If you look at the demographic makeup of Mitt Romney’s inadequate coalition, you’ll notice that it includes the elderly who are on Social Security and use Medicare. You’ll notice that it includes business and finance leaders. These people are not going to like the Republican Party’s coming threat to destroy the stock market if they can’t destroy people’s retirement security. Getting the Republicans to go on that kind of suicide mission should involve a lot of work, but they seem to want to do it for free.
There is an obvious cultural divide in this country that the Republicans use quite effectively. But if they want to truly minimize the effectiveness of that cultural divide, they could hardly do better than to go after white seniors’ earned benefits with a threat to wipe out white businessmen’s profits and white professionals’ 401(k)’s.
It’s easy to imagine an erosion of GOP support among the white working class when the Democrats offer a white presidential candidate in 2016. Whether it’s Biden or Clinton or Cuomo or O’Malley or Warner, or whoever it is, those candidates won’t automatically be losing in Appalachia.
I think the Republicans will have to do substantially better with white voters in 2016 if they want to compete, and I think there is almost no chance that they will. I think Wall Street will be with the Democrats, and I don’t think the GOP will retain their advantage with the elderly.
The GOP is moving to oblivion with breathtaking speed. I can easily see Hillary Clinton winning in 2016 with a very similar electoral map to LBJ’s 1964 landslide.
Now, now…let’s not get too excited. Plenty of time to rig the EC, etc. Lots can happen between now and then.
But pleeeease let it be so.
Be careful what you wish for, jdw. The Republicans will only disappear if the PermaGov is quite sure that the Dems will move into the vacuum left by that disappearance. We are now moving towards one-party governance. That is of course what the U.S. has really been experiencing since the JFK assassination, but the media-run control system is now considered by the PermaGov to be so strong…a fairly accurate observation, on the evidence of the last 50 years or so…that the whole UniParty system (Dempublicans and Republicrats posing as “enemies”) has now gotten so cranky and clunky that it is simply not needed anymore. Like getting rid of a wheezing old V8-powered Oldsmobile and replacing it with an oh so efficient hybrid that has all the soul of an electric toaster, that old system is headed out.
Watch.
Obama: In For The Kill. Watch.
AG
Whether it’s Biden or Clinton or Cuomo or O’Malley or Warner, or whoever it is, those candidates won’t automatically be losing in Appalachia.
Dear god, not Cuomo or Warner!! Can we please have a populist Democrat for once?
Mark Warner sucks.
good shrimp, though.
I continue to believe the debt ceiling ‘negotiations’ will go something like this.
President Obama: I want a clean debt ceiling bill.
The GOP: We want huge cuts in ‘entitlements’
President Obama: I want a clean debt ceiling bill.
The GOP: We want huge cuts in ‘entitlements’.
Other Democrats: Well….why don’t you give us a detailed list of these CUTS.
The GOP: No, you should put forth the cuts first.
Other Democrats: Um, no. It’s time for you to put up or shut up.
President Obama: Here’s my deal. You run on your proposed CUTS for the 2014 elections… you know, like I ran on raising taxes for the 2%. If you win on them, I’ll talk to you in 2014. But, for this year – I want a clean debt ceiling bill.
The GOP: We want huge cuts in ‘entiitlements’.
President Obama: You know what I’ll sign… …don’t call me until it’s ready to come to my desk.
Heh ‘cultural divide’. Gawd bless ask the euphemisms we white folks come up with, order to avoid saying the simple truth, they we white folks are in the whole, simply bigots.
(Shrug) whatever makes us feel better….
Brian Schweitzer, if he were to run, could probably clean up in Appalachia.
And while he has his flaws, he seems like a better option than the list you put up there…
How about Clinton with Schweitzer as vp?
If healthy, Clinton winning by a landslide seems inevitable. The question is what she’d be like. I was a passionate supporter of Obama in 2008 – to the point of being venomously anti-Clinton – for the simple reason that I felt sure that she would govern exactly as Obama did govern. If I could go back in time and wave a wand to give Hillary the necessary delegates to push her over the top in 2008, I would – it would be a crapshoot, but in hindsight, I’d roll the dice (mixing wand and dice metaphors here, but …).
