Republicans find themselves behind the eight-ball less because they are stuck with outdated ideological rhetoric than by their having failed to come to terms with how most Americans view the incumbent Republican President.

There is no distance, in the public mind, between the Republican Party and President Bush. There is not likely to be the same opportunity to create such distance as there was, for example, after 1974, when the man everyone blamed for the Watergate scandal all but disappeared from public life. Bush, his current and former aides, and his longtime fervent supporters in Congress and the media still see themselves as the GOP's leaders, and there are no nationally prominent Republicans not closely identified with the Bush administration.

There are not many precedents in American history of administrations dominant within the President's own party but so unpopular with the American public as to put the party's status and future in doubt. The Republican Party sails in uncharted waters in this respect -- already in difficulty because of its limited appeal to fast-growing minority groups, the GOP is painted into an even smaller corner because so many of the newest voters identify it with Bush, and only with Bush. As long as this remains true, the GOP will be isolated in American politics and impotent at the national level.

I've always been a glass half full kind of guy. In tough economic times Americans rediscover the virtues of self-reliance, hard work and the sanctity of the family - in other words, conservative values. The GOP will be returning soon with a vengeance.

I've always been a glass half full kind of guy. Posted by: Al

Except when it comes to intelligence, where you've been running on empty for some time now.

I'd be worried and discouraged too, if I was in a party that had Bush/Cheney as its past and Palin/Plumber as its future.

I'd feel more sanguine about Dem chances to control the agenda for the next few decades if the American people better associated the Repubs with our present predicament.

Hoovervilles and wide public revulsion at Repubs was already in place by the time FDR took office in March 1933.

By 1936, while campaigning for re-election, he was using some of the most hardhitting rhetoric ever directed at the Repubs. Rhetoric that helped bury the Repubs for the next 3-4 decades.

We need for Repubs to be forever seen as the folks who destroyed everything they touched during their post-1980 reign of terror/error -- Americans losing their houses, jobs, retirements because of Repub ideology/incompetence.

We are still a long way from that.

You sound more like a half glass full kinda guy to me there ally.
What the republicans need to do is become more conservative and call for more tax cuts to fix everything. Oh yeah and maybe start some more wars. I love the fact that republicans are unable to come to terms that that their philosophy is so outdated that the rest of the country has just passed them by and regard them like the crazy homeless guy that you see in subway stations, ie people to be avoided because they might be dangerous and have nothing left to contribute to the good of society. Keep dreaming about tax cuts and hope that Sarah Palin will be your guardian angel. Pray real hard, but get out of the way because we have important work to do. Here's a dollar. Now go away.

Part of the problem the GOP faces is that it's core idea, lowering taxes and reducing the size of government, no longer has much traction.

Lower taxes sound great in the abstract, but even the biggest idiots in the land realize that you cannot keep lowering them forever. And other than that, the GOP really doesn't have any remotely compelling ideas. The war in Iraq and the inbaility to catch Bin Laden have robbed the GOP of whatever reputation it had for being strong on defense, and people are sick and tired of having the religious right try to impose their morals on everyone else.

So until the GOP comes up with some good new ideas, they're going to have a hard time winning votes.

The financial similarities between Bush/republicans and Hoover/republicans are very similar, but what about the non-economic destruction, the wars, the torture, the wiretapping, the politicizing of government agencies, and a million other things that Hoover republicans can not be compared to. There is and will be more of a backlash, but I wonder how the above and Fox News/AM radio will play into all of it. Does the republican party get shamed for 10, 20, 50 years, does it dissolve, or does it come back in 4 years.

Interesting times from a cultural perspective.

So long as Fox News, Limbaugh and the usual suspects continue dumbing down their audience, Republicans will be spending a lot of time in the wilderness.

Keep up those public appearances, Mrs Palin!

I think you are underestimating the power of tax cuts.

If the GOP suggests eliminating social security taxes and reducing income taxes then a significant portion of the public will favor the GOP policy of tax reductions over spending plans.

I assume the GOP's view of things is to eliminate taxes on everyone making over $200K and keeping taxes on the middle class the same. However, they might not be that stupid.

Yeah, right Al. Just like the GOP won resoundingly in November. I guess it's a good thing the economy collapsed after the elections or the GOP would have swept us.

Oh, it didn't? And the terrible economy likely propelled Obama and other Democrats to victory?

