Despite polls showing Barack Obama and John McCain surprisingly neck-and- neck, such as with the recent Gallup Poll reporting a mere two percent lead for the presumed Democratic nominee, most political analysts are expecting McCain to get his clock cleaned in November.
And they�re probably right.
Assuming Obama doesn�t trip himself up in the debates in Gerald Ford like fashion (recall: ``there�s no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe��); and doesn�t pick Rev. Jeremiah Wright as his running mate; and isn�t discovered to have Osama bin Laden listed as one of his social networking friends on Facebook�the 2008 election has all the makings of being what most are predicting: an Obama landslide
And with an unpopular war in Iraq, the economy in shambles, most Democrats running for Congress and the Senate, are likely to cling to Mr. Obama�s coattails, giving them a clear working majority to right the wrongs of an inept conservative administration.
What�s more: Republican�s were served with yet another dose of bad news recently, when The New York Times reported, the Democrats were making significant progress in party registration, growing by as much as three percentage points in six states, including Iowa, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania.
The question, then, is no longer who wins in November; Obama will certainly be the next president. The question is have we reached a turning point in the political electoral cycle that will allow the Democrats to control the agenda and pass liberal legislation (or at least left-of-center) for the next four to eight years and possibly longer, while the Republicans just watch and wail with Fox�s Sean Hannity in the evening.
While watching David Broder interview syndicated columnist George F. Will on C-Span�s Booknotes over the weekend, Mr. Cub said that there is ``nothing like a burst of liberal government to bring back Conservatism��, a clear reference to when Barry Goldwater was crushed in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson, and with it came the beginning of the ``Great Society�� and a massive wave of social spending programs. Mr. Will went on to explain between 1964 and 1966, the Democrat�s overreached with so many spending programs, that it helped bring about the reemergence of the Republicans with Richard Nixon�s victory over Hubert Humphrey, the defender of the Great Society as LBJ�s Vice President.
In 1969, with a new Republican administration, U.S. News and World Report reported they found "signs that an era is ending." But by 1973, inflation had reached double digits for the first time in the nation�s history. The following year, the consumer price index stood at 12 percent. And with the Watergate scandal and the fall of Nixon in 1974, Republicans lost 43 House seats during the midterm elections that year.
So much for a turning point.
After Jimmy Carter was routed in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, an election which also gave the GOP a majority in the Senate, Theodore H. White, political journalist and historian, told NBC on election night, that we were watching ``the end of an era��.
But the GOP�s fortunes changed quickly over the next two years. In protest over Reagan�s deep cuts in federal programs, the Democrats picked up twenty-six seats in the House of Representatives during the mid-term elections, the most ever in an off-year election since 1922
James L. Sundquist in his book the ``Dynamics of the Party System'', wrote this was one glaring indication the Reagan 1980 landslide couldn�t be compared with FDR�s realignment of 1932. ``The 1980 election appeared instead, Sundquist wrote, to be closely analogous to 1952, when the comparably overwhelming anti-Truman, anti-Democratic protest that put Dwight Eisenhower in the White House failed to make any significant lasting addition to Republican identification in the electorate��
So does an Obama landslide and loss of a majority in both houses of Congress, necessarily mean the Republican�s will be ushered off into the sunset (not to be heard from again) until they can get their act together?
Timothy Patrick McCarthy, Lecturer on History and Literature at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University thinks the ``Republicans need to do some serious soul-searching; they seem to be falling apart. This is partly due to the fact that the old Reagan coalition--foreign policy hawks, fiscal conservatives, and evangelical right-wingers--was always a pretty precarious alliance, sustained masterfully by Bush, Cheney, Rove et al���
The general consensus seems to be that the Democrats will indeed be handed the ball after a catastrophic fumble by the Republicans over the last eight years, but what they do with the ball is still an open question. After all, they�ll be faced with an almost impossible compromise in Iraq, a housing crisis, a growing jobless rate, possibly a worsening recession, and a country badly in need of health care reform.
Will Obama be the new FDR, setting in motion a wave of social programs with New Deal bravado, or will his prescriptions backfire, causing voters to say they got the Raw Deal electing a freshman senator who was nothing more than a tax and spend liberal?
How can Obama and a Democratic controlled Congress possibly avoid raising taxes and allocating more spending programs to get the country out of this historic economic slump?
Even if Obama�s first term is less than successful after entering the White House with such high expectations, (he shouldn't be confused with Houdini), the Republicans will continue to remain out of power, at least until the party can find a new leader and new cause to rally around, that will replace the GOP�s outdated tune of limited government with responsible government; while working with countries in rooting out the real enemy: nuclear armaments.
As Thomas E. Mann, congressional scholar from the Brookings Institution explained to me in an email, ``Whether they [Democrats] will succeed in government following their electoral victories is uncertain. But it is clear that Republicans will have to suffer at least one more decisive electoral defeat before they begin to refashion their public philosophy and build a credible program for governing.''
