Allahpundit asks:
Exit question: Is [Kirsten Powers{!}] right that Healthcare.gov’s sustained failure will cause people, especially younger people, to lose faith in liberalism? I want to believe, but the longer I’m around politics, the more I think ideology is less something people are reasoned into than something they “feel” and then build a framework of reason around. It’ll certainly help turn people off to liberalism at the margins, but no one’s expecting a sea change. Or are they?
…Maybe. John Ringo, The Last Centurion:
Prior to the Great Depression, the Democrats were a minority party. The Grand Old Party (GOP: Republicans) had dominated every Federal office since the Civil War.
Hoover killed that. His response to the Great Depression was to tell people to pull up their socks and quit complaining. Not a functional response. People couldn’t afford socks. It went over as well as “let them eat cake.”
FDR simply did things that made sense to people. Oh, they were considered “communist” at the time, but they made sense.
People will undoubtedly bristle at the idea that FDR was not, in point of fact, at the very least one of Satan’s Dukes of Hell; but the point is that Americans react well to public figures who at least look like they know what the [expletive deleted] they’re doing. FDR at least looked like he had a plan: Herbert Hoover (who, if you read Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man, comes across as a lot as being a lot like Barack Obama in temperament) did not look like he had a plan. And when it comes to Obamacare, Barack Obama does not even remotely look like he has a plan.
Now, perhaps he does. And perhaps Barack Obama has a plan for what happens when the easy problem (no one can access the website) is solved and the hard ones (the plans available on those websites are going to make people scream in horrified rage, and/or not bother to get insurance after all) remain. But if he doesn’t – and I don’t think people in the administration are thinking that far ahead – the American people will look for somebody making a functional response to the situation that will make sense. And that somebody will almost certainly be somebody who cannot win the Democratic nomination for President.
That would be my take, at least. I guess we’ll see.
Moe Lane
I wish to add that the four (not one, but *FOUR*) next GOP nominees for President were all Mitt Romneys to FDR’s Obama.
.
Alf Landon – The template for a “Compassionate” Republican
.
Wendell Willkie – Not just a liberal, also a lawyer, after losing became FDR’s ambassador.
.
Thomas E. Dewey – Another east-coast liberal republican, who lost to FDR, and then lost to FDR’s final veep Harry Truman despite southern Democrats including Strom Thurmond running as Dixiecrats.
.
I understand, Moe, that you prefer to avoid “red on red”, but change requires recognizing the problem, and – as we just saw in 2008 and 2012 – running “Democrat-Lite” candidates not only doesn’t work, it *NEVER* worked.
.
Mew
Hate to respectfully disagree with you cat, but that depends entirely on one’s definition of work.
Only 2 out of all the Republican presidents of the last century I would consider NOT a moderate squish (Coolidge and Reagan). Some of them even had successful presidencies, in a caretaker term kind of way (Eisenhower).
Not that I want to encourage the Republicans nominating “Democrat-Lite” candidates again (great liberal taste, less filling!), but Americans have tolerated them, especially when nothing is particularly going wrong (kinda like when people now look fondly back at the Clinton years).
Indeed, it does depend on “work”; I define it as more than just winning the election.
.
“Caretaker” seems a good term for many of the squishy moderates who have – accuracy over grammar here – failed to lose the election.
.
Mew
TR was the first “liberal Republican” that made it to the White House. And he certainly wasn’t a moderate. He was a “maverick”. Taft was conservative “squish” . But still conservative. Harding and Coolidge were definitely conservative.
Eisenhower and Nixon could be described as moderates. But Eisenhower campaigned to the Right of anybody since atleast Hoover, maybe Coolidge and Nixon campaigned to the Right of him.
Thomas Dewey was our most Liberal nominee, and Romney was arguably ( depending on whether or not it was Governor of MA, or Pres cand.) the most liberal since him.