Monday, January 11, 2010

Do Republicans Deserve a Reward?

By Robert Parry
January 11, 2010

These days, I rarely open an e-mailed article from someone on the Left that doesn’t denounce President Barack Obama as a sell-out, a corporate tool, a coward or worse – with similar assessments applied to the Democratic leadership in Congress.

Read on.
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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whole thing's a coordinated scam; all of it is just theater for "democracy's" sake.

Mon Jan 11, 10:16:00 PM 2010
ETSpoon said...

As usual spot on, Robert.

I supposed you've read by now Ralph Nader has decided not to run for US Senate from Connecticut. In the news story I read St. Ralph pretty much admitted the only reason he even thought about running against Dodd was to be a spoiler. Can you imagine Mrs. Vicent McMahon, Jr of WWE infamey as the senior senator from CT?

You know I'd like to see the Green Party make some gains in the fall. But it seems that third party candidates only show when it's a tight race between candidates of the two major parties and it's always the Democrat who loses. Why don't third party candidates ever run in, say a safe Republican district or state? They always punish Democrats for not being ideologically pure enough, rewarding the asshole Republicans.

Mon Jan 11, 10:45:00 PM 2010
John said...

To ETSpoon:

You said: "But it seems that third party candidates only show when it's a tight race between candidates of the two major parties and it's always the Democrat who loses."

I'm compelled to point out that in 1992 Clinton beat the incumbent Bush I with the help of third-party candidate Perot. I'll admit that Clinton did turn out to be our best Republican president!

Clinton 43.0%
Bush 37.4%
Perot 18.9%

Wed Jan 13, 07:34:00 PM 2010
Bill from Saginaw said...

I like Robert Parry's description of the Republican decision to replay the strategy against Barack Obama that they used with some success against Bill Clinton: vote in lockstep against all Democratic legislative initiatives, demonize the president personally through right wing and mainstream media outlets, then energize their party's electoral base by throwing lots of ideological raw meat in their direction. To make that strategy work, the GOP had to be willing to consistently come down hard on any Republican moderate or maverick who strayed from the fold.

Bill Clinton survived, barely, as the impeachment spectacle ground to its conclusion. Clinton also occasionally frustrated the GOP's strategy by adroitly co-opting Republican initiatives as his own (ending welfare as we knew it, globalizing corporate capitalism through NAFTA and the IMF,
deregulating Wall Street, more upward redistribution of wealth, etc.) The long term net effect of such triangulation however was that the "center" of the public policy spectrum kept moving further and further to the right.

Thusfar, one year into the Obama presidency, it seems to me the DLC braintrust calling the shots inside the DC beltway are completely befuddled on how to react. The only thing for sure is that replaying Bill Clinton's partisan gamesmanshp style will never work for Barack Obama.

Bill from Saginaw

Thu Jan 14, 07:14:00 PM 2010
casey said...

Hello Robert Parry,

To answer your question "Do Republicans Deserve a Reward?" my answer is no but neither Do Democrats Deserve a Pass! Since my opinion is that the Democratic Party has basically been grafted as the left wing of the Republican Party as the Republican Party has only a Right Wing and an Extreme Right Wing it needed a Left Wing and the Democratic Party was removed from Democrats so it was an easy graft.

Tue Jan 19, 12:47:00 AM 2010

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