Cultural war vs. fiscal policy?
Interesting OP-ED in the NYT. How much of the split is based on a cultural war vs. fiscal policy?
NYT-…The Republicans did this to themselves, yet a convenient amnesia can be found in conservatives’ post-Election Day soul searching. There’s endless hand-wringing about Bush and McCain blunders and Abramoff-Stevens corruption, but there’s barely any mention of the nasty cultural brawls that defined the G.O.P. campaign narrative this year as the party clung bitterly once more to its 40-year-old “Southern strategy.”
There were as many Republican prejudices as candidates. In primary season, the whispered antipathy among some conservative evangelicals toward Mormons grew so loud that Mitt Romney felt compelled to give a speech defending his faith (but was so fearful of inciting further wrath that he said the word Mormon only once). The conservative gatekeeper Michael Medved spotlighted another whisper campaign in May, writing that the popular moderate Florida G.O.P. governor Charlie Crist had been “single since his divorce in 1980 (after a marriage that lasted only a year)” and was the subject of “nasty rumors of possible gay activity.” Crist announced his engagement to a woman weeks later, but by then he was no longer a serious contender for the ticket.
John McCain also might have held Florida had he prevailed with his first choice of a running mate, the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman, but G.O.P. ayatollahs scuttled both him and the abortion moderate Tom Ridge, who might have helped win Pennsylvania. Not that McCain was innocent in these exclusionary escapades. He strenuously sought the endorsement of the Rev. John Hagee, even though Hagee had blamed gays for Hurricane Katrina, referred to the Roman Catholic Church as “the great whore,” and theorized that Hitler came about because God’s “top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”
The icing on this rancid cake was the race-baiting of Obama and the immigrant bashing by G.O.P. hopefuls who tried to outdo the nativist fringe candidate Tom Tancredo. Yet Republican denial is unabated. In an interview with Palin the weekend before the election, a conservative Wall Street Journal editorialist asked whether “the G.O.P. doesn’t in fact have a perception problem, that it is no longer viewed as a big tent.” A perception problem? Hello — how about a reality problem?…..
November 16th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
FYI
The Hyperbole of a Conservative
by George Will
TH-Conservatism’s current intellectual chaos reverberated in the Republican ticket’s end-of-campaign crescendo of surreal warnings that big government — verily, “socialism” — would impend were Democrats elected. John McCain and Sarah Palin experienced this epiphany when Barack Obama told a Toledo plumber that he would “spread the wealth around.”
America can’t have that, exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans — whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society gave birth to Medicare in 1965; a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a time of record profits for the less than 2 percent of the American people-cum-corporations who farm — and their administration were partially nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called “the private sector” has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible for a bailout from the $1 trillion or so that is to be “spread around.”
The seepage of government into everywhere is, we are assured, to be temporary and nonpolitical. Well.
http://townhall.com/columnists/GeorgeWill/2008/11/16/the_hyperbole_of_a_conservative
November 18th, 2008 at 7:35 am
People like George Will really get on my nerves. They want to hold George W. Bush accountable for his spending but they completely ignore Reagans spending sprees. Reagan never submitted a balanced budget.
November 18th, 2008 at 8:05 am
It’s the economy stupid. And Hypocrisy and lies and torture, and depleted uranium, and blackwater, snooping spying, pedophiles in high places, Bohemian grove, Ivy league elitists, the Franklin coverup, the PNAC, corporate fascism, no-bid contracts, secret planes, secret plans, NAU, SPP, open borders, “it’s just a GD piece of paper”, corporate shills, ect…
November 18th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Equating Tancredo, and real immigration reform with any type of fringe is just intellectually lazy. The author obviously hasn’t done any surveys lately. And yet the status quo distanced itself from Tancredo while at the same time elevating Ann Coulter to new heights. blwech! I can’t stand her race baiting. Personally as an AMERICA FIRST Republican the issue of Ms13 gangs was one reason I became a blogger. And specifically, learning about how ms13 gangs were going around killing AMERICAN BLACKS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_Salvatrucha
November 18th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Lieberman? Puleeeeze. What does he stand for except perhaps for expanding the police state and bombing Iran? Connecticut (and the rest of the country) got a raw deal with LIE-berman courtesy of the RNC.
November 18th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Only the power mongers and control freaks are worried about some type of “breakup”. HELLO…there’s plenty of REAL conservatives out here.
November 18th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Hopefully the GOP will not rely upon the NYT as its advisor going forward.
November 18th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
G.O.P. ayatollahs
I love that phrase !
November 19th, 2008 at 5:39 am
Bart
Do you think the GOP has a Cultural war vs. fiscal policy?