A restaurant in my neighborhood went out of business recently. It now stands abandoned. A sad sight, really. The reasons for it’s demise was not the surroundings; the place was actually quite nice. The corner the empty building stands on today has been a good one for many years, in terms of customer draw. The problem was the food. It wasn’t just bad, It was abysmal. Nobody liked the place, because retching to puke on your sneakers in a restaurant, even one with such a nice atmosphere, is not a popular past time, at least for most folks. So they tell me, anyway.
This closing then, reinforces a basic in a free-market society; When you’re selling something that nobody wants, you don’t sell much, and eventually, you go out of business.
Now, generally speaking, on realizing your problem, you don’t try to arrange to burn down the restaurant next door, try to poison their customers, put glass in their food, and level lawsuits so as to bankrupt them…. If you’re an honorable person, without criminal intent, you either try to improve your situation by providing what the people DO want, or else you simply go out of business… Often never really understanding just what the problem was. At this point, someone springs up to take your place, and if they do the job better, they survive If they don’t, they go down the path you’ve broken for them.
If you’ve got a spine, you buck up, and try again, under a different business name, hoping that you get it right next time. Such things are a fact of life when talking about a free marketplace, whatever widget is being sold.
Now, let’s bring that into the world of politics, and translate this into what Ronald Reagan used to call “the free market of ideas”. In a free market, as we’ve seen, if you’re trying to sell something nobody wants, you go out of business.
The collapse of the Democrats is not simply this most recent election with the President being re-elected by a more than comfortable margin, and the Republicans picking up seats in each house of Congress, but in fact has been decades in the making.
Factiod: The most recently elected Democratic President who actually won the popular vote, was Lyndon Johnson, 40 years ago. He got 51% of the popular vote that year. As remarkable a record of the public rejecting the Democats as this is, let’s go further.
Now, one could argue that at least 2% of the votes he got were a sympathy vote over JFK. Which would mean that the last Democrat to have gotten to the White House on a true majority vote was… ready…? FDR. Remember, Truman also didn’t get the popular vote… he only got 49%. So, in truth the Democrats haven’t gotten a popularly elected Democrat into the White House since the 30’s. (!)
All this is suggesting that the people are not buying what the Democrats have been selling, and that they have been quite successful at alienating themselves from the electorate for over eight decades, now.
They’ve been working on it for 80 years to get to where they are now, and getting better all that time. Last Tuesday’s embarrassment suggests they’ve nearly got the formula perfected, and their reaction to that loss.. IE;loudly blaming the voter for their loss.. confirms it.
Consider the effort expended, as compared to voter response;
This most recent election saw the democrats outspending the Republicans on the order of $9 to $1. The likes of Bing, Soros, and so on donated millions upon millions of dollars to get John Kerry elected. Millions more were spent (And lost) on promoting the attack flick, Ferenhate911. (Imagine with me the look on Michael Moore’s face today!) The Star power being brought to bear in an effort to get out the vote, to getting John Kerry elected, was beyond anything ever attempted previously.
And viscous? Oh, yeah. Moveon.org ran slime ads all over the nation, but particularly in the rust belt states where they tried to saddle Bush with the unemployment problems in that area. CBS tried to float forged documents, trying to pass along the idea that Bush didn’t serve well the National Guard. CBS then tried to break a 2 year old 380 tons of bombs story, and the NYT played along. Both stories were exposed as lies, but the Democrats kept at it.
Yet, despite all those added feathers, it was all for naught; The Democratic Party pig still could not fly. Clearly, the Democrats are becoming something of a hard sell.(!)
The result of election day was a record number of votes cast for a presidential candidate, since the earth cooled. Further, Mr Bush was the first president to be elected with a majority of the popular vote since 1988 when his father did it. Bush got somewhere north of 59 million votes, which breaks Ronald Reagan’s old record of 54.5 million. Winning the popular vote was something that Bill Clinton never did, having attained office without winning the popular vote, on both occasions. In fact, NO Democrat since the early 60’s has ever won the White House with the popular vote and in truth, since the 30’s. Finally, I honestly don’t recall when the last time was that a sitting President saw his party’s share of congressional seats in both houses increase.
Worse for the Democrats, is the specter of Minority voters, a Democratic party staple for decades now, that have been on the move away from the Democrats. Not toward the Republicans, specificity, but away from the Democrats. The Republicans are gaining popularity by default because the Democratic party and it’s Al Sharpton /Jesse Jