In order to really get a sense of the sea-change that is rushing upon this country, we need to look at W through Republican eyes for a moment. I know, sounds yucky, but bear with me for a minute. It might turn out to be something you like – so follow me over the fold…
Consider the various branches of the Republican coalition: libertarians, big business republicans, old-school conservative isolationists, and, of course, the religious right.
I haven’t been to a horse track in 20 years, so I don’t know what the next thing better than a trifecta is (a quadfecta?), but ol’ W has hit it:
He’s alienated the libertarians with the patriot act.
He’s alienated the business class with the deficit.
He’s alienated the old guard with his Iraqi adventure.
And he’s alienated the religious right with Miers.
Here’s the bottom line:
In Republican eyes, W is going to be remembered as their Jimmy Carter. They will despise him for a generation, and then 25 years from now invite him to give the invocation for the Republican national convention in 2028 or so.
The next generation of fundamentalists will say “He was such a godly man, but he surrounded himself with greedy and corrupt men, from Cheney on down.” The business men will say “We came so close, but Cheney couldn’t keep the nutcases from taking over the asylum, and now we’re back in a semi-socialist state.”
The old guard still won’t have any time for him, but they’ll mostly have died off by then. (How many Eisenhower Republicans are still around today?) And the libertarians will have swung over to our side of the aisle.
This is not the time for triangulation and putting a finger in the wind via polls. This is the time for boldness. People are comparing 2006 to 1994, but the closer comparison may be 1974, when a crop of reformers swept in after Watergate, to be followed two years later by a Democratic president. We need to be laying the groundwork now for our version of the Reagan Revolution, and 25 years of hands on the tiller. We need to be funding progressive think tanks, and developing bold new proposals to yank the conversation back to the middle ground it had a generation ago – and then head left from there.
The proposals I’ve seen floated for our version of a “contract for America” are good, but they’re only a start. They simply move the conversation back to the middle ground and sweep away the craziness of the recent discredited reich. I’ll have more to say about this in another diary in a few days, though.
For now, just savor the image of a discredited W, struggling to merely hang on having lost his brain trust, a compliant congress, and most significantly, all four factions of the Republican party. To him it’s going to seem like forever until 2008, if he makes it that long.
Today’s menu special: schadenfreude, served cold.
Excellent post, Knoxville Progressive. As much fun as it is to see the Republicans in the state they are in, we need to step back and see the big picture. Now is the time for action, not sitting by the sidelines, gloating. In truth, we have nothing to gloat about. Republicans are in charge and are still banging away at the foundations of our democracy with the sledgehammers of corporatism, greed and lust for power. More and more people are finding themselves part of the Nouveaux Poor with nowhere to turn.
We need to remember that things keep getting worse by the day as long as Republicans are in charge. There is no time for anything but planning, plotting and action on our part.
Can’t disagree with anything you said; and I’m certainly not advocating inaction. It is nice to have something to smile about for a change, however; seems like it’s been a long time coming…
I still have a hard time with “funding think tanks” as a general rule. Hard to imagine that among all the written works produced since the Constitution there aren’t a few good works to promote.
You’re right about the new dem “contract”. Still reads like too much 19th Century bumping into the 21st.
and unfortunately I don’t have time to look for the reference now.
He’s alienated the Neocons by messing with their Middle East plans.
The neocons are major-league pissed off because Bush managed to ruin their plans to remake the Middle East according to PNAC plans. There are major players who waited for the perfect storm, and managed to pull off the invasion and toppled an easy target (Hussein). But, the war has been so mismanaged and poorly handled, noone would buy pre-emptive rationales again (at least it would take a whole lot more convincing.) The scariest part to me is that there are real threats out there, but I fail to see how invading a sovereign nation would ever be the proper reaction.
You’re right; I forgot to add the neocons & how W turned their “perfect storm” into a shitstorm.
Ok, it’s the middle of the night, and I’m feeling bad with an earache. So. I’m going to through a little cold water on the celebration here. Remember how Bush I was sitting pretty at the end of Gulf I? Well, he did a nose dive within 12 months. And it could easily be the opposite. Bush II has plenty of time for recovery. He can stop the hemmorage of red ink by proposing and Congress passing the worst cut-off of the social safety net every seen – a virtual role back to the start of the Hoover administration. We could have another large terrorist attack in this country that would prove to be a rallying point for further patriotic jingoism. He could institute controls on the internet that could cutoff communication such as this one.
That and a few other things could turn it around for him. He is not nearly as stupid as he looks and acts at times. He is ruthless and ambitious and he will fight like hell not to go down in flames.
My big 3AM hide-under-the-bed fear lately has been that their path to ruination is not only intentional, but also on a very carefully monitored time schedule. There’s no way to achieve what I suspect are their goals without tons more hurt on the common folk, and with hurt there’s always blame (unless your therapist is very good and teaches you the difference between blame and responsibility, 🙂 but I digress). No matter how slick you are, it’s very difficult to maintain a long period of time diverting blame away from yourself when you’re in total control of things and everyone knows it.
So I’ve been thinking, if I were an ego-manaical warmonger who wanted to keep control of the US govt under these circumstances, what would I do? Well, what I might do is set things up carefully such that they were primed to blow, then have my Head Monkey step out of the spotlight, as he is Constitutionally required to do in ’08. Then I might just let some folks whom I publicly refer to as adversaries (but half of whom really work on my side and only play at being adversarial) take over control. And then when the shit hits the fan, all I have to do is a little spin to make sure they get blamed for the mess I created. At that point people would perceive my team as the lesser evil and be all too happy to put more of my monkeys back in control — they’d do it quite willingly, and I wouldn’t have to subvert the election process any more than I had already gotten away with doing in ’04 and ’00.
I hope your ear feels better. 🙂