Sorta libertarian, sorta conservative, never poltically correct either way, dedicated to sarcasm and a refusal to grow up. That would be me.
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Thursday, March 11, 2004
What Is The Bush Administration Thinking?
James Carville, a man as shrewd about the practicalities of politics as he is dense about the ideologies, said in 1994: “Whenever I hear a campaign talk about a need to energize the base, that's a campaign that's going down the toilet. It's a pretty good indication that they're not eating up any territory, they can't get anybody in the center to support them, they're getting shelled back into their own bunker.” He was talking about Bush's 1992 campaign, and all the "family values" and "culture war" stuff that worked so well....for the Democrats.
Am I the only one that remembers that campaign?
He was also talking about one of the basic facts of electoral math: Votes from the "center" count more. Theoretically, every time you get someone who would otherwise vote for your opponent to vote for you, that's a two vote swing. If someone in your "base" doesn't vote as a result, you only lose one vote. In reality, there's more voters near the middle than there are at either extreme. So for every "base" voter you lose by being moderate, you likely pick up several voters in the middle. The reverse holds true as well.
This is something one learns on the first day of Elections 101. So what the John F-word Kerry is the administration thinking, putting on a big "cultural decency" push during an election year?
This isn't going to gain the GOP any votes. Especially against the Democrats. On the other hand, younger voters don't react well towards government trying to make the culture more "wholesome". They already escaped that from their parents at age eighteen. They don't want it coming back from a paternalistic government, any more than a businessman wants the government "correcting" his business plan or his personnel regulations.
Ronald Reagan realized this. The moral majorettes would dearly have loved to gain control of the FCC once he was elected. Instead he appointed their opposites. Reagan's FCC consisted of libertarians who believed in deregulation of radio and TV just as his appointees in other areas believed in the deregulation of other businesses. They figured that as long as there's an on-off switch on every unit, government didn't need to be the moral police.
This paid off in 1984. Young voters went 2-1 for Reagan. The Democrats were about to give birth to porcupines over that statistic. Breech presentation. They had all sorts of meetings and forums going on, trying to figure out what they were doing wrong.
The answer wasn't to be found though. The answer was what Reagan was doing right. One of the key things as far as younger voters were concerned: he wasn't trying to mess with the culture.
It's often said that George W. Bush is more like Reagan than his father. Here would be a good place for that to be true.
James Carville, a man as shrewd about the practicalities of politics as he is dense about the ideologies, said in 1994: “Whenever I hear a campaign talk about a need to energize the base, that's a campaign that's going down the toilet. It's a pretty good indication that they're not eating up any territory, they can't get anybody in the center to support them, they're getting shelled back into their own bunker.” He was talking about Bush's 1992 campaign, and all the "family values" and "culture war" stuff that worked so well....for the Democrats.
Am I the only one that remembers that campaign?
He was also talking about one of the basic facts of electoral math: Votes from the "center" count more. Theoretically, every time you get someone who would otherwise vote for your opponent to vote for you, that's a two vote swing. If someone in your "base" doesn't vote as a result, you only lose one vote. In reality, there's more voters near the middle than there are at either extreme. So for every "base" voter you lose by being moderate, you likely pick up several voters in the middle. The reverse holds true as well.
This is something one learns on the first day of Elections 101. So what the John F-word Kerry is the administration thinking, putting on a big "cultural decency" push during an election year?
This isn't going to gain the GOP any votes. Especially against the Democrats. On the other hand, younger voters don't react well towards government trying to make the culture more "wholesome". They already escaped that from their parents at age eighteen. They don't want it coming back from a paternalistic government, any more than a businessman wants the government "correcting" his business plan or his personnel regulations.
Ronald Reagan realized this. The moral majorettes would dearly have loved to gain control of the FCC once he was elected. Instead he appointed their opposites. Reagan's FCC consisted of libertarians who believed in deregulation of radio and TV just as his appointees in other areas believed in the deregulation of other businesses. They figured that as long as there's an on-off switch on every unit, government didn't need to be the moral police.
This paid off in 1984. Young voters went 2-1 for Reagan. The Democrats were about to give birth to porcupines over that statistic. Breech presentation. They had all sorts of meetings and forums going on, trying to figure out what they were doing wrong.
The answer wasn't to be found though. The answer was what Reagan was doing right. One of the key things as far as younger voters were concerned: he wasn't trying to mess with the culture.
It's often said that George W. Bush is more like Reagan than his father. Here would be a good place for that to be true.