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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (478645)	5/6/2009 10:47:27 PM
From: bentway	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574906

"34% of this country still identifies themselves as conservative, compared to 21% liberal." I don't know where you get YOUR unattributed stats, but MY stats say that only 21% of Americans identify themselves as Repugnicans. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Republican Shrinkage Problem voices.washingtonpost.com The new Washington Post/ABC news poll has all sorts of intriguing numbers in it but when you are looking for clues as to where the two parties stand politically there is only one number to remember: 21. That's the percent of people in the Post/ABC survey who identified themselves as Republicans, down from 25 percent in a late March poll and at the lowest ebb in this poll since the fall of 1983(!). In that same poll, 35 percent self-identified as Democrats and 38 percent called them Independents. These numbers come on the heels of Steve Schmidt, former campaign manager for Arizona Sen. John McCain's presidential bid, declaring the Republican party a "shrinking entity" last week -- citing the decline of GOP numbers in the west, northeast and mountain west as evidence. And they show a somewhat significant decline from even last November's election when exit polls showed 32 percent of voters identifying as Republican as compared to 39 percent for Democrats and 29 percent for independents and others. (A caveat: voters tend to see things through a more partisan lens after having just voted in a presidential election than they do in an April poll.) The Post poll numbers show the challenge for Republicans in stark terms. The number of people who see themselves as GOPers is on the decline even as those who remain within the party grow more and more conservative. That means that the loyal base of the party has an even larger voice in terms of the direction it heads even as more and more empirical evidence piles up that the elevation of voices like former vice president Dick Cheney does little to win over wavering Republicans or recruit Independents back to the GOP cause. Put simply: Republicans find themselves stuck between a political Scylla and Charybdis -- with apologies to the Police.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (478645)	5/7/2009 8:48:31 AM
From: Alighieri	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574906

I've already given my opinion on Republicans who think being the Lite Beer of Liberalism is going to win elections. They sure as hell won't win it by clinging to a hard right ideology and offering nothing in the way of solutions to the very complex issues the country faces. Roadwalker posted an excellent editorial by David Brooks on the topic....did you read it? 34% of this country still identifies themselves as conservative, compared to 21% liberal. You could argue that Powell wants to go after the big middle, a.k.a. "moderates," but it's not really clear to me that most moderates wants more government in their lives. In fact, I would argue that most moderates are fiscal conservatives and social liberals, i.e. libertarians. I am pretty sure that your numbers are off, but even if they were not, they are indicative of a growing middle that won't be keen to follow a right wing agenda that sucks up to southern conservatives and that proposes little. The current crop of republicans sound ignorant on the public airwaves, and I think that's because the bulk of their base is superficial. Al