Listening to Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck discuss politics can blister your cerebral cortex. They are fools who operate without the most basic facts or any accurate historical framework. That is why O’Reilly thinks that Mitt Romney is an Eisenhower Republican and Glenn Beck thinks that Obama is a radical socialist who doesn’t like white people. I want to make a point about trying to assess the ideological bent of presidents and potential presidents. You can’t go by their record alone, or by their rhetoric. They will do what it is possible to do, not what they would do if given a free hand. Mitt Romney, if elected, will be faced with one radical bill after another. He will not veto them all. He will not go to war with a Republican Congress. He will sign most of their radical agenda into law. He will not stand up to the radical right any more than Eisenhower stood up to Joe McCarthy. The difference today is that McCarthy is no longer an outlier in the GOP, but the norm.
If you want Eisenhower Republicanism, you already have a fairly good facsimile in the Obama administration. It’s not that Obama is on the same ideological plane as Eisenhower, but when you combine a fairly orthodox Democrat in the White House with a radically conservative Congress and a Democratic Party that isn’t united behind the president, what you get looks a lot like what Eisenhower produced. It wouldn’t be too bad if the economy wasn’t so crippled and Congress could actually agree on anything.
As someone from the White House told me, the president didn’t run for office to spend all his time bickering about the goddamned debt ceiling. Where we are is not where he wants us to be. The same thing would hold true with Romney. If you elect Romney, you get a massive rightward lurch, even if Romney himself isn’t that crazy.
Don’t do it. It’s been proven to cause PTSD.
One is a has-been and one is about to be a has-been.
I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which.
I was only 4 when Ike got first elected, so I thought it might be instructive to go back and read the party platform from 1952. The first part sounds all to familiar, but when it gets in a labor and a few other areas we can see how far the Republican party has moved to the right and taken far too much of the country with it.
Worth a read: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25837#axzz1ZvoPQUJe
Shhh, we’re supposed to pretend Romney is magically immune to the extremist base he’s currently pandering too.
Speaking of the Eisenhower years and beyond: Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth has died.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/us/rev-fred-l-shuttlesworth-civil-rights-leader-dies-at-89.html?_r
=1&hp
Good insight Martin
.
All Obama needs is de backing of Wall Street, distance himself from Main Street and the recovery of the Jewish Vote. Noam Chomsky rightly refers to Democrats as Republican Lite. In European elections, all incumbents are dumped – see Denmark, Spain, Germany and France in 2012.
“Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero called early elections as polls show voters will ditch his Socialist
party over its handling of the debt crisis in favor of opposition pledges of jobs and tax breaks.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Interesting thought experiment, which produces more consistently progressive legislation:
President Romney and Democratic control of both chambers of Congress vs. President Obama and Republican control of both chambers?
Even with institutional power and prerogatives shifting towards the executive as they have, I have to figure it’s the former. The latter is just a guarantee of deadlock and intentional sabotage. Which goes to show how absolutely important it is to flip the House back. Of course, we can’t ever have nice things, so obviously the firebagger contingent would instead read the opposite into that and declare Obama and the presidency a reasonable sacrifice to the cause of “progress.” Dumbfucks.
I’ve been thinking about those situations a lot, too, and yes I would most definitely agree with your conclusions.
You say that Obama+GOP Congress=Eisenhower.
That’s not fair to Eisenhower, who met the mid-50s recessions with the Interstate Highway System.
Obama can’t get a bill through the House that would fill in potholes.
Obama did the same for rural broadband in his first two years.