Jeb Boy. Forget the “Dynastic concerns.” His older brother just won more votes than anyone else in history.
Arnold. This is the big one. Don’t be surprised to see a constitutional amendment fast tracked in the next couple of years. The GOP controls Congress and a majority of state houses, meaning they could get something through to overturn the natural-born citizen clause in the Constitution. And Dems would be ineffective to block it, because they could be painted as anti-immigrant.
Hillary. My father is convined she’d win, but I’d be very wary of hitching my wagon to that horse. Especially in a battle vs. Arnold.
The Dems need to start fresh. The good news is that there’s a whole generation of new Democratic governors coming online in the midwest. Fiscally conservative but socially moderate, too young for them to have partcipated in the Civil Rights movement or Vietnam. The only problem is that no one has heard of them, save for Granholm, and she’s Canadian by birth (though that’s less of a problem if the Arnie Amendment is passed.)
Personally, I don’t think this loss is the worst thing for the democratic party. The truth of the matter is they just don’t seem to have their shit together when it comes to launching a bid for the white house. Hopefully this creates the proper motivation to really find and cultivate a strong-across-the-board candidate.
It doesn’t matter at this early date and I’m not even having enough fun considering the prospect to really get into it. We’ve got four serious years of who-knows-what ahead of us. I’ll wait and see which folks emerge from it with battlescars and credibility. For sure, I don’t want to see Hillary run - she’s doomed unless Bush screws up even more and deeply ruins Republican unity.
But, fuck, how much more can a sitting President screw up and still get elected?
If we can’t get Kerry elected, why in the world would we think we could get Hillary Clinton elected? She’s loved in Washington D.C., New York and California but that’s about it.
It’s not that horrible - I’m pretty happy how we did on terrorism and Iraq. For all the talk of Bush’s unassailable 20-point lead, blah blah, the terrorism breakdown was very close to 50% - depending on the individual exit poll item you use, it’s 45% to 55% agreed with us. And we did great on economics; I’m not seeing any Republican inroads there.
The coming demographic changes detailed in the Emerging Democratic Majority will probably still save us in 10 to 20 years, but I’m not as confident as before. The exit polls don’t show what Latinos voted on - if Bush is making culture-war inroads there, we’re in trouble.
But without a serious plan to fight back on this ridiculous gays/guns stuff, we’re in for a long 20 years.
Jason, you posted a link many months ago about some grand ideas to restructure the democratic party with oodles of cash from the likes of George Soros and other liberal elite, if Kerry lost. Do you still have that link?
Ahh. I was wrong. It wasn’t Soros. It was Andy Rappaport and Simon Rosenberg (though Soros was said to be in on the meetings).
I was referring to This NYT article, about a lot of the richest liberals in the country coming together to, essentially, form their own Democratic party.
Reading this article again, is giving me some comfort
Yeah, no kidding. Arnold campaigned for and passed the Stem Cell research bond. I suspect that Republicans are going to be really hard core evangelical for the next election, meaning Arnold is right-out.
A constitutional amendment requires 3/4 of the states (not their congressmen) to ratify it. This after it passes congressional muster. This is why a constitutional ban on gay marriage will never pass. But in any event, the Republicans having +7 seats in Congress doesn’t mean a god damn thing w.r.t constitutional amendments.
