When I was younger, I used to read “Rolling Stone” Magazine religiously. It was (and I suppose still is) the bible for contemporary music lovers. It also had some of the best feature writing around. It’s political commentary was cutting edge stuff. Some of the legendary writers who cut their eyeteeth at the mag were Ben Fong Torres, Cameron Crowe, Hunter Thompson, and P.J. O’Rourke.
That’s why the magazine’s retrospective of the recently concluded election is puzzling. Why in God’s name did they get the opinions of three mossback’s like Ruy Teixeira and Peter Hart—two analysts deeply grounded in public-opinion research and rather passe in Democratic circles—and David Gergen, a man who’s undergone a transformation of sorts: From conservative intellectual to wishy-washy muddleheaded centrist.
Deacon at Powerline links to the article and calls it worthwhile reading. Perhaps…but to my mind, it’s more instructive for what they DON’T say.
Teixeira credits Bush’s increased appeal to white voters while Gergen points to closing the gender gap. Hart gives something of a cryptic evaluation, pointing to an obscure statistic that since 1912, “whoever has won a plurality of states along the Mississippi has won the presidency.”
Well, duh. For the record, these states are Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. My guess is (and some enterprising blogger who has a little time on his hands may want to look into this) that you could take ANY 10 states in the country at random and make the same claim.
Teixeira comes closest to getting it:
“The bigger question is: What do the Democrats stand for? Democrats in this election ran against Bush. Kerry’s program was never very clear to voters. They didn’t get where he was coming from. Democrats have to have large and good ideas that people can recognize—ideas voters can summarize in a couple of sentences.”
One of the funniest and most prescient books of the last 25 years was R. Emmett Tyrell’s “The Liberal Crack-up.” Tyrell’s book skewers modern liberalism by pointing to its horrific inconsistencies on everything from the environment to freedom. Published in 1984, the book, if anything, is more relevant today as it shows the left learning absolutely nothing despite the shellackings they received from Reagan and both Bush’s over the last 20 years.
Tyrell’s thesis—that liberalism doesn’t stand for anything, it stands for EVERYTHING—is what Mr. Teixeira is talking about. Liberals can’t condense their message to one or two sentences…how can you explain the unexplainable? Liberal incoherence is the reason Democrats keep losing elections and the reason they’ll probably continue to get spanked by Republicans at the polls. How can you reconcile extreme environmentalism with creating a business climate friendly enough for job creation? How can you be FOR individual liberty while advocating a suffocating brand of political correctness?
Democrats may be able to comfort themselves with the notion that if they adopt “values” as a meme for their campaigns, they’ll be competitive with Republicans. But, in order to have a value-oriented party, they’re going to have to reconcile the massive internal contradictions that cause most of us voters to scratch our heads in wonderment and say “just WTF is he talking about?”
11/28/2004
ROLLING STONE GATHERS SOME MOSSBACKS
CATEGORY: General
By: Rick Moran at 5:45 am
3 Responses to “ROLLING STONE GATHERS SOME MOSSBACKS”
RSS feed for comments on this post.
The URI to Trackback this entry:
http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2004/11/28/rolling-stone-gathers-some-mossbacks/trackback/
Leave a comment
11:53 am
lose weight
dressmaker Devonshire precipitation muteness buy ambien http://buy-ambien.talented-doctor.com/
4:06 pm
order valium
violently Eskimo,voyagers educate lament:
3:28 pm
gay leather bondage lesbian bondage
zd00linkar