Both the Democratic and Republican parties are made up of diverse interest groups.
Republicans made up of diverse interest groups? Is that a typo?
One thing that gives Republicans the edge over Democrats is that they are more focused on winning elections than maintaining ideological purity. Ironically, their lockstep behavior has them all now marching to the tune of ideological purists.
But, Republicans aren't populists. They have become an ideologically pure conservative party, and conservatives are authoritarians by nature. A good example of the differences between Democrats and Republicans is how they are responding to the issue of changing demographics in many southern states. The Democrats are trying to do their usual balancing act of trying to draw in immigrant and visible minorities, while trying to avoid losing all too many white, and possibly xenophobic voters. The Republican strategy is to just say 'to hell with the minorities, our base is white bread suburban and rural voters.' And if their numbers fall below that of visible minorities, they'll just pull something similar to the days of the Jim Crow South - cry voter fraud, and make blacks, latinos and other minorities who don't support them, jump through hoops, or have their names struck from the voter rolls; and tell everyone that they are fighting against voter fraud.
About 40 years ago, a very important founder of modern conservatism - Paul Weyrich, made an iconic statement during a speech somewhere when he declared:"we aren't interested in getting everyone out to vote. We want OUR people to get out and vote. If everyone votes, conservatives lose." Weyrich feared that appealing to populism watered down his vision of conservative values, and taught that conservative values needed to be imposed on the majority, not voted for by the majority.
Stay home or vote for someone else, if you want. But don't complain when Republicans take power and show you how different they can be from a Barack Obama administration. As Ben Franklin warned his compatriots: "We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." Democrats are pretty good at hanging themselves.
After a few years of holding dual citizenship over 20 years ago, I gave up my U.S. citizenship when I moved back to Canada and got married...so, I don't really get a vote in this election. I'm just an interested bystander with a lot of American relatives; and my interest in U.S. politics is especially piqued now that we have a Federal Conservative Government up here with a room full of Republican strategists and advisers. Pretty much every bad Republican idea is getting trotted out up here. But, re: the Franklin quote, I don't think old Ben had to worry about his fellow patriots selling out to the British, as modern Democrats have to worry about who is funding their Democratic Party candidates.
You got your history a little twisted around. LBJ faced a strong primary challenge from Eugene McCarthy, not Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy would never have challenged Johnson. After LBJ announced he wouldn't run for re-election, Kennedy jumped into the race, much to the dismay of us McCarthy-supporters. It is a seriously bad idea to challenge an incumbent president in one's own party, and Kennedy knew that. McCarthy, like you, didn't care that much about the consequences of bringing his party down. Nor did I at that age. I wouldn't make the same judgment to support McCarthy, in retrospect.
WIP, not only was I there at the time, but you keep getting your history mixed up. Humphrey was informed by Johnson that he wasn't running before Kennedy knew it. Johnson urged Humphrey to run, and Humphrey remarked that he doubted he could beat the Kennedys. Anyway, we are arguing over a lot of Democratic losers, and I think you need to step back and ask yourself whether your solution to the problem isn't the same behavior that screwed Democrats in the past. If we don't work hard to elect candidates, then we will not "have a voice at the table", as you put it earlier.
My recollections may be off...I was only 11 years old at the time, and everything I heard came from having a politically active family, and relatives -- especially one uncle, who even took an unpaid leave of absence from his job at the Cadillac Plant so he could go work for the George Romney Campaign...and he was a lifelong Democrat! Let's just say the differences between the Sr. Romney and Jr. are like night and day.
Refocusing here -- Wikipedia isn't much help resolving this issue of who did what when. On the RFK Wiki page, it says that Kennedy entered the race after Johnson announced his retirement, but both the LBJ and McCarthy articles say that he entered the race after Sen. McCarthy's close 2nd place finish in New Hampshire:
However, entering the 1968 election campaign, initially, no prominent Democratic candidate was prepared to run against a sitting president of the Democratic party. Only Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota challenged Johnson as an anti-war candidate in the New Hampshire primary, hoping to pressure the Democrats to oppose the Vietnam War. On March 12, McCarthy won 42 percent of the primary vote to Johnson's 49 percent, an amazingly strong showing for such a challenger. Four days later, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York entered the race. Internal polling by Johnson's campaign in Wisconsin, the next state to hold a primary election, showed the President trailing badly. Johnson did not leave the White House to campaign.
If you are expecting a "grassroots uprising", wake me up when it's over. That just isn't going to happen.
At this point in time, it's difficult to say what will happen. A popular uprising requires a population that feels a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose. Today, the attitude of what seems like the majority is too selfish and individualistic to get a wide majority to take on the power of the oligarchs.
It was never realistic to expect Barack Obama, who never had a strong liberal track record, to be a champion of liberal causes. He will work to overturn Citizens United, even if you don't believe it, but let me put it this way. The way you talk, there is no difference at all between Obama and Romney. Romney has been quite clear where he stands and what he will work for when elected. He has already met openly with Wall Street moguls to tell them that he is their boy. They believe him, because Obama is getting peanuts from them in comparison to what Romney is getting. Romney will outspend Obama by a huge amount before the campaign season is over. Where do you think think the political momentum will be if Romney beats Obama? It isn't just about the candidates. It is about the political policies that will be pushed through in the next presidential cycle. Romney will have enormous clout if he wins election, and his backers are expecting a return on their investment. Obama may still owe them, but nowhere near as much.
Obama has sure done all he could to curry favour with the Wall Street bankers. If he's getting burned because the greedy oligarchs have dropped him because Romney is even more grovelling and obsequious....I can't really say I feel sorry for him for his poor showing in campaign financing. Last time around, when the monied interests were delivering bags of loot, he opted out of the public financing restrictions and outspent John McCain two to one. This time around, the shoe is on the other foot!
But, again, the reason why I don't see substantive differences between Obama and Romney is because they are so close on money issues. Last year, Obama
had planned a deficit-cutting budget deal with Republican leaders that would have made substantial cuts to Medicare, Medicaid programs and Social Security. The so-called "Grand Bargain" would have been signed if the go-for-broke tea party Republicans didn't blow up the deal. If Obama is re-elected, what are the odds that he will revisit this scheme again, rather than go after the elephant in the room...the ever-growing military and defense contractors, to balance the budget?
And add to this, the issue of dealing with the most important issue of all -- The Environment. The Obama 2008 Campaign made a lot of promises about taking a leading role in the battle to reduce carbon emissions, and has completely made that issue disappear entirely...at a time when the World is seeing more droughts and storms that are part of increasing global temperatures. The Republicans aren't going to talk about environment issues; so if the Democrats are going to avoid these issues also, they are both as useless as having nobody in charge!
Irrelevant and unsought, but produced a laugh
