiased assessment of voters’ views on a number of environmental issues. By a margin of more than two-to-one, those responding said our nation should declare the Arctic refuge a national monument and prevent oil drilling.

But would drilling in the Arctic refuge give us independence from foreign sources of oil? No. According to the latest estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey, the coastal plain would yield only about six months worth of oil for the United States under the most likely scenario. And even that would take 10 years to bring to market.

Since the Prudhoe Bay discovery, Alaska’s North Slope has produced more than 13 billion barrels of oil, and the state of Alaska predicts it will pump 5 billion more by 2020. But the U.S. Geological Survey concluded in 1998 that the largest potential oil field in the Arctic refuge might produce 1 billion barrels. And most of the refuge’s potential oil fields are smaller. "

 

Not without an alternative (could we switch from oil), agreed. The problem is that the energy companies should be leading the transition and they are not. They are being dragged along by public opinion and government regulation/incentives. America is great because of our 'can do' attitude. Everytime new regulations FORCE industry to change the industry screams it will crush the economy/is unfeasible. Everytime they quickly adapt and make the changes. There is not a reason we cannot make the transition. And again I will point out that our economy will continue to take hits precisely because we are so attached to oil (for instance: 75% of our trade deficit is from oil, oil shocks) and that if your position is correct the collapse of the economy is INEVITABLE as oil is a finite resource. As such it makes no sense to continue along a path that guarantees economic collapse. The only sensible path is to transition away from an oil economy.

Say hello to Dubya for us.

 

The "Republican Revolution" almost died after what 36 hours?

RM95, Ref--I just wanted to keep the thread (i.e., "Republican Rev...") alive when it seemed out of steam and out of sight.