Tuesday, June 10, 2014

To tea or not to tea...

Eric Cantor just lost his primary in Virginia to a Tea Partier. 

What does it mean?


I have a prediction.  If the Democrats can get even a smidgen of a voter turn out, the Republican party will fall to pieces under the onslaught of the extreme right in their own party.  the Tea Party will weigh it down with so much baggage that it will not recover for some time.



Why?



America is a centrist society.  It has a thin line that it wavers on between moderate left and moderate right.  It like social programs but it wants lower taxes.  It wants to be safe, but not at the expense of a bloated Pentagon and Homeland Security budget. It does not like the far sides of either party.  Jesse Jackson’s wing of the Dems in the late 70's and early 80's sank the donkeys for about ten years, until a centrist, Bill Clinton, came along and resurrected the party — with a great deal of help from one arch conservative, H. Ross Perot.  But turn the party around he did...and he drove it straight out of the fog bank on the left and into the center, where it sits today.



The Republicans are going in the opposite direction. Ever since Karl Rove announced that the Elephants would control the White House for perhaps the next 100 years, the extreme wing of the party has been trying to muscle its way in and share in the glory and in the victories.  But alas, they are running into the same problems that the Dems had in the 1980's. They are too far out of the mainstream for America to trust, or even to listen to. The repackaging of George W. Bush in his second term, by Dick Chaney and friends, was nothing short of trying to foster the look and feel of the right– the far right — onto the American public.  And they didn’t bite.  Instead they went with a first term U.S. Senator with little to no experience named Barack Obama. And he has steered a course, (if you don’t listen to the right-wing radio and Fox News pundits) into the center once again.



The Republicans are losing footing.  Sure the Tea Party is making great strides in the primaries.  They are knocking old guard members of congress and the senate out of the way left and right.  But look at the voter turn out.  27%. 30%. Those are high.  Most states are seeing in the neighborhood of 16% or less.

So should the Democrats get a ground swell and get people off their butts and out of the recliners this fall, the Republicans might lose more than the two houses on the hill.  They might well lose their way.



It is a game of numbers.  Percentages.  Democrats need to raise their numbers at the poles by 20% across the states.  If they do that, America will go blue. 

I'm sorry Eric lost.  he was a pompous ass.  I wanted to see him go down to a democrat with good solid ideals about how to help Americans and not step on them for his rich buddies.  too bad.  His own party did him in.  As it will the rest of the party.

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