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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Robyn Blumner
Will someone please wake me from the bad dream that is the coming election? No matter how kooky, mean or incoherent Republican candidates get, voters seem willing to support them. Maybe former witchcraft dabbler and perennial deadbeat Christine O'Donnell won't be taking a
Tea party-Republican fulminating is primarily focused on a few initiatives that are well known by now: the
The huge upsides to these programs are irrelevant. The bailout saved the economy from collapse, health reform is already keeping health insurers from dumping people who get sick and the stimulus probably prevented another Great Depression, according to economists. But a crowd with pitchforks doesn't much care about facts as long as someone hangs. In this case, the people hanged would be Democrats and establishment Republicans.
I never thought I'd say this, but the election is making me nostalgic for Republicans -- at least, for those who used to populate the party.
Progressive Republicans did, in fact, exist, and you don't have to reach all the way back to Honest Abe Lincoln or Teddy "Trust Buster" Roosevelt to find them.
Growing up in New York, I was represented by Jacob Javits, a U.S. senator and a Republican who played a key role in passing civil rights legislation in the 1960s. He was a brilliant man with liberal instincts who authored the seminal legislation that protects pension funds for working people known as ERISA.
I remember Lowell Weicker fondly, too. This Republican senator from Connecticut rejected President Nixon's attempt to use executive privilege to shield his aides from testifying during the Watergate hearings. Weicker said the national interest was to get to the truth.
Full-blown liberals like Javits and Weicker, and even moderate "Rockefeller" Republicans who were fiscally conservative but socially and environmentally liberal, had their eulogy read a long time ago. The Christian Right ousted them from the
Take Charlie Crist's hug heard 'round the world. When Florida's governor embraced President Obama and expressed support for the job-saving stimulus last year, Crist unknowingly severed his career-long relationship with the
Tea party insurgencies used that same tactic in primaries across the country. They tarred establishment-backed Republicans who gave off even the slightest hint of cooperation with Democrats or the Obama administration.
American voters claim to be tired of the bitter partisanship in Washington, but this election is about to usher in a class of Republicans so committed to sabotaging Obama in particular, and government in general, that the last 10 years will look like a "Kumbaya" sing-along.
Rand Paul, a Republican running for the
Sharron Angle, the Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, said that if she loses to Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader, conservatives might have to turn violent. "I look at this as almost an imperative," she said.
This year, the
Available at Amazon.com:
The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama
The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy
The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics
Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks
The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House
AMERICAN POLITICS
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A Nightmare of an Election | Politics
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