Daily Kos: The 2010 Comprehensive Daily Kos/Research 2000 Poll of Self-Identified Republicans

Daily Kos: The 2010 Comprehensive Daily Kos/Research 2000 Poll of Self-Identified Republicans

Judging from the answers, it would seem that 25-50 percent of Republicans are hard-core on every issue: Palin is more qualified than Obama, Obama is a socialist, Obama wants the terrorists to win, et fricking cetera. It makes you wonder what Independents are thinking. There will be no so-called post-partisan era simply because the boundaries of reality are at issue, not just policy. There will be no post-partisan era where we agree to disagree, as in a healthy democracy. What there will be will be -- if Obama rhetorical approach is successful -- is a persistent co-opting of the "independent" voting faction, and I think he might be on to something. Maybe. On the pessimistic side, Reagan's success did not come from simply cultivating the right-of-center independent vote and disaffected liberals, his lasting victory was in defining the Democrats as representing the discarded ideas of the past. So far, Obama has not turned his rhetorical gifts to the historic task Reagan set for himself, and that will leave a legacy as fragile as Clinton's when Gore decided to run from Clinton's accomplishments. At this point in history, Republicans should have no credibility on foreign or domestic policy, but somehow Bush's eight years are off-limits as an object lesson on the failure of Republican policy. By comparison, after Reagan's first year in office, it was fashionable to associate Carter with failure and weakness. Certainly, Bush is a failure and an embarrassment to the Republican establishment, but the Democrats are too polite to show that Bush's failures were a failure of ideology, not simply of one administration. Essentially, the Democrat's rhetorical task is to viscerally associate the Republican ideology with weakness and confusion, just as Reagan successfully did against the Democrats. By the same token, Democrats must avoid trying to paint the Republicans as merely "wrong" or "incorrect" in their views, which is entirely too intellectual a position for politics and entirely unsuitable for the opponent. The Democrats should say, "We've tried it their way for eight years, and their deficit has weakened our country, and their wars have weakened our country, and their policies have weakened our moral standing around the world. It's time to return to the values of civility and common interest that has made our country strong." Or something like that.