Excerpt
If you trust in the predictions of Dick Cheney - and hey, who doesn't? - then clearly you believe that a Republican restoration is imminent.
The crowd went wild at a recent conservative confab when Cheney confidently decreed that "Barack Obama is a one-term president," but I'd suggest that such giddiness is woefully premature, and that forecasts of an Obama defeat may well prove to be as credible as the seer's old saw about how our troops in Iraq would be welcomed as liberators.
The current polls report that Obama is vulnerable when matched against a generic Republican candidate. In reality, however, he'll be matched against an actual candidate. And all actual candidates are burdened with actual baggage - not to mention the inevitable wounds and scars that any Republican will suffer during a primary season that promises to be downright Darwinian.
Even if one of these Republicans manages to unite all the various overlapping factions - the tea-partiers, the religious conservatives, the deficit hawks, the libertarians, the pro-business country clubbers, the Wall Street types, the neoconservatives - will he or she be sufficiently financed and talented to knock off a charismatic incumbent who's likely to be sitting on $1 billion in campaign funds?
And speaking of talent, have you actually looked at the current crop of Republican prospects? Suffice it so say that one of the front-runners is a guy who once embarked on a family road trip by strapping the family dog to the roof of the car.
OK, dog lovers would probably give Mitt Romney a pass on that one.
ALSO:
"GOP could be heading for a historic slide" By Lewis Diuguid, Kansas City Star 4/18/2010
Excerpts:
Ten years from now historians will look back and lament how the Republicans’ “no” strategy on health care reform marked the worsening of a downturn for the party.
Historians also will examine this moment and see a radical shift beginning as the nation moves away from the centuries-old negative view of African Americans to concluding that black people are God’s gift to the United States with the first black president, Barack Obama, ushering in a new era of better health and prosperity.
It is sad that the Republican Party — the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party responsible for the North’s victory in the Civil War and for freeing the slaves and Reconstruction in the 19th century — took a wrong turn on such a vital issue. Instead of seeing good health care as a human right, Republicans viewed it as an expensive entitlement that they and their followers were unwilling to have the government involved in so everyone could be covered.
Outrage against that government involvement is one of the focal points of tea party crowds, which brought their anti-tax and “take back our country” rhetoric to the Kansas City area last week. Historians will see that another mistake the Republicans made was to embrace the tea party anger and contrariness and make it their own.
Historians will examine pictures that ran in the news media of our time showing the tea party throngs. They will note that nearly all were white. A lot of the anger expressed was from everyday folks feeling helpless and voiceless over the awful state of the economy. But it is wrong to scapegoat people of color and immigrants.
Always when people come to their senses, they realize when things went too far. Historians will find that the health care reform bill that Obama signed into law — though not perfect — really did benefit people and families.
What’s not to like about the new health care bill? Eventually the public will see through the pundits’ and politicians’ hysteria. The Republican Party regulars can do that now.
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