The Final US Election Thread

[Koga No Goshi]

Condolences to those who strongly supported McCain, and I humbly request that any and all calls for impeachment wait until the new President has served at least a week in office.

I would feel sorrier for McCain if he hadn't hitched his wagon to the same people who character assasinated him. His re-embrace of almost all the scary fringes and the of the Republican base and the Bush ideological hardline further alienated him from the many Dems who used to like him quite a bit, myself included.

Cr - I think that article is compeltely right in terms of how Reagan did what he did - but much more than that he came at a time when people wanted de-regulation and lower taxes. Now the fundamentals of the political state are compeltely different - more - better - regulation and a degree of fairer, more taxes - the answer. Palin made Hilary voters turn TO Obama - the moderate, conservative leaning Dems got pushed away by Palin. Independents got pushed AWAY by Palin. That kind of Republican will not wash anymore with, that is what the GOP have to deal with.

I agree with this completely. The problem with the Republican party is a very simple one. They've played around too much with the bait of ideology and have become too dependant upon it in order to win or excite their base. Republican platform over the last 12 years or more has been repeatedly trying to shove the square peg into the round hole, over and over, thinking that the square peg is what made Reagan great or Republicans respected. It wasn't the square peg (be it deregulation, tax cuts, corporate pandering, a contempt for social services, a demonizing of the poorer 40-90% of Americans as just lazy and unworthy of compassion or assistance, a contempt for the international community) as much as having a square peg when the hole was square.

Campaigns have become a sad repetition over and over of "Square peg! Square peg!" with no one stopping to ask themselves if the holes of our time are square.