The Red Tornado wrote:In the next 50 years the "majority" (aka white folks) will no longer be a majority.

I wonder if...

a-we will become a one party system, all democrats?
b-the republicans find a way to be appealing to other races aside from caucasions and hispanics?
c-minorities becoming the majority (and getting more power and $$) will start finding the republicans appealing without them changing?

jeff2sf wrote:

pacino wrote:2/3 of the bill was towards food stamps, food banks, and nutrition programs. Kind of hard to vote against that.

Come on, don't make excuses for it. It was a bad bill to approve. If 99% of the funds of a bill goes to cancer research and the other 1% goes to killing kids with cancer, do you vote for the bill? Of course you don't. Food stamps wasn't going to go away, so just come up with a better bill.

philliesphhan wrote:

The Red Tornado wrote:In the next 50 years the "majority" (aka white folks) will no longer be a majority.

I wonder if...

a-we will become a one party system, all democrats?
b-the republicans find a way to be appealing to other races aside from caucasions and hispanics?
c-minorities becoming the majority (and getting more power and $$) will start finding the republicans appealing without them changing?

Isn't the biggest increase in population supposed to be Hispanic though? Hispanic + white in 50 years could be a majority

jerseyhoya wrote:Fascinating article from TNR on why the Clinton campaign failed from the perspective of insiders on the campaign.

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=f7a4a380-c4a4-4f84-b653-f252e8569915

dajafi wrote:

The Red Tornado wrote:In the next 50 years the "majority" (aka white folks) will no longer be a majority.

I wonder if...

a-we will become a one party system, all democrats?
b-the republicans find a way to be appealing to other races aside from caucasions and hispanics?
c-minorities becoming the majority (and getting more power and $$) will start finding the republicans appealing without them changing?

Hoping for B, and thinking that's what will happen.

What's nice is that the Republicans can do this without abandoning "conservative" principles (small government, skepticism about the limits of power, etc)--they just have to stop all the DeLay/Cheney priorities, which are a perversion of conservatism anyway.

dajafi wrote:Their fight should have been to pass those measures separately, without the subsidies.

dajafi wrote:This raised my eyebrows (note: not a euphemism):

Did you know that a half a million African Americans Georgia are eligible to vote but haven't registered? The Obama campaign knows this. And they plan to register these voters by November, campaign folks say.

The New York Times reports today on how his campaign has already increased turnout in the South among African Americans. As astounding as some of the numbers cited by the Times are, what the Obama campaign plans for the summer and fall are incredible, as in, barely credible, until you arrive at the conclusion that they've met most of their incredible goals (1.5 million donors) before.

I've heard the theory that Bob Barr, a GA native, could help tip that deep red state into play. I didn't buy it before. But if Obama registers half those folks, though, and gets them to come out, maybe it could happen.

My best stab at understanding it is to go back to a classic post by Mark Schmitt, written three years ago: 'What The Republicans Could Learn From Hayek:

"A command-control system like the White House-led Republican congressional system can be absolutely formidable for a certain period of time. But when it breaks down, it breaks down completely. The collapse is sudden, and total. Signals get crossed, backs get stabbed, the suddenly leaderless pawns in the system start acting for themselves, with no system or structure to coordinate their individual impulses.

Is this happening? I don't know, but it's getting close. I thought I'd seen it before, but each time they've pulled it back together. This time, I think there's too much happening at once.

The irony of all this for conservatives is that if they actually read Hayek and got anything out of it other than "government sucks," they would know this. Hayek's libertarianism was very pragmatic. Centrally controlled systems are flawed above all because they have no mechanism to correct their own errors, unlike distributed, self-organized systems. The Democrats in the Clinton years always operated in chaos, no one followed the party line, and there was a cost to that, but in the chaos and improvisation they found ways to get out of the holes that they had dug for themselves. The Rove/DeLay/Frist system doesn't have any means for correcting its mistakes[...]

I think that the command-control system Schmitt describes did not really fall apart back in 2005. Bush's ability to just plain command Republicans to do things took a big hit: witness the failure of his Social Security 'reform'. But while Republicans did gain the capacity to just flatly refuse to do a few very unpopular things, they did not seem to gain any capacity to take action on their own. I suspect the reasons for this also reflect their command-control structure.

One of the many problems with command-control structures is that they have no room for individual initiative or independent thought. Decisions are taken at the top; subordinates have only to obey; any good ideas they might come up with on their own are disregarded, and any attempt they make to advance those ideas without the imprimatur of their leaders is punished. As a result, those people who don't go along are drummed out of the party, and the rest have no incentive to think for themselves, unless they happen to be in leadership positions.
...
Consider as well how intellectually impoverished conservatism has become over the last decade or so, at least as far as policy questions are concerned. A lot of the time, Congressional Republicans seem to have no principles at all. They are all for freedom, except when something or someone they don't like is involved (gays, people who someone in the Justice Department thinks might possibly be a terrorist, medical marijuana, Terri Schiavo.) They are all for fiscal discipline, except that military spending, cutting taxes, and spending in their own districts mysteriously don't count. Taxes should be simpler and flatter, except when businesses need arcane tax exemptions. And so on, and so forth.

Besides being out of the habit of thinking for themselves, then, Congressional Republicans have not actually followed conservative principles, or any others, for quite some time.
...
First, Republicans' principles have atrophied by being used not as the basis for serious policy discussions, but for beating other people over the head. As far as I can tell, a lot of Republicans in Congress act as though just about any situation they encounter calls for one of three responses: starting a war, cutting regulation, and cutting taxes on the wealthy. (OK, there are a few other ideas: build a great big wall at the border, for instance. But these three seem to do most of the heavy lifting.) This is not what I'd call a flexible and nuanced ideological arsenal.

