A rare moment of consensus. Obama should have waited till 2016 (when he would have been ready) and let a far more capable Hillary have 2008. Unfortunately, ambition got the better of him, and 2008 was the closest thing to automatic since 1976, so he did not want to roll the dice on 2016. McCain said we could not afford on-the-job training for the president, and he was right.


Fair point; the two party system makes it hard for either major party to completely disintegrate until/unless an alternative takes their place. However much either dominates some will always disagree and gravitate to the opposition by default.


I think they have 2-4 years to get their collective heads out of their butts on immigration or they will lose latinos for the foreseeable future just as they did blacks. Julian Castro, the San Antonio mayor who gave the DNC keynote address, said a few days ago he thinks TX will be a swing state in 6-8 years, because 65% of its population growth in the last census was latino. The Southwest is important, but Republicans have already lost all of it except AZ, and TX keeps them in the game: Without it the largest state they carried was (Dem trending) NC, then TN. Atlanta is making Georgia a lot closer these days, too, so SC begins to look as much like an endangered GOP salient as IN does.

Unless the GOP finds a way forward with minorities soon they will be left trying to cobble together an electoral victory out of a dozen states, most with single digit electoral votes. That is political obscurity and irrelevance.


In the '70s and '80s it was the other way around, and Dems learned a hard lesson from that. If you have not yet looked up the Democratic Leadership Council, I recommend it, because it is a very instructive piece of history Republicans may be about to repeat. The national party tired of nominating arch-liberals the base loved only to see Reagan and Bush 41 define them as extremists and cruise to general election victory. That was the birth of Americas Third Way New Left, and the death of the old (real) Left. The DLC hails the Clinton elections as vindication, studiously ignoring Perot polling double digits (mostly from conservatives) in '92 and '96. The GOP produced a copycat organization about a decade ago, but it may finally get some largescale support thanks to the Tea Party disasters.

The irony is that the DLC may finally be accomplishing its goal just a few years after its formal dissolution. Pushing the DNC to the center forced the RNC right to maintain its ideological distinction, so outside the Northeast and West Coast much of the GOP is openly far right. It remains to be seen whether the New Left has captured the center on its own merits, but with the national Republican Party fleeing the center to preserve its identity the effect is much the same.

The knock, of which the GOPs highly motivated and reliable base must remain conscious, is that the DLC traded ideological purity for electoral victories consequently rendered meaningless. Clinton brought welfare reform, the demise of labor and protectionism, the rise of "free" trade and stagnant working class wages even as GDP and the DJIA skyrocketed amid the longest sustained economic growth in US history. In many ways it was hard to tell the difference between Clinton and Bush 41, except the former succeeded in passing the NAFTA and WTO treaties where the latter failed. Many noted that risked far left votes Dems needed, but the truth is many of those voters rejected anyone to the right of Marx anyway. The GOP base is historically far more inclined to hold their nose and vote for the party as a patriotic duty.

That may be what kills the Tea Party in the end. Historically, even when the national GOP was fairly far right, it could and did tell its extremist base to sit down, shut up and vote for whom they told lest the Dems atheist commies win. It worked, because GOP voters are just that. Even now they have not stopped voting, only staged revolts and forced extremists on the party during primaries. If the GOP goes back to its old model of closet extremism marketed as centrism with winking indulgence by the base, they could easily pull out of this tailspin without sacrificing any ACTUAL ideological purity.

If not, however, the GOP base could find themselves completely marginalized by restructuring like the DLC orchestrated in creating "Super Tuesday" in the mid-eighties, and have nowhere to go but the catherd. The "better dead than red" philosophy makes the latter a non-option. I did not coin the "herding cats phrase," but have always liked it because it fits; Republicans are not like that, and it is much easier to lock the base out of the process secure in the knowledge they will show up on election day along with all the newly seduced moderates and independents.


Do not hold your breath; Snowe is justifiably disgusted with politics (though she could completely change the face of US politics if nominated; even I might vote for her.) Hillary, on the other hand, is nearly as old as Biden and, asked after the election about her future plans, her response was "I would like to see if I can get untired." 2008 was her year, and Obama blew it with his amateur hour presidency. Two missed opportunities for the price of one, as it were.