by Susie
Bruce Dixon on why Obama makes Republicans even crazier. Go read it all:
Three things happen when a corporate right wing Democrat steals Republican positions.
The first is that because of the two-party duopoly, when a Democrat moves rightward, his constituents have nowhere else to go. Democrats and Republicans have cooperated, in most of the fifty states, to throw up massive barriers to ballot access for third parties, and by requiring big money to access broadcast and cable networks, the corporations who fund both parties limit public discussion to what their corporate funded politicians are saying.
Freed from the need to represent the have-nots, who must now vote for him no matter what he does, or an even worse Republican, the right-leaning Democratic president can now claim he is looking for “the center,” or to pick up Republican-leaning voters. In the Clinton era, these sought-after voters were called “Reagan Democrats,” and Clinton got a lot of them in 1996.
The second thing that happens when corporate Democrats steal the policies of Republicans, is that since they nominally represent the have-nots, who now have nowhere else to go, they are often more effective at imposing Republican policies upon the polity.
If Obama’s re-elected, which conventional wisdom seems to believe he will be, he would have a tremendous opportunity to set the stage for a truer left leaning dem candidate come ’16. Look how much room he’ll have to his left to try to re-assemble his base. One way to think about it is that the rethugs have decidedly been pinned into a very far fringe corner to the right, and really have no wiggle room to get out.
Obama may have a wonderful opportunity, dandy, if that is in fact what he wants to do. But I think that admits facts not in evidence.
I might agree, if I thought that the right really had no more room to wiggle. But they keep finding new ways of surprising me. Four more years of Obama and somebody is going to fire on Fort Sumter.
Bruce Dixon: Word.
Exactly what I’ve been thinking these past couple decades, Bruce sets it out so much better than anything I’ve written.
Dandy, Obama could use a second term to try to move the government and society more to the fairness side, but, somehow, I just don’t think he even thinks that way. Alas.
With apologies to Foxworthy, everyone look in the camera and say, “I am not smarter than a Tea Partier!” The Republicans have no ability to triangulate a significant portion of their base because these folks will play hardball. A right leaning “democrat” is a Republican! Surprise you get Republican government. An Obama loss is not that big a deal. The democrats in opposition are marginally more liberal and can stand 40 votes in the Senate. Romney can’t do the damage to entitlements that Obama will. Who knows, maybe in the minority the democrats will discover that civil liberties matter.