Gee, Al, it seems like you've got everything backwards.

Please, at least, tell me the fantasy world you live in has houses made of chocolate and it never rains.

President Bush has admitted that he "abandoned free market principles to save the free market system."

So when the shit hits the fan, call in the liberals, or is it the adults?

I assume the GOP's view of things is to eliminate taxes on everyone making over $200K and keeping taxes on the middle class the same. However, they might not be that stupid.

You forgot the underpants-gnomes part about how this will magically result in no deficits! (And when it doesn't, it's the fault of liberal spending, even though the GOP never proposes spending cuts that amount to a fraction of their tax cuts.)

Since World War II the goose that has laid the world economy's golden eggs has been the American middle class. The American middle class has been giant and wealthy beyond measure. Republicans for the last 30 years assumed the permanence of the American middle class. What we have learned is that a big part of the job of the American government is to develop and implement policies that support and encourage the growth of the American middle class. Republican policies over the last decade have been aimed at bleeding the American middle class for the benefit of the much smaller and far less important American financial elite. Those Republican policies have been extraordinarily successful. The predictable result has been a worldwide economic meltdown.

Al: "...the sanctity of the family - in other words, conservative values. The GOP will be returning soon with a vengeance."

Soon? How soon? Anyway, we didn't know that vengeance was such a sacred value. You're a well-known fool, so maybe your family is safe from the violence you are once again calling for -- except for all that hot air, of course.

If the GOP suggests eliminating social security taxes and reducing income taxes then a significant portion of the public will favor the GOP policy of tax reductions over spending plans.

Maybe in a couple of years, but right now so many people are in shock at what happened to their 401(k)s that I don't think any proposal to reduce guaranteed retirement savings will go anywhere.

A loss of 25% of the value is the least I've heard, and a lot of people have lost 50% or more. Once you start getting those statements, those annual letters from the SSN telling you how much you'll receive a month start to look pretty good.

In the good old days these obsessive right-wing misfits had Lyndon LaRouche to worship. He has a chance now to get them all back from the GOP. Political discourse would be much more imaginative, not the same thing over and over like now.

Hi:

Not too long ago I saw a great suggestion, and I can't understand why it isn't more popular. The suggestion was to make membership in a union a covered Civil Rights Act right. They listed 6 or 7 words which, if added to the Civil Rights Act, would make Union membership a civil right.

Right now union members who get shafted by management (read - most all of the organizers) spend years before the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) which takes years to decide that the union member deserves their job back, assuming the facility wasn't closed to shaft all the union members. They don't get damages at all, just back pay, assuming the Repug-appointed NLRB members don't just screw them again.

But violators of the Civil Rights Act can be sued right off in Federal Court, and, when found guilty, guilty, Guilty! have large judgments awarded and then the union gets implemented right off.

I'm not sure if this check-off card gig is really worth fighting for, if we could make things more straight-forward by making union membership a Civil Right.

JR in WV, where the 40-hour-week was invented by the UMWA!

Nice theory, but the debt hole is so deep, the Democrats will not be able to reverse the decline in the economy and we'll be ready for another "change you don't have any hope in."

Some interesting quotes by Keynes from Wikipedia:

* On inflation, Keynes wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace: "Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

* On Karl Marx's work, Keynes wrote in 1931, "How can I accept the [Communist] doctrine, which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete textbook which I know not only to be scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values.

Please tell me how Stalin's Communist Russia and George Bush's Republican America differ on these two points.

Zathras, I fail to see yer downside!!!! *G*

WRT to the ReThugs?

I'm with the comment we need to bury them for 4 decades like Roosevelt did in '33 . . .

Bastards resurged in CA under Nixon's Senatorship of McCarthy, and then the next thing we knew he was our President, then CA had Reagan and HE was our president, and outside of J. Brown, we had 8 years of Reagan, Dukemejian and Wilson around J. Brown. Gray was handicapped by our legislature, and Ahnald is a disgrace in the form of Reagan, all over again.

Why am I talkin about CA? Well, I live here, have lived here since '64 and as CA goes, so goes the nation. In case no one was watching as the GOP screwed us over and over again nationally since Nixon, and later, Reagan, set the tone. Bastards.

Merry Effin Xmas, Indeed. May the GOP rot in the hell of its own making! *G*