Comment

McCain Admits Sarah Palin Tension

175
iceweasel10/11/2009 1:19:02 pm PDT

re: #158 mich-again

re: #156 Liberally Conservative

Just see 153, please, and try to think about it. Especially this:

I see the GOP moving much farther to the right than the Dems ever moved to the left, because there’s a leadership vacuum in the GOP, and the extremists and religious right fanatics have moved in and seized control.

The opposite happened in the Democratic Party. They moved to the center to fill their leadership vacuum post 2004 (and later) and pushed all the Code Pink types away. They ran Obama not because he was a ‘leftist’ or ‘socialist’, but because he is a guy who always takes the safest option, always steers towards the middle.

The GOP meanwhile is in disarray. They ran their own ‘centrist’ candidate against Obama— but then panicked and picked Palin as the campaign collapsed around them. Now they don’t know what the hell to do. The thinking (such as it is) seems to be “we ran a centrist Repub and that didn’t work — let’s go back to the dogwhistle”.

It’s a losing strategy. They want to timetravel back to the 80’s and Reagan and the coalition built then by allying with the religious right and creating the so-cons (or giving them power). But the world has changed, and they’re reaping the whirlwind of the alliances they encouraged and cultivated then, with no intention of ever giving those people a real policy say (operation rescue, dobson, etc.) Those groups are back like zombies and they’ve eaten the brain of the GOP.