SERIOUS QUESTION: Would Clinton 2016-2020 be more or less populist than Obama with regard to – social programs, corporate regulation, infrastructure, taxes, etc.
I just got back from several weeks in France, Holland, Belgium, living in little apartments with no tourists in sight, talking to normal people about what they do and how they get by and just observing how life works. You cannot begin to believe how much better life is in those countries. I can’t even express it. We live like animals here. Ugh.
The Clinton inevitable thing didn’t work so well in 2007-08. A lot can and will happen between now and 2015-16.
As much as I admire what she’s done as SoS and what Biden’s done as VP, I would prefer someone else. There’s a new generation of Democrats who are just as deserving of a shot, hopefully some of them run.
Clinton was not my candidate in 2007 and would not be in 2015.
I think if Clinton doesn’t run the next nominee will be a white male governor and in my opinion Schweitzer’s the best of the lot. And if we go for a white male at the top of the ticket that leaves the downticket for a woman. To me Gillibrand would be a good fit there. Either her or Patty Murray.
I think we’re the Democrats, and who knows what we’re going to do?
By any reasonable measure, Hillary Clinton was a lead-pipe lock in 2008, but we went and nominated some smooth talker who had been a state senator three and a half years before he was chosen to be our presidential candidate.
In 1992, we nominated the Governor of Arkansas after his affair came out.
In 2000, we were eagerly looking around to avoid nominating Gore.
We’re liable to do any damn thing.
President Obama had been a State Senator for 7 years before he ran for the U.S. Senate.
I mean, three and a half years before he won the nomination, he was a state senator in Illinois. He left the Illinois state senate in November 2004. Three and a half years later – in the early summer of 2008 – we nominated him to the presidential candidate.
how is schweitzer on economic issues? And isn’t he an anti-abortion nutjob?
That tide is still going out. Suburban Atlanta and Phoenix is where the action will be.
He didn’t lose Appalachia. He lost the South. So would she.
Must it be Hillary?
Or that stinker, Cuomo?
Come to that, why must it be someone white?
Why not a non-white female, this time?
Can’t find one?
Or are they just too far left?
In 1992, Clinton won West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Arkansas.
In 1996, he won all but Georgia.
Obama won none of those states and, in fact, was destroyed in all of them.
I don’t know if Hillary can win any of them back in a two-way race, but she will do a whole lot better.
Appalachia, the Interior South, and the Coastal South are three different regions. Hillary would probably do better in the first two, but I don’t know about the Atlantic Coast South.
Biden-Hickenlooper
Biden-Schweitzer will also work.
Go, Joe, go.
Great to read that the Republicans are vanquished (or nearly so) and that we are on the road to the liberal goal of living in a country very much like other developed nations (Japan, Canada, much of Europe).
And now that the Norquist Pledge has been bucked once in unusual circumstances, those Republicans have been freed from their fierce opposition to taxes – at least that’s what I read here last week.
Never mind that the fiscal cliff deal is contractionary, reduced potential revenues, and left us with several unresolved problems. It’s all clear sailing from now on!
It’s contractionary and it reduced “potential” revenues.
The food is terrible, and the portions are too small.
God bless John Maynard Keynes.
We are so so SO far from living like they do in France, Holland, Sweden etc. SO far. And it’s SO much better there. My god. You have to go there and see for yourselves. And Europe at a very low ebb economically right now and it’s still infinitely better.
To elaborate, residents of some parts of the U.S. live (on average) as well or better than residents of France, Holland, Sweden, etc.
Some residents of those countries are worse off than many residents of the U.S.
The variability in income, wealth, and quality of life in Europe is as great as it is in the U.S. In both cases we’re talking about hundreds of millions of people spread out across vast distances.
