50-state bizarro world Daily Kos

[Demeter]

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/11/6/141347/603


The depth of frustration is hard to overstate. The national Republican Party and its candidates from outside New York have raised tens of millions of dollars here this year, party officials say. But they have spent little money helping the nominees for governor and Senate, John Faso and John Spencer, respectively, and there have been no morale-and-money-boosting visits on their behalf by leaders like President Bush or Senator John McCain...Mr. Faso, the candidate for governor, said that Republicans in Washington treated New York like a political A.T.M. for campaign donations and offered little in return. ---NYTimes

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/06/nyregion/06fund.html?ei=5090&en=49e7fd9e46b47e3c&ex=1320469200&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1162856255-Nr3LGp+6Ymfwk/8ZYS/plQ





There's a big difference between them and us at this point -- they have a national media machine to push their message into every corner of this country, no matter how Blue it might be. Progressives, on the other hand, do not. Blogs and Air America are pretty much it.

But aside from the media angle, conservatives built their movement from the ground up, and it's only until recently that the national GOP has become so powerful that it's starting to go down the path Democrats did a few decades ago.

Those New York Republicans are expressing the EXACT same frustrations that led to Dean's ascension to the top of the DNC despite the fervent opposition of the DC Democratic elite. They would rather syphon money from the states to DC, than keep the money local. They would rather abandon entire swaths of the country, than to build a national party.

We'll have a clearer picture of the political landscape on Wednesday, but regardless of the outcome, it's clear that the Northeastern Republican is an endangered species, and the Mountain West and plains states will be fertile ground for the rise of the Libertarian Democrat. In the midwest, the best days of the "sensible Republican moderates" are gone.

Much like Democrats found themselves a coastal party by the late 1990s, so are Republicans becoming a regional, southern party led by out-of-touch (and corrupt) elites in Washington D.C. And as that happens, they'll be wishing they had their own Howard Dean working on building a true 50-state national party.

[benEzra]

1. Good article.

I do hope the coastal Dems don't make the mistakes they made in 1994, and try to turn the rest of the country into California and Massachusetts (the 1994 Feinstein gun ban comes to mind).

There are currently two camps within the party, the faction that wants more government control of individuals' private lives, and the faction that wants less. The future of the party is with the latter, not the former.

[Little Star]

2. Hope they hear you loud and clear!