Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe
We're actually increasingly moderate, but republicans refuse to step to the center. The future of the rep party is dependant on Obama failing. If he has success without republican support, the party could very well morph into two parties - one half unbending, the other willing to moderate. It would not be the first time a political party came apart.
It's better to bend and get half of what you want than to be stubborn and get nothing.
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Although there have been periodic Republican burps to the right (especially in rhetoric), in practice, due to election necessities, the Republicans have been drifting to the left for a few decades. Before Bush II, I thought that the Republican party was similar to the Democratic party under JFK. And the Democrats have moved, progressively, to the left of that position. Bush II may well have moved to the left of Kennedy. And the Democrats may be well on the way to picking up the broken pieces of European, British, and Canadian quasi-socialism and expanding it to further depths. For a statistical, analytical, too hard to read work on what I consider the moving "center," see MacKuen & Parker-Stephen,
The Left Shift in American Politics. ABSTRACT: "Here we examine the "Left Shift" in American politics. The Left Shift refers to the fact that policy position attributions of left groups--we examine the Democratic Party case--are consistently further left-of-center than group members own preferences, but that this same mismatch does not apply to attributions of the political right. We show how partisan asymmetries in affect, which are steeped in personality differences, combine with the ideological tenor of media messages to produce pervasive asymmetric attribution bias in American politics--that is, Left Shift."