The GOP will kick butt in 2010?????

My old sparring partner Vic sent me this political analysis from the erstwhile GOP strategist, Dick Morris, who helped elect Bill Clinton President: Essentially Morris says that Democrats are toast.

What the hell, Harry. You can switch from being a Lincoln Democrat, to being a Lincoln Republican.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0410/morris040710.php3

Morris is still angry with Clinton because he was canned by Bill at Hillary’s insistence for something on the order of letting his prostitute girlfriend listen in on private White House phone calls. He’s still smarmy but that doesn’t necessarily mean his analysis is faulty. In this case I think it is and I sent Vic this reply:

Vic,

If I could just be in the Lincoln party that would be great.

Morris like Rove, Carville, Lee Atwater, Ham Jordon, and others before him has had his day in the sun getting a president elected. Today Morris is just part of the GOP echo chamber. His role today is cheer leading the Republicans out of hiding.

I don’t know if Obama will lose the Congress this year. As Morris himself points out that will largely be a result of the economy. I give Obama credit for doing what was necessary, as did Bush did before him, to keep a world wide depression at bay. That achievement, however, will only cut the mustard with eggheads like me. The average Joe will only vote for Obama if he feels that things are on the right track and that a Republican victory will derail them.

I continue to be impressed with Obama and have a great contempt for the movers and shakers behind the Tea Party movement, Roger Ailes, and Rupert Murdoch. FOX News is sort of like Father Coughlin squared. Lincoln had to contend with the same sorts when he was elected President in 1860. He helped unify the remnants of his dismantled Whig party with the anti immigrant No Nothings and radical Abolitionists but he was always the consummate pragmatist and unlike John McCain stayed true to his centrist beliefs.

There has always been a simple if unpopular fix for social security. Raise the age of retirement, raise witholding taxes, cap or reduce benefits. The same will be true of Obama care. It need not be the end of the world.

What Obama has done is made sure that national health care extends to all Americans as it does in almost all other developed nations. Fiscal conservatives can fix it later. They will have to unless they want some eventual economic disaster to befall the nation.

All the BS about socialism, like the front cover of the latest National Review is just that, Bullshit. We’ve been socialized to some extent from the moment of our beginnings with George Washington wanting Federal dollars to build a canal on his frontier property; to Lincoln’s efforts to fulfill Henry Clay’s “internal improvements;” to Teddy Roosevelt’s Anti Trust Actions; to FDR’s New Deal and Eisenhower’s Interstate Highways and on and on.

If you want a more rational conservative voice you have only to read David Frum or even Christopher Buckley. However, like Goldwater before them, they have been drummed out of the GOP. Keep reading suck ups like Morris and eventually they will be right. Surely the Democrats can’t stay in control for the next forty years. Republicans will reform themselves some day. If they do it my way they’ll promote a bunch of unexciting gradualists like Jerry Ford, Bob Dole etc. If they push for blood and guts they’ll simply end up generating more death threats for liberal congressmen. Gosh, that’s just the kind of party I’d love to be part of. I’m sure Abe Lincoln would feel the same way.

Harry

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