I base my statements on Normandy and inner-city Paris, which are analogous to where I live (San Francisco and areas about as far from SF as Normany is from Paris. Where I live, you can’t survive on an average job – much less have a kid, buy a house, buy health insurance, etc. etc. In inner city Paris, people who do the same type of jobs have full coverage, kids, money, educations and acceptable living quarters. High income professionals obviously do well in both places. I’m talking about (I’m guessing) the “80%” – the people like my parents, where a schoolteacher-level income breadwinner could support a live-at-home wife, buy a house and send several kids to college. It’s close to that across civilized Europe. Here in Hell, fuhgeddaboudit – even two DINKs (double income no kids) can’t buy a house unless they’re well above the 80% mark in the upper upper upper middle class.
That said we have better vegetables – woohoo
The other thing is there are no potholes in the streets and everything is clean and efficient – and all the people making that happen are the ones who are doing so much better than their counterparts here.
Wow! Do we sound like kids on a playground or what? My dad/brother can whip yours. Can not! Can tooo! We have plenty of time to argue over who it’s going to be in 16. We have some very tough ntimes right in front of us. In my view, what is important now is to get together and stay that way. If we do, we have a chance to pull this off.
I agree. There has been so much focus on the antics of the fright wing, but not enough attention paid to keeping our coalition strong heading in to the midterms.
As an organizer, my biggest challenge is despair–that is keeping people engaged and not feeling hopeless. The media memes and a lot of progressives are already pushing exactly the kind of messages that lead to people feeling hopeless, disengaged, and not willing to work and turn out the vote in 2014.
It is fun to speculate about the right but I think it is more important to stay focused on things we can actually affect–like getting accurate information to progressives, helping people see the long game, educating liberals about how achieving meaningful change has always been a patient process.
I would agree with your statement with a small but rapidly growing cavaet;
Societal change usually happens slowly, even once it’s clear there’s a problem. That’s because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in leisurely currents. Change often requires going up against powerful, established interests, and it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses. Think civil rights, gay marriage, equal rights for women.
With climate change, however, there simply isn’t time to waste. It’s not a fight, like gay marriage, between conflicting groups with conflicting opinions. It’s a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn’t care less if precipitous action raises gas prices or damages the coal industry in swing states. It couldn’t care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China or made agribusiness less profitable.
By Bill McKibben
We have about lost this argument because of the physical system that runs our climate is changing too fast from tall the sequestered Carbon we have dumped into it already, with no political will to make the necessary rapid and deep socialistic and cultural changes to both the economic system and resource usage to stop the coming catastrophe.
Just as Grover Norquist main aim was to starve the beast to force change, our ignorant activity of releasing millions of years of sequestered carbon into the planets biosphere, is feeding a much more dangerous beast which is forcing change on all, of us, with the problem we are very ill equipped both as a species and society to survive it long term.
I’m afraid we have already lost the most important fight of our generation, much to the detriment of future generations to come.
You know it is so frustrating. I was studying environmental policy in the late 80s and the evidence of climate change was definitive then and had been for some time. I was working on environmental legislation and I really felt then that I was playing the lyre while the planet was burning.
President Obama has quietly made a lot of progress using the auto bailouts to get improved fuel efficiency standards and using the Recovery Act and tax credits to stimulate a lot of growth in renewable energy. I live in Maine and we just got a nice infusion of funds for a big wind project. We also are refusing to digest the latest studies showing serious problems with our fisheries and projections about sea level on our coasts.
Sadly, you are right that we have already lost this fight. At this point we are talking mitigating the consequences around the margins. And I think too many people still see this as some far off problem (if they even accept the science of climate change).
Can you imagine when conservative Floridians realize they need that evil, big government to relocate them to someplace above sea level?
On the left, we completely failed to coalesce around climate change and pretty much let the fright wing dominate the messaging. Clinton didn’t touch it when he was President and really we should have been dealing with it then but everyone was preoccupied by a blue dress, some shitty land in Arkansas, and impeachment. Remember when George HW Bush proposed cap and trade and environmentalists were furious? We would be giddy if the Senate had passed the cap and trade bill that made it through the House in 2009.