-Bill Lucey
[email protected]
And they�re probably right.
Assuming Obama doesn�t trip himself up in the debates in Gerald Ford like fashion (recall: ``there�s no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe��); and doesn�t pick Rev. Jeremiah Wright as his running mate; and isn�t discovered to have Osama bin Laden listed as one of his social networking friends on Facebook�the 2008 election has all the makings of being what most are predicting: an Obama landslide
And with an unpopular war in Iraq, the economy in shambles, most Democrats running for Congress and the Senate, are likely to cling to Mr. Obama�s coattails, giving them a clear working majority to right the wrongs of an inept conservative administration.
What�s more: Republican�s were served with yet another dose of bad news recently, when The New York Times reported, the Democrats were making significant progress in party registration, growing by as much as three percentage points in six states, including Iowa, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania.
The question, then, is no longer who wins in November; Obama will certainly be the next president. The question is have we reached a turning point in the political electoral cycle that will allow the Democrats to control the agenda and pass liberal legislation (or at least left-of-center) for the next four to eight years and possibly longer, while the Republicans just watch and wail with Fox�s Sean Hannity in the evening.
While watching David Broder interview syndicated columnist George F. Will on C-Span�s Booknotes over the weekend, Mr. Cub said that there is ``nothing like a burst of liberal government to bring back Conservatism��, a clear reference to when Barry Goldwater was crushed in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson, and with it came the beginning of the ``Great Society�� and a massive wave of social spending programs. Mr. Will went on to explain between 1964 and 1966, the Democrat�s overreached with so many spending programs, that it helped bring about the reemergence of the Republicans with Richard Nixon�s victory over Hubert Humphrey, the defender of the Great Society as LBJ�s Vice President.
In 1969, with a new Republican administration, U.S. News and World Report reported they found "signs that an era is ending." But by 1973, inflation had reached double digits for the first time in the nation�s history. The following year, the consumer price index stood at 12 percent. And with the Watergate scandal and the fall of Nixon in 1974, Republicans lost 43 House seats during the midterm elections that year.
So much for a turning point.
After Jimmy Carter was routed in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, an election which also gave the GOP a majority in the Senate, Theodore H. White, political journalist and historian, told NBC on election night, that we were watching ``the end of an era��.
But the GOP�s fortunes changed quickly over the next two years. In protest over Reagan�s deep cuts in federal programs, the Democrats picked up twenty-six seats in the House of Representatives during the mid-term elections, the most ever in an off-year election since 1922
James L. Sundquist in his book the ``Dynamics of the Party System'', wrote this was one glaring indication the Reagan 1980 landslide couldn�t be compared with FDR�s realignment of 1932. ``The 1980 election appeared instead, Sundquist wrote, to be closely analogous to 1952, when the comparably overwhelming anti-Truman, anti-Democratic protest that put Dwight Eisenhower in the White House failed to make any significant lasting addition to Republican identification in the electorate��
So does an Obama landslide and loss of a majority in both houses of Congress, necessarily mean the Republican�s will be ushered off into the sunset (not to be heard from again) until they can get their act together?
Timothy Patrick McCarthy, Lecturer on History and Literature at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University thinks the ``Republicans need to do some serious soul-searching; they seem to be falling apart. This is partly due to the fact that the old Reagan coalition--foreign policy hawks, fiscal conservatives, and evangelical right-wingers--was always a pretty precarious alliance, sustained masterfully by Bush, Cheney, Rove et al���
The general consensus seems to be that the Democrats will indeed be handed the ball after a catastrophic fumble by the Republicans over the last eight years, but what they do with the ball is still an open question. After all, they�ll be faced with an almost impossible compromise in Iraq, a housing crisis, a growing jobless rate, possibly a worsening recession, and a country badly in need of health care reform.
Will Obama be the new FDR, setting in motion a wave of social programs with New Deal bravado, or will his prescriptions backfire, causing voters to say they got the Raw Deal electing a freshman senator who was nothing more than a tax and spend liberal?
How can Obama and a Democratic controlled Congress possibly avoid raising taxes and allocating more spending programs to get the country out of this historic economic slump?
Even if Obama�s first term is less than successful after entering the White House with such high expectations, (he shouldn't be confused with Houdini), the Republicans will continue to remain out of power, at least until the party can find a new leader and new cause to rally around, that will replace the GOP�s outdated tune of limited government with responsible government; while working with countries in rooting out the real enemy: nuclear armaments.
As Thomas E. Mann, congressional scholar from the Brookings Institution explained to me in an email, ``Whether they [Democrats] will succeed in government following their electoral victories is uncertain. But it is clear that Republicans will have to suffer at least one more decisive electoral defeat before they begin to refashion their public philosophy and build a credible program for governing.''
-Bill Lucey
[email protected]
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