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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ggersh who wrote (265596)	12/2/2014 1:50:36 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540820

<< It might be a question for another day, but what happened to the Alaskan D party? I don't know anything about it but it looks like Alaska is now pretty much a R state?>> Good question. We started out as a liberal state in 1959. The folks who wrote the constitution in 1959 were mostly all liberals like the great Earnest Gruening (one of only two senators to vote against the Viet Nam war), Bob Bartlett and Bill Egan. etc. We probably have the most sophisticated constitution in the country. Egan was a great liberal dem and governor when I got here in 1968/70. In those days there were liberal pubs and conservative dems and the lines between parties was blurred. In the 70's we simply out campaigned them. Anchorage had half the votes so we only needed to dominate that one area. And we only got the house, but we got lots of dem governors (and one liberal pub gov - Hammond)over the years partly because pubs have a tendency to run nut cases. This last fiasco where the state dems threw the dem senate candidate under the bus for Murkoski (they didn't want Joe Miller and people thought they could get something from her) was pure nuts. We dems might have won that one when Murkoski and Miller split the vote, but alas we will never know. Then this year it is clear Murkoski alone defeated Dem senator Begich. What a stupid disaster! I raised holy hell about it at the time, and now get to say I told you so, but it is too late. By the 80's, as people increasingly started voting tribal (party) rather than issues the right wingers started to bury us. Senate is now 15 pubs and only 5 dems. Nobody pays any attention to issues any more, it is totally a matter of what tribe you belong to; and the pubs do that a lot better than we do. We are a rural state and the government is bad rhetoric Reagan started works up here, Ironically even though we are dependent on government more than anyone. So we won, when we won, by outsmarting the pubs (easy to do), but finally it was simply too much. But we knew we would lose control eventually, so we worked on building a legal infrastructure in the 70's they could not tear down like putting the permanent fund in the constitution requiring a 3/4 vote of both houses to touch the principle and not allowing in state investments. That will never happen, so the permanent fund is safe from the criminals. That infrastructure we put in place is still holding pretty well. What I also learned over the years is how to fight the pubs and why I have been so down on Obama for refusing to fight the pubs, bankers, plutocrats, corporatists and multi nationals. They are running this country and world. Money is power 85 people have more money than the bottom 3.5 billion people! That says it all about who controls the world and the US should be leading the fight against the plutocrats, yet we are doing anything but being 65th in the world in income inequality. This is why I was always pissed at Obama for bringing so many Republicans into his administration, sociopathic politico's like Rahm, Summer's and Geithner, who would throw their mothers under the bus if they thought it was politically expedient and for not working with the dems and for our priorities (the ones he campaigned on!). I know how to fight political battles and now our only hope, IMO, lies with the women and a few liberal men in the congress and going forward. I am hoping for a coalition of women, kids and minorities. I hope Obama wakes up, but it is way to late to do anything now but fight a rear guard action. He squandered our army in 08. We ahd a wndow of opportunity. The first thing he could do now is fill as many slots as possible with smart liberal dems. But he won't.