A little bird talked to Ben Smith of Politico:
A former Bush aide, watching the GOP’s current discussion of Islam with some interest, noted to me today that the crucial thing will be how the 2012 presidential candidates handle mosques and Muslims rhetorically: With the deliberate embrace that Bush chose just post September 11, or by seeking to rally parts of the Republican base with religious confrontation.
Yeah, “just post” is a nice way of saying “just prior to bombing the crap out of Baghdad,” but I get the point. The Republicans are going nuts about Muslims, and it isn’t just about the establishment of mosques. It’s also about relocating prisoners to our soil from the Guantanamo Bay prison, or trying them in ordinary courts. They hyperventilate every time there is a terrorist act (or an attempted terrorist act). They are doing their best to make sure that they get less than 10% of the vote from a community that agrees with them about abortion and gay marriage and the importance of piety in all areas of one’s life. Muslims also excel at starting small businesses, so they are just the kind of aspiring bourgeoisie that you’d expect to rally to the GOP flag.
Much the same, but to a lesser degree, could be said about the Latino community. McCain got about 40% of their votes, but we won’t see that number repeated for decades, if ever.
And the gay community may be impatient with Obama, but they’ve never had it made more plain that they have no alternative to the Democratic Party than in the last two years.
There may be a narrow window right now where it is still possible to benefit politically from going to an all-White-all-the-time strategy, but everyone knows that that window is closing. Republicans seem to know that they’re making a deal with the devil, but they can’t help themselves.
I think you (or maybe someone else I read recently) made the point that while certainly it would be great to gain seats in 2010, that’s not the general pattern, and that it’s much better to have the pendulum swing against you in a midterm than in a general. The Republican Party has only one electoral card to play, and that’s white fear. No substantive policies or the promise of them serve to motivate enough voters to win an election.
I was talking to a friend and we like so many people were psychoanalyzing Obama from a distance. I made the suggestion that I think that while Obama will cite the health bill as his big achievement in years to come (at least of things done so far), that in his mind he knows that the most important thing he’s done was getting elected. Race is so intertwined with everything in our status quo, simply existing opens up the potential for much greater change in the future. I say this not to diminish his legislative accomplishments, but just to point out how racially screwed up the United States is.
I wager the GOP has 20 years left. $10!
Twenty years? At this rate, it will be even less.