Henry Olsen speaks a bitter truth.
I have been saying that BHO can't possibly lose in 2012, because he will be running against the idiot Republicans. Not the one chosen as Prez candidate, but the US House.
Repubs insist on making the same mistake over and over again. When the voters see what the Dems are actually like, the voters go "ewwwwww!" But that is NOT an endorsement of the bunch of whack jobs that the Repubs trot out, or the ideas they have for running our wars, our bedrooms, our borders, or our trade policies.
Anyway, I think O, Henry has this right.
5 comments:
What I don't get about the Olsen article is he closes by talking about how weak Romney is, which is true, but he doesn't mention that the other candidates are even weaker, as indicated in the head-to-head polls.
Although in fairness, the fact that the GOP only "barely took control of the Virginia state senate" was a result of an efficient pro-Dem gerrymander. Every one of the 18 incumbent GOP state senators won at least 56.7% of the vote. 11 of the 22 incumbent Democratic state senators won less than that.
Virginia had split control, and each house was given carte blanche to do its own gerrymander. The Virginia senate Dems arranged things so half their members would be guaranteed around 52-53% on a terrible year.
It's the same reason why the US House Dems in NC did much better than the NC House and NC Senate, despite receiving the same percentage of the vote (and the same percentage as the Dem did against Burr for US Senate.)
Also note that Olsen's article mentions that one of the big problems for Republicans is that independents just aren't that libertarian. They don't want to cut spending-- they just like low taxes. They don't want to restrain public employee bargaining.
While independents are ready to stop fighting wars, one takeaway from that article should be that independents aren't libertarians-- that there's a good reason why the political consensus has been for more spending plus lower taxes. That's what the swing voter likes. The swing voter may dislike deficits, but he hates tax increases and spending cuts each more.
"our borders, or our trade policies."
Sadly, speaking of a bitter truth, free immigration and free trade are unpopular with swing voters as well.
There are some libertarian swing voters. But in the polling I've seen, they're outnumbered by the populist anti-libertarian swing voters.
Many Independents still have hope that the government can deliver. Libertarians, in the short run are unlikely to change the balance of the winning coalition without engaging independents.
The other choice is to wait for the brink and hope that Churchill was right: "Americans always do what is right, after they have tried everything else."
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