Thursday, August 27, 2009

Reasons for Pessimism

Brad DeLong really hits the nail on the head:
The problem is that Gingrich's "let's block everything Clinton tries to do even when it's good for the country, proclaim that he is a failure, and win the next election" move won the 1994 election. And now they are trying to repeat it. Only a throughgoing shellacking at the 2010 and 2012 elections--a Goldwater-magnitude shellacking--has, I think, a chance of restoring even a modicum of sanity to the Republican Party.
As I've hinted at before, as long as 60 votes is the norm in the Senate, the only way to have sane politics in America over the long run is to have a saner Republican party. And at the moment, the leaders of the Republican believe that they can repeat 1994. Now, there are certain structural reasons why that will prove difficult—the 1990 redistricting gave Gingrich a big assist, and Ross Perot's candidacy had dislodged a large number of voters—but I fear that anything other than total defeat will fail to convince GOP elites that they simply don't have their pulse on the mood of the country.

2 comments:

Stephen said...

Only a throughgoing shellacking at the 2010 and 2012 elections--a Goldwater-magnitude shellacking--has, I think, a chance of restoring even a modicum of sanity to the Republican Party.

This is worrying about the wrong goal. It's more correct to suggest that it will take massive Democratic victories n 2010 and 2012 to have a chance of restoring even a modicum of sanity to the Democratic Party.

Maybe if Americans somehow decided to send 85 Democrats to the Senate and 400 to the House, conservative Dems like Nelson, Baucus and Reid might finally start to think that the American public is not as far right as they think it is.

But what's more likely is that the Dems will lose seats, giving these idiots an excuse to move even further to the right, as if that will solve anything.

low-tech cyclist said...

As I've hinted at before, as long as 60 votes is the norm in the Senate, the only way to have sane politics in America over the long run is to have a saner Republican party.

I just don't see a route to a sane GOP, period. The smaller it gets, the more it will be owned by the crazies.

Voters need a choice, but a choice between crazy Republicans and ineffectual Democrats isn't a good one for the country.

Dems need to do some serious thinking about how to change the dynamic so that voters are offered a choice between the two wings of the Democratic Party, while easing the GOP towards permanent splinter party status.