In response to http://www.grist.org/politics/2011-04-26-ezra-klein-obama-moderate-republican-early-1990s at the Grist.
In short, Ezra Klein is commenting on how Republicans have 'moved the goalposts' of 'moderate.'
Now, one thing this does is raise a crucial question: what happens when/if the Republicans find that their strategy has failed -- i.e. Obama wins reelection.
Of course the Left must continue to worry that it is being 'lucied,' but there's a credible alternate scenario, which is that the Republican party has driven itself to the margins to find stances on which to oppose Obama.
This is certainly a problem many of the mainstream Republicans -- e.g. Mitt 'healthcare' Romney will face in both the primaries and general election.
For the Left, 2012 is probably going to be an agonizing election -- I get the sense that for many on the Left the 'abridgment of hope' has been such a personal disappointment that they won't just hold their nose and vote. Yet the alternative to Obama is likely to be one of the worst refugees from the right wing's loony bin -- with Donald Trump about the best of the lot.
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I don't think it's so much that "The Republicans have moved the goal-posts" so much as The Republican base has simply moved way, way right. Shifting the goal-posts is usually meant as a tactic in argumentation: We start (presumably) with some idea of what we're about to discuss and then, as the conversation winds on, I increase the bar for what I'll accept as valid in order to 'win.'
ReplyDeleteIn this case, I do not think that there was shifting done "in order to win." Rather, I think something else is going on: the base's reaction to the 2008 elections combined with the nation's reaction to the economic meltdown and 9/11 has simply changed the political conversation to the point where the moderate position has taken a rightward shift not as a matter of tactic but as a matter of cause and effect.
If "The Left" doesn't like, for example, drone attacks, they have to realize that most Americans DO support effective war on Al Queada and either they have an answer for that (a rational alternative that is still 'effective war') or they need to hunker down and try to change the narrative (good luck).
If they don't like a bail-out of the big banks, they need to step back and decide what either (a) a giant break-up would -really- look like for the world economy (chaos: I work in the financial industry) or (b) hunker down and realize that there was no good alternative in 2008 and the living-will stuff banks are doing now is just BARELY enough to entertain an un-winding them without causing wreckage.
And so on. It isn't Lucy moving the football: it's the reality of the football itself.
If 2012 is an agonizing decision for anyone on "the Left," I think they need to look in the mirror in the morning and go "I'm the problem."