2012 Will Be a Debacle for the GOP

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-20/palin-the-gops-mcgovern/


Palin Is the New McGovern

by Peter Beinart

Go ahead, pull your party to the far right, Sarah. But your ideological purification drive will spell doom soon. Peter Beinart on what the GOP should learn from 1972.

snip//

So between 1968 and 1972, grassroots activists—many of them incubated in the anti-war movement—took over the Democratic Party, state by state. In 1970, activists rewrote Michigan’s party platform so that it advocated reparations to North Vietnam. In Washington state, they demanded amnesty for draft evaders and a ban on the building of missiles. “The old Liberal Idea,” wrote the famed campaign chronicler Theodore White, “held that the job of a politician was to be a craftsman… as long as the politician moved the state or the majority in the right direction… they {activists} left the pace of change to him… In 1970, the Liberal Theology drew new lines—men of morality must take over the party and operate it; politics was too important to be left to the craftsmen of accommodation.” In 1972, several of those craftsmen of accommodation—Edmund Muskie, Scoop Jackson, and Humphrey himself—sought the Democratic presidential nomination and were stunned by a purist, George McGovern, the darling of the party’s newly dominant liberal activists.

Something similar is happening in today’s GOP. Between 2000 and 2008, George W. Bush pushed American politics sharply to the right: cutting taxes, appointing highly conservative judges, and shredding government regulation. But the Tea Partiers aren’t inclined toward gratitude. In their minds, Bush was an accomodationist, a big spender. Like the McGovernites in the Vietnam-era Democratic Party, the Tea Partiers are taking over the GOP, state by state. And in all likelihood, they will select a party nominee who runs substantially to the right of both Bush in 2000 and 2004 and John McCain in 2008.

That candidate, whether it be Palin herself or a Palin wannabe, will, I suspect, be crushed in the general election. The one major advantage today’s Republicans have over the Democrats of the early 1970s is the economy: If it is actually worse in 2012 than it is today, all bets are off. But if it improves, even modestly, Republicans are likely in for the kind of rude awakening that Democrats experienced in 1972. The reason is that in their fervor to make their parties ideologically pure, the Tea Partiers, like the McGovernites, have not noticed that the bulk of the country is actually moving the other way. In retrospect, the story of the Vietnam years is not the rise of the anti-war left; it was the rise of the suburban Sun Belt, that rapidly growing swath of the country that would elect Reagan, Gingrich, Bush, and DeLay. The McGovernites were so angry that Kennedy, Johnson, and Humphrey had compromised their liberalism that they didn’t notice that the fastest growing share of the electorate didn’t want any liberalism at all.

Similarly, the Tea Party is today garnering all the headlines, but the rising demographic force in today’s politics is not aging white conservatives, but Hispanics and Millennials, two rapidly growing portions of the electorate that are uncomfortable with any right-leaning ideology at all, let alone the right-wing purism of Palin and company.

Historically, it is only after a party loses two or three times that its activists come to terms with the reality that retaking power will require not ideological purity, but ideological compromise of the most wrenching kind. After McGovern lost 49 states, the Democrats nominated Jimmy Carter, who on economic policy was not merely to McGovern’s right, but to Humphrey’s. And after Mondale lost 49 states in 1984, they nominated Bill Clinton, who was even further to the right.

It may seem odd to talk of a blowout Republican defeat in 2012, when the GOP is headed for a blowout victory in 2010. But it is precisely the over-interpretation of the latter that could produce the former. When the dust from this massive recession settles, it will be clear that America is not moving right; it is moving left because America’s fastest-growing demographic groups reside on the center-left. Hold on, Republican moderates; you may be poised for a big comeback in 2016.

What is "conservative" about these judges or the RWers, in general?

They've co-opted the word and changed it's meaning (as they have so, so many others) - while calling the decisions and stances of actual conservatives everything from "Stalinist" to "Liberal Activism".

We need to stop using their (stolen) words to define them.

...and Scalia is the biggest judicial activist of all.

A) minor debacle
B) major debacle
C) titanic deathblow to the GOP

Let's get out the vote, and make sure option C is made manifest!!!

electorate, particularly the uncommitted voters. Who do you have to pick from? Huckabee? Mittens? Pawlenty? Newtie? Caribou Barbie? Not to mention the animal magnetism of the latest darling of the RW, Mike Pence. It's too early, even if he wins, for someone like Rubio who is at least photogenic to get that far that fast. It's really the party of tired old white men, with nothing new to offer. I agree that Obama should handily crush whoever gets to be sacrificial lamb this time around for the Rethugs.

What the people want and what they vote for is hardly even relevant any more.

The main function of the MSM narrative about the inevitability of the Republican blow-out is to provide cover for the theft of any number of races that actually go to the Dems. Already the Alvin Green candidacy is highly suspect, as are some others, because there is reason to believe that the primary votes were hacked.

My guess is that the Dems would retain control of both houses of congress, if the votes were honestly counted, but that since the validity of the vote count will be very questionable, the outcome of the election is very much in doubt both this year and in 2012, just as it was in 2000 and 2004--and actually in 2006 and 2008. I am quite certain that the Dems won more races in 2006 and 2008, and that they won by higher margins in the races that they took, but that vote hacking kept the mandate smaller than it was and fliiped closer races to the Republicans.