AFTER TWO EXPENSIVE BUSH PRESIDENCIES, A PUNDIT CALLS THE DEMOCRATS “FAILURES”

Failures?...After what the Obama administration did to save the nation from the GOP driven Great Recession….?

 

According to a devoted conservative pundit, (who will remain unnamed) “Two of the last three Democratic presidencies have been emphatically judged to have been failures.” 

 

Really?

Well let’s see; the Republicans previously led America into unnecessary expensive wars in the middle-east, drove the nation into the worst recession since the Great Depression, (and as with FDR, it took a Democratic administration to clean-up the mess), and the Republicans have since done absolutely nothing for helping the average working American.

I would also assume that those that were these judges of the past Democratic presidencies being failures, that group consisted of this same pundit, his wife, and his two best Tea Party buddies. 

I will be the first to say that for the mid-terms, the Republicans did do a stellar job in using Fox News, along with their GOP excellent misstating political messaging-machine.  In addition, that the Democrats really blew it in not making the public totally aware of the details of the positive things that the Obama administration has done over the last 6 years.  

I will also give the Republicans major credit for their stopping of all the US jobs programs to fix the nation’s infrastructure, which would have put tens of thousands of unemployed Americans back to work in good paying jobs.  The GOP has also done an excellent job of pushing the raising of the minimum wage off as the responsibility of the individual states. 

 

Even considering their “Red Wave” wins on November 4^th, four Red states still voted to increase their states minimum wage levels.  Counter to what the Republicans say, most Americans believe that a minimum wage is needed and that it is currently too low.

This conservative pundit was correct that the Democrats were failures in their latest campaign against the Republicans, but Democratic failures in their presidencies?  I think it’s the GOP that has to accept that national “thumbs-down” award, and they should be doing it with no comments or complaints.

Now, this same pundit, with all his self-awarded bravado, is asking, “Do Democrats now want to wager their most precious possession, the presidential 2016 nomination, on the proposition that [Hillary] Clinton has political talents akin to Ronald Reagan’s? “ 

 

Yes, apparently he’s referring to the same President Reagan who philosophically would not be allowed to join today’s Republican Party!

This conservative is also trying to claim that the reason that some Democrats lost their latest elections was because one or both of the Clinton’s campaigned for some of the nation’s losing Democratic candidates. 

The reality is that most rational Americans do agree with the following:

·       One reason for the latest Democratic losses is that even with the economy improving, more jobs having been created, the average American’s wages have stagnated and most Americans aren’t personally feeling these improvements.  This is why over 50% of Americans feel the nation is still headed in the wrong direction.

·       This is also historically the period, (6 years) into a presidential administration, that is the worst time for an incumbent, regardless of which party is in power.  This is usually when the party in the White House normally does poorly in the mid-terms and their party loses seats in both Houses.

·       This mid-term was particularly bad because most of the senatorial races happened to be in normally Red states where they were mostly expected to stay Red.

·       The president and his promoters, even though he is an excellent orator, did a very poor job in selling what he and his team had done in the 6 years since he took over as the nation’s chief executive.

This pundit, then went on to offer the views of the “dyed-in-the-wool”, dedicated, conservative editor of the National Affairs quarterly and a conservative author, Yuval Levin.  The pundit then published Mr. Levin’s negative statements regarding his feelings about Hillary Clinton. 

Per Mr. Levin: “She [Hillary] is smart, tough and savvy and has a capacity to learn from failure and adjust. But . . . people are bored of her and feel like she has been talking at them forever. . . . She is a dull, grating, inauthentic, over-eager, insipid elitist with ideological blinders yet no particular vision and is likely to be reduced to running on a dubious promise of experience and competence while faking idealism and hope — a very common type of presidential contender in both parties, but one that almost always loses.”

To be quite frank, after reading this description, I felt it could be better applied to most of those past, and possible future Republican candidates, that were previously presented to America in the 2012 Republican presidential debates.

There were then, many more blasts at Mrs. Clinton, calling her “a bridge back to the 1990s, or perhaps to 1988 and the “competence” candidacy of Michael Dukakis”. 

 

After more slams at Hillary, at that point, the thought crossed my mind that “this conservative is acting this way because he is scared to death that Hillary could become the next president instead of it being a Republican”.

It is now clear that since these individuals now have the legislative branch tied up, and they have 5 conservative activists on the US Supreme Court, it is scaring the be-Jesus out of them that they really don’t have a candidate that can bring all the Republican Party members together.  Therefore, under those conditions, it is now their job to work on burying the most likely Democratic nominees.

 

...The current activist US Supreme Court

Just look at the groups in the party that the GOP has to work with:

·       Moderate, reasonable, Republicans (those few left)

·       Tea Party Republicans

·       Anti-Immigration Republications

·       Old white-guy conservative Republicans

·       Anti-abortion Republicans

·       Anti-birth-control Republicans

·       Anti-equal-pay Republicans

·       Anti-climate-change Republicans

·       Anti-spend-to-fix-the-infrastructure Republicans

·       Southern evangelist Republicans

House Speaker, John Boehner has a boat-load of bad experiences in trying to get the representatives of all of these groups, all on the same page.

According to this conservative, the energy in Hillary’s party is well to her left, and is, “too untethered from reality to engage in effective politics”. So, he apparently thinks that the Republicans aren’t the ones that are, “too untethered from reality to engage in effective politics”….Right!

He gives the following as his example of this situation of the far left: “The billionaire Tom Steyer’s environmental angst is implausibly focused on the supposed planetary menace of the Keystone XL pipeline. His NextGen Climate super PAC disbursed more than $60 million to candidates who shared his obsession. The result? The gavel of the Environment and Public Works Committee is coming into the hands of Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe, the Senate’s most implacable skeptic about large-scale and predictable climate change driven by human behavior.”

 

…The new Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, James Inhofe (R-OK)

First, his statement about the Republican senator is correct.  James Inhofe (R-OK) is the US Senate’s most anti-science Republican senator and he has always referred to climate change science as the biggest “hoax” on all Americans. 

But what has that got to do with the left being “too untethered from reality to engage in effective politics”….?  Yes, Senator Inhofe is taking over that senate committee……but so what?  I would bet that the people that voted in all those Republican senators were not doing so because it would allow an unscientific senator to take over an environmental committee. 

Americans voted for a change in government because they wanted something to get done in Washington and it wasn’t happening fast enough under the Democrats.  These mostly misinformed voters aren’t aware that what they want to happen still won’t be happening with the party that is now running the show. 

I personally believe that after the next two years, the voters will be able to see that what they voted for will not happen.  That’s how democracy works.  Just like the slot machines in the casinos.  You pull the lever, and you takes your chances.

This conservative pundit ends his article saying, “A Clinton candidacy makes sense if, but only if, in 24 months voters will be thinking: Let’s have a third Obama term.”

In the 2008 election, Hillary made it clear in the presidential debates that her views were somewhat different from the then candidate Obama, so I personally don’t see a 3^rd  Obama term. 

 

But I do see the possibility that the voters will see that after all the Republicans have done to this nation, having them running all three branches in Washington would be political suicide.

But that of course, is only my opinion.

Copyright G.Ater  2014