Moreover, each of these three responses has limits. There is a limit to the number of wars you can be engaged in at any given time. Presumably, no one thinks that we should pay no taxes at all; if not, then there must be some point at which cutting taxes is not the right thing to do. Likewise, very few people think we shouldn't have any regulations -- not even on food safety or nuclear power plant operators. Again, this means that there is some point beyond which most people would think that regulations should not be cut.

TomatoPie wrote:

dajafi wrote:Brilliant essay by one of my favorite bloggers about what has befallen the Republicans in the Age of Bush. I apologize for the lengthy excerpt:

My best stab at understanding it is to go back to a classic post by Mark Schmitt, written three years ago: 'What The Republicans Could Learn From Hayek:

"A command-control system like the White House-led Republican congressional system can be absolutely formidable for a certain period of time. But when it breaks down, it breaks down completely. The collapse is sudden, and total. Signals get crossed, backs get stabbed, the suddenly leaderless pawns in the system start acting for themselves, with no system or structure to coordinate their individual impulses.

Is this happening? I don't know, but it's getting close. I thought I'd seen it before, but each time they've pulled it back together. This time, I think there's too much happening at once.

The irony of all this for conservatives is that if they actually read Hayek and got anything out of it other than "government sucks," they would know this. Hayek's libertarianism was very pragmatic. Centrally controlled systems are flawed above all because they have no mechanism to correct their own errors, unlike distributed, self-organized systems. The Democrats in the Clinton years always operated in chaos, no one followed the party line, and there was a cost to that, but in the chaos and improvisation they found ways to get out of the holes that they had dug for themselves. The Rove/DeLay/Frist system doesn't have any means for correcting its mistakes[...]

I think that the command-control system Schmitt describes did not really fall apart back in 2005. Bush's ability to just plain command Republicans to do things took a big hit: witness the failure of his Social Security 'reform'. But while Republicans did gain the capacity to just flatly refuse to do a few very unpopular things, they did not seem to gain any capacity to take action on their own. I suspect the reasons for this also reflect their command-control structure.

One of the many problems with command-control structures is that they have no room for individual initiative or independent thought. Decisions are taken at the top; subordinates have only to obey; any good ideas they might come up with on their own are disregarded, and any attempt they make to advance those ideas without the imprimatur of their leaders is punished. As a result, those people who don't go along are drummed out of the party, and the rest have no incentive to think for themselves, unless they happen to be in leadership positions.
...
Consider as well how intellectually impoverished conservatism has become over the last decade or so, at least as far as policy questions are concerned. A lot of the time, Congressional Republicans seem to have no principles at all. They are all for freedom, except when something or someone they don't like is involved (gays, people who someone in the Justice Department thinks might possibly be a terrorist, medical marijuana, Terri Schiavo.) They are all for fiscal discipline, except that military spending, cutting taxes, and spending in their own districts mysteriously don't count. Taxes should be simpler and flatter, except when businesses need arcane tax exemptions. And so on, and so forth.

Besides being out of the habit of thinking for themselves, then, Congressional Republicans have not actually followed conservative principles, or any others, for quite some time.
...
First, Republicans' principles have atrophied by being used not as the basis for serious policy discussions, but for beating other people over the head. As far as I can tell, a lot of Republicans in Congress act as though just about any situation they encounter calls for one of three responses: starting a war, cutting regulation, and cutting taxes on the wealthy. (OK, there are a few other ideas: build a great big wall at the border, for instance. But these three seem to do most of the heavy lifting.) This is not what I'd call a flexible and nuanced ideological arsenal.

Moreover, each of these three responses has limits. There is a limit to the number of wars you can be engaged in at any given time. Presumably, no one thinks that we should pay no taxes at all; if not, then there must be some point at which cutting taxes is not the right thing to do. Likewise, very few people think we shouldn't have any regulations -- not even on food safety or nuclear power plant operators. Again, this means that there is some point beyond which most people would think that regulations should not be cut.

My read of "Bush/Rovism" is that it's essentially Stalinist in orientation--not of course in terms of sending people to forced labor camps, but in how everything starts with absolute loyalty to The Leader and ends with simple-minded application of a bastardized version of someone else's theory--but, on everything except the taking and hoarding of power, Keystone Kops-ish in execution. What I always worried about was that what this model they utilized (which didn't start with Bush--Newt Gingrich pioneered a lot of it in the mid-'90s--but culminated with him) was so extreme and unprecedented in American public life that our body politic would prove unable to resist the infection, and that it would become the new normal for both parties.

Happily, this fear is starting to diminish--though I still don't think this was inevitable. If Giuliani--a much smarter but far angrier version of Bush--had won the nomination, I'd be frankly terrified. (To an extent, this also would have been true with Hillary Clinton, who's absolutely Bushian in terms of how she perceives and values "loyalty.") McCain's a much better man than that, though, and his comments yesterday about respecting and reaching out to the legislature and the political opposition reassure me that, even if he wins, the Bush age will end. If Schmitt and hilzoy are correct in their diagnosis, this is ultimately good news for the Republicans too--win or lose--since it will liberate them from this harmful "command/control system."

Bakestar wrote:Hillary doing photo-ops with big barrels of Maker's Mark Bourbon... combined with that famous shot-n-beer campaign stop in Indiana, she seems to be hanging the fate of her campaign almost exclusively on the Whiskey Vote. I have to admit I'm starting to find her arguments more persuasive, smooth, mellow, easy-drinking and sippable.