10 replies to this topic

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Reports coming out of Boston, the Hub of the known universe, indicate that former senator Scott Brown will not run for the Senate seat vacated by John Kerry.  This makes me very happy.  Not because I think Brown is a bad person, because I don't.  As Republicans go, he's generally the sort I can tolerate.  His political interest group ratings ranked him as one of the most bipartisan senators.

 

No, my problem with Scott Brown was that he gave the Republicans another vote in the Senate, and that I simply could not countenance.  I am strongly partisan, by necessity.  I favor Democrats not because I fervently believe everything the Democratic party believes, but because in a political landscape dominated by two parties you have to pick one or the other, and the Democrats are closer to my ideals than the Republicans, who have come to be dominated by religious fanatics and right-wing extremists.  I think a battle royal is brewing in the GOP which will pit these folks against the remnants of the more centrist, reasonable Republicans of old. 

 

Hard to believe, but once upon a time a creature known as a "liberal Republican" roamed the land.  Former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was one.  So was Mitt Romney's father, onetime Michigan governor George Romney.  Most of my state's Republican governors have been liberals, in fact one, William Weld, was so liberal he could not even get his own party's support when President Clinton wanted to name him ambassador to Mexico.  Scott Brown is more naturally of this more moderate, New England Republican stripe.  The problem for people like him is that the crazy people in his party don't like them.

 

It's going to be fun watching what happens in the GOP over the next couple of years.  My guess is that the crazies will win out, and run someone hard right next time.  I'm thinking Marco Rubio.

[Thrash]

 I'm thinking Marco Rubio.

If that's the case, I'll be voting Dem again.

[Haflinger]

The guy who signed the order ending slavery in America was a Republican. The Democratic party has its roots in the old states-rights, i.e. pro-slavery, movements. It's funny how these things change.

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I agree.  In fact I've thought about that a lot.  It started changing in the early 1900s, but well into the 1920s blacks were still a solidly reliable Republican voting bloc.  That really changed with FDR and the first stirrings of what would become the Civil Rights Movement.  But well into the 1960s the South remained solidly Democratic.  That was back when party affiliation mattered less than ideology.  There were Southern conservative Democrats like Strom Thurmond (who later became a Republican) and Northern liberal Democrats like John Kennedy.  And it was the same on the Republican side, where there were liberals like the aforementioned Rockefeller and Romney, and John Birch Society conservatives like Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater.

 

Goldwater, by the way, was an interesting political anachronism.  Although staunchly conservative – he was Tea Party crazy before there was a Tea Party – he was also strongly in favor of gay rights.  I always wondered if he had a gay son or brother or something.

[Haflinger]

Goldwater was borderline libertarian, and libertarians tend to be pro-gay rights because they don't like the government meddling in people's private lives.

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That was an unusual position for an arch-conservative in his day.

[Haflinger]

Yeah, I don't think he really was a genuine arch-conservative though. I think he was more of an insane conservative-libertarian hybrid and the gay rights thing was part of the libertarian side. He had a huge amount of distrust of any government action at all for any reason.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Unless that action was to build thousands of nuclear weapons!

[Haflinger]

Yeah I did mention he was insane right? B)

[Justavictim82]

Ironically, Hilary Clinton was a huge Goldwater supporter when she was younger. Oh how times change

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Ronald Reagan was once a New Deal progressive.  Funny how people change.  It may surprise some of you to know this, but when I was around 12 I was a huge Reagan fan à la Michael J. Fox's character on Family Ties.  But then again I guess that shouldn't be so surprising — his policies seemed designed to appeal to a 12-year-old mentality.