The President

The President

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 3, 2008
Source: Nyt...November 3, 2008

This opinion by Paul Krugman in the NYT today
hits the nail right on the head. We have made
essentially the same points here before, but
this is a succinct writing about the Republican
Party. To be sure the Republican Party is not
going away as was predicted previously with Hoover
and the great depression and Nixon and the
Watergate. I would not like that scenario as
neoconservative theological Republican Party would
go underground. It's better to have them out in
the open as a minority party. It lets us know
where they are. Regardless of who wins the
election, this should become one of our missions,
that is, to lessen the influence of this group in
U.S. politics. Krugman gives a good summary of
what problems this "rump" Party can foment.
Hopefully there will be some type of party transformation
in which the Republican Party becomes a minority people,
and the Democratic Party along with a growing viable
Independent Party will develop.


Paul Krugman,The Republican Rump

»Most of the post-election discussion will presumably be about what the Democrats should and will do with their mandate. But let me ask a different question that will also be important for the nation’s future: What will defeat do to the Republicans?

You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.

For example, Larry Sabato, the election forecaster, predicts that seven Senate seats currently held by Republicans will go Democratic on Tuesday. According to the liberal-conservative rankings of the political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, five of the soon-to-be-gone senators are more moderate than the median Republican senator — so the rump, the G.O.P. caucus that remains, will have shifted further to the right. The same thing seems set to happen in the House.

Also, the Republican base already seems to be gearing up to regard defeat not as a verdict on conservative policies, but as the result of an evil conspiracy. A recent Democracy Corps poll found that Republicans, by a margin of more than two to one, believe that Mr. McCain is losing “because the mainstream media is biased” rather than “because Americans are tired of George Bush.”

And Mr. McCain has laid the groundwork for feverish claims that the election was stolen, declaring that the community activist group Acorn — which, as Factcheck.org points out, has never “been found guilty of, or even charged with” causing fraudulent votes to be cast — “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” Needless to say, the potential voters Acorn tries to register are disproportionately “other folks,” as Mr. Chambliss might put it.

Anyway, the Republican base, egged on by the McCain-Palin campaign, thinks that elections should reflect the views of “real Americans” — and most of the people reading this column probably don’t qualify.

Thus, in the face of polls suggesting that Mr. Obama will win Virginia, a top McCain aide declared that the “real Virginia” — the southern part of the state, excluding the Washington, D.C., suburbs — favors Mr. McCain. A majority of Americans now live in big metropolitan areas, but while visiting a small town in North Carolina, Ms. Palin described it as “what I call the real America,” one of the “pro-America” parts of the nation. The real America, it seems, is small-town, mainly southern and, above all, white.

I’m not saying that the G.O.P. is about to become irrelevant. Republicans will still be in a position to block some Democratic initiatives, especially if the Democrats fail to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

And that blocking ability will ensure that the G.O.P. continues to receive plenty of corporate dollars: this year the U.S. Chamber of Congress has poured money into the campaigns of Senate Republicans like Minnesota’s Norm Coleman, precisely in the hope of denying Democrats a majority large enough to pass pro-labor legislation.

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.

More Articles in Opinion » A version of this article appeared in print on November 3, 2008, on page A31 of the New York edition.

Listed below are various comments Mississippians
are making about McCain and Obama. Might give
a snapshot of where Mississippians are.

"The wealthy now pay more in taxes."(well I would
hope so. Actually, we know under the Bush-McCain
tax system the wealthy pay less.)

"Obama means class warfare."

"Obama will cause the socialist and moral
decline of our children."

"Obama is a muslim and a terrorist."

"Americans whine or Obama whines for them. Let
them downsize; sell the house. Live within
your means, not with your dreams."

"Palin and McCain represent the America of
our forefathers."

"I don't want part of my paycheck going to
someone else."

"Obama hasn't promised to cut his ties to
terrorist friends."

"Lowering taxes for the lower classes is not
fair to the business owners who pay the
workers and will have to pay higher taxes."

"Obama is not patriotic. He supports the
Arabs and will lead our military to defeat."

"Obama will give free money to all the people
who don't work."

Now, I'm sure many of these same statements
can be found in Ohio or any other State. The
problem in Mississippi is that these are
probably more in tune with a majority of the
stinking thinking of people here. What the
percentage is I don't know. Look at the
Mississippi returns on Tuesday evening. The
percentage of victory for McCain will be a
fair measure of the above sentiment.

Obama Speak

Unable to sleep the night through, the
internet beckoned me this morning. My
search led me to read some of Obama's
recent speeches. What sparked my interest
was a segment on the news in which Obama
described the United States as a car
heading toward a cliff. Obama accused
Bush for heading the car towards the cliff
and then added that his rival, McCain,
would apply the gas to speed it over that
approaching cliff.

Previously, many of my own comments made
the same point re the approaching cliff.
The bit about McCain applying the gas was
not part of my scenario, but it is an nice
addition, lol.. My point has been that it
hasn't been just George Bush that put the
U.S. on that course to the cliff, rather it
has been both Dems and Reps, the Republicrats,
who share the blame. You know, M-R, maybe the
readership of your blog has included some
unknown very important people. Do you
think that we could have been the fathers
of that thought? Oh well, its a nice fuzzy
to play the dreams for us old farts, lol...
This has earned me another reason to vote for
Obama now. I've moved up to a two issue voter.

On the otherhand, there has to be a remark made
about the way Obama is ending his speeches.
This will come to no surprise to the resident
fundamentalist. She will certainly say that
this just confirms her preconceived beliefs.
Obama is ending his speeches with "God bless
America." Actually, there are two problems
with that phrase. One is the use of "God" in
a constitutional federal election. The other
is using "America" instead of the United
States of America. America applies to the
entire continent, and the United States of
America was the term given by the Founding
Fathers to differentiate the country they
were establishing over all others. It's
Obama's word usage of "God" and "America"
which upsets the purist in me.

As an aside to the God question in United
States history, Meacham of Newsweek has a
new book out on Andrew Jackson. Previously,
the two main biographies about Jackson were
by Remini and Arthur Schlesinger. While
these two works remain the standard history
of Jackson, Meacham provides some new
insights about Jackson. Jackson is regarded
as a "founder" of the Democratic Party along
with Jefferson. Jackson's presidency has
been described as his belief in small "d"
democracy. He ended the Second Bank of the
United States and sanctioned Indian removal
with tremndous loss of life. He also brought
on the patronage system of paying off political
supporters. However, he did stand firmly against
the increased attempts to dilute the Constitution
and the federal government with religion. He
really belived that religion was unfriendly for
a free people. Religion must be held in check
and even rolled back from the excesses of the
last eight years. There is doubts that Obama
will do this....