…is new again. Dems haunted by old stereotypes:
Election Day 1988 was only days away. Ronald Reagan was headlining a rally in Nevada. He said the options were the same as “when I stood before you.” Reagan framed the Democratic “choice” as one for “liberal policies of tax and spend, economic stagnation, international weakness, accommodation, and always, always blame America first.”
They are what they are.
What changed, temporarily, was that W and the post-Newt congress spent much of the last decade blurring the distinction between Republicans and liberals, trying to outdo Clinton on triangulating the opposition, coopting the more popular bits of their agenda in an attempt to seize the center.
It’s hard to say how long it might have worked absent an increasingly unpopular war, an increasingly corrupt Congress, and monolithically hostile old-media. Oh, and a gust finally hitting the bipartisan financial house-of-cards… In the real world, the base stayed home, the center drifted left, and the Dems took the House in ’06. Then Obama ran in the general election as a nominal centrist, and however absurd this was in light of his record, enough centrists believed there was little practical difference to buy a combination of euphoric hopenchange and cathartic Republican-spanking.
Now the rubes are shocked, SHOCKED to find out how much worse real left/liberal/progressive types are than the Republican liberal-lite version. It’s the Republican’s own damn fault for blurring the distinctions in the first place, and it’s not at all clear yet that they’ve actually learned anything.
Meanwhile the Dems are shocked, SHOCKED that the majority of the general public is once again realizing that it doesn’t like left/liberal/progressive types trying to take their money and tell them what’s good for them.
We might even eventually get sensible moderate government out of this mess, for a while, till the people get distracted again. Of course, that would take at least one side (preferably both) actually learning from their screwups and applying the lessons. Don’t bet the house on it.
cynically
Porkypine