Its worth noting that Ronald Reagan ran conservative campaigns...
...
I included Reagan as proof that a conservative candidate could win elections...
...twenty-eight and thirty-two years ago. The political landscape has changed significantly. Voters and candidates both tend to be more polarized; information disseminates more rapidly, and the nation's demography is radically different than in the 1980's. Even between 2000 and now, the political landscape has changed. The George W. Bush campaign ran in 2000 and 2004, in part, on their strong opposition to gay rights. Gay rights were a wedge issue that Karl Rove correctly surmised could render Democratic candidates unelectable. Now, gay rights are still a wedge issue, but it is Republicans who want to avoid that issue, because the majority has turned against them.
It's also worth noting that in many ways, Reagan governed more liberally than Republicans have let Obama. In particular, Reagan passed a $37.5 billion tax-increase, principally to save Social Security. By contrast, nearly every current Republican member of Congress has signed a pledge not to introduce any tax increases and to oppose any attempt to increase taxes, whatever the circumstance. Likewise, Reagan expanded the Office of Management and Budget, specifically to slow the functioning of other government agencies, while Obama has been conceiving of ways to consolidate the Department of Commerce and several related elements of the federal bureaucracy. If you think that Reagan, Romney, and Ryan are all of the same political stripe, then you either have some information about Romney and Ryan that the general public does not, or your memory of Reagan is actually a construct of today's GOP, rather than any kind of reflection of history.
More to the point, John McCain campaigned as a conservative much more recently than Reagan, and having made sure to jump into bed with the right-wing in the eight years, after losing a primary bid to George W. Bush, he had a recent legislative record to match his rhetoric. His VP choice was, as I've already mentioned, not too dissimilar to the Romney's pick, and what did it get him? It put McCain on the wrong side of a 192 electoral vote margin. He lost Florida, a kingmaker in the electoral college. He lost North Carolina and Virginia, which hadn't been blue since 1976, when the election was a referendum on the pardoning of Richard Nixon. He lost Indiana, which hadn't been blue since 1964, when the Civil Rights Act passed.
Converting yourself from a moderate into a Bible-thumping, right-wing candidate is not a winning formula for a general election. It might have worked (and did) in 2000 and the 1980's, but it's not 2000 or the 1980's anymore.
Ruth Marcus, in the
Washington Post, quite neatly summarized my thoughts on the Paul Ryan pick:
Here’s a rule of thumb: If you are the Republican nominee and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, The Weekly Standard and The National Review are all urging you to do the same thing, run the other way. Romney doesn’t need the base; if they are not enthusiastically for him, they are enthusiastically against Obama, which ought to be enough.
Romney doesn't need help in Louisiana or Tennessee or Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia. He's led those polls, from the time he locked up the nomination to now by ten points or more. He doesn't need help in Montana or the Dakotas or Wyoming. He's led those polls by ten points or more, from the time he locked up the nomination. He doesn't need help in Arizona or Texas or Oklahoma or Arkansas. He's led those polls by ten points or more, from the time he locked up the nomination. Where Romney does need help is in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, where Romney has never left the margin for error in the polls or trailed Obama by five or more points and all states where Paul Ryan is either no help or a liability.
To the issues, again, then:
GM would have gone under, and it would restructure, and maybe it would have come out better.
And how many manufacturing jobs would have been lost in the United States, only to be picked up by European and Japanese auto makers? When you work on an automotive assembly line, what are your qualifications for jobs outside of the automotive industry? When the company providing for your healthcare and retirement goes up in smoke, what assets do you have available to facilitate a career change? My question was not whether or not GM could successfully drag itself out of bankruptcy; it was about how losing one of the very few large manufacturing businesses left in the United States would affect the nation's economy.
As to the banking system, the bailout didn't correct the primary issue that bankers make a ton of risky deals that risk a repeat...
Then point the blame at the people responsible for passing the bills that funded the bailout. Again, Paul Ryan voted for (which is the opposite of against) the initial bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which were given final approval by the George W. Bush administration. Paul Ryan then voted against a bill intended to rebuild regulations (that the GOP had previously been busy disassembling in the 1980's and 1990's) that would inhibit banks from taking the kinds of risks that had led to the sub-prime mortage bubble.
Deficit spending in general: Would work better if Obama could raise taxes on the rich (like a "hoarding tax", you only lose the money you if you don't spend it)... but no tax increases are going to get past the Republican-controlled House.
While I won't agree with a hoarding tax, the GOP has done a good job of erasing from the public consciousness the fact that the biggest spending programs of the Bush adminstration were the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts on capital gains and the top tax brackets, easily outpacing the expense of both of the wars in the Middle East. There's also a certain level of forgetfulness about how much top-tier earners have been taxed in the past and the remarkable lack of a negative effect that it had on the economy. In the most extreme case, the Eisenhower administration taxed the wealthy at a 90% rate, and not only did the economy not collapse, but we got an interstate highway system out of the deal. Granted, the economy of the 1950's is not the economy of today, but bumping the top-tier tax rates from 33% and 35% to the Clinton-era (you know, when we had a balanced budget) 38% and 40% is hardly going to destroy jobs or end the recovery, as the GOP's rhetoric would not-too-subtly suggest.
Final note: I fixed the first link in the opening post, so that it actually goes to my electoral college prediction, instead of a blank electoral college map.
