2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumSilver lining of a Romney Presidency? THE DEATH OF REAGANISM
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/political-science-says-a-romney-presidency-would-be-doomed/263918/(snip)
Romney will not be able to make difficult choices in the public interest. Rather, he will find himself hemmed in by the conflicting demands of a radicalized party. Opposition to Barack Obama's presidency unified the Republicans. But once Obama is gone, the various factions of the party will find themselves in fierce competition, and the incoherence of the Republicans' various commitments will emerge starkly.
The predicament of a Romney presidency is that he may make George W. Bush look good by comparison. During most of Bush's eight years in office, the Republican Party was united and willing to follow his lead. Romney will not be so lucky. The party he heads has become so rigid, radical, and unrealistic that, despite his best efforts, he may end up as the last of the Reagan-era Republican leaders -- a disjunctive president like John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, or Jimmy Carter.
(snip)
The next Jimmy Carter will be a Republican president -- a Republican who, due to circumstances beyond his control, unwittingly presides over the dissolution of the Reagan coalition. If Obama is reelected, we might decide in hindsight that George W. Bush best fits that description. But if Obama loses, the president who finally unravels Reaganism could turn out to be Mitt Romney.
regnaD kciN
(26,045 posts)RBInMaine
(13,570 posts)timlot
(456 posts)alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)Workers, women, the poor, Latinos and Latinas, African Americans - and absolute catastrophic disaster - for two generations, if Romney gets two or more court picks. And our LGBT brothers and sister? Forget it. 45 years of progress in the toilet. Gone. A fucking horror.
A fucking horror.
The only people who would be doomed are the poor and middle class Americans and our children who would have to live with the consequences of a Romney presidency for the rest of their lives.
A deeply, deeply stupid article.
freshwest
(53,661 posts)emulatorloo
(44,182 posts)abumbyanyothername
(2,711 posts)Reaganism is dying regardless. So it's not really a silver lining.
When Obama wins, the republican party will splinter into a "morals" and war branch and an economics branch . . . with the latter called the libertarian party.
vilify
(102 posts)I can't think of anything positive coming from a romney win.
aint_no_life_nowhere
(21,925 posts)The Supreme Court will be gone for at least a generation. The end of social security, medicare, and the middle class may take a whole lot longer to restore. And wars may bankrupt the country to a point where it never recovers and nation states including the United States are replaced by international corporate states.
craigmatic
(4,510 posts)The bushes and reagan that's it. If reagan was their bizarro FDR that makes bush 41 their Truman and the parallels kind of hold up he won an election he shouldn't have and presided over a the end of a big war. Then he left office and was not held in high esteem by his contemporaries but looking back he was a pretty good foreign policy president and he didn't get as ideological as his predecessor. Plus his party split. Clinton in this instance would be our Ike with the good economy and peace. Then bush 43 would be a bizarro combination of theirJFK and LBJ. He was nearly the opposite of JFK in terms of articulation. JFK was trying to keep the US out of wars and bush got us into 2. He's like LBJ in that both were from TX and liked to spend money but at least LBJ had something other than war to show for his spending in the forms of social programs. And I think both LBJ and bush 43 hurt their parties in terms of long term political consequences for their actions. LBJ lost the south because of civil rights and bush ruined the economy and pissed away the republicans' lock on national security. That brings us to Obama who is either our Nixon i.e. a person with the opposite moderate ideology who comes along at a weak moment in the end of the dominant coaltion. Nixon was a moderate conservative who had to placete democratic liberals and Obama is a moderate liberal who has tried to placate conservative republicans. Or Obama could be our Reagan and the beginning of a new political regime. It's hard to tell at this point.