No, the GOP is being pushed into oblivion by the corporate-owned media at breathtaking speed. It’s just business, nothing personal, Just demographics.
Pretty soon “the GOP” will resemble those sad cable stations that sell automatic juicers and slicer/dicers to the elderly while sponsoring polka shows and Lawrence Welk reruns.
Perfect.
The resurrection of that previously big bad witch Hillary Clinton by leftinesses like yourself.
Media-driven cattle, all of you.
Disgusting.
AG
Hillary is your candidate, not mine.
Resurrection?
The woman came with a hair’s breath of winning the Presidential nomination four years ago, and then served the most accomplished term as Secretary of State in living memory. She is probably the most popular political figure in America.
She needs a “resurrection” about as much as Fiona Apple needs a gastric bypass.
>”No, the GOP is being pushed into oblivion by the corporate-owned media … Just demographics.”
How about “the GOP is being pushed into oblivion by demographics”?
No.
Why?
Because “demographics” without corporate and media hype is just another word for segregation. That’s why. The demographics of the years before so called post-racial America really weren’t all that different than they are now except for a current surge in older people due to the baby boomers. The GOP has always been a minority party in this country if you looked at the actual numbers of the races, religions and ages of people who really lived here.
The GOP was a white, Protestant party. Older white Protestants, at least since the ’60s.
Conveniently for the PermaGov, those older white Reagan clones were encouraged to vote. A lot. By the media. Meanwhile people who were:
Were in many ways encouraged not to vote.
By both the media (“Why bother? You’re gonna lose anyway.”) and by economic, educational and social segregation.
This has all changed now.
Why?
Because the corporate-owned American media now have a controllable majority regardless of race, age, cultural affiliation or religion.
Controllable by other ways. More efficient ways.
What ways?
Need you ask?
If you do need to ask then you are part of the problem. Part of the media-led herd of sheeple sleeple.
So it goes.
Sigh.
And the beat goes on.
Sigh.
AG
And why do we want Wall Street to be with the Democrats, anyways, again?
A.) It’s the focus of evil in the modern world.
B.) It already owns the Democrats, and can’t very well capture them twice.
All of that is true, BooMan.
Now, think about how the Democrats agreeing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits would influence that story you laid out.
I think the calculation has been made that SS recipients are GOP voters. I’ve seen so much hate on the blogs toward “old white men” that I’m convinced. So there will be political payback against the old white men. Young voters are already convinced that they will never get SS anyway. By young, I mean under 50.
So why doesn’t Jamie Dimon get a group together to say “Raise the debt limit to infinty dollars by next Tuesday or we’re donating 100 billion dollars to Priorities USA?”.
Because solidarity isn’t just for union members?
I don’t understand. Replace “isn’t” with “is”, and I might.
According to the OP, the Republican congress is going to destroy the stock market.
OP?
“Original Post”. Sorry, internet tradition.
I am (apparently not) aware of all internet traditions. 🙂
If the bottom line was all that mattered, C-level corporate folks would be a solid Democratic voting bloc. People aren’t just homines oeconomici though — not even rich people. People define ‘self-interest’ in all sorts of ways, some of them turn out to be expensive. Ask any GOP-voting union member.
So Dimon has his class allies, and even if they’re being idiots, and destroying the stock market, you still have to back them up, because solidarity forever.
Besides, in a flood, so to speak, the tallest guys drown last — and Dimon’s pretty tall.
Okay, so they won’t because they won’t. Got it.
So the little giys panic and sell, while the big boys buy cheap. After the inevitable “fix”, the market rebounds. Wall Street made a lot of money on the fiscal cliff.
I was discussing this with my oldest son last night and he also called them Kamikazes.
Romney and Ryan ran (erroneously) as defenders of Medicare in the last election so it will be interesting to see how Seniors react to the Republican demands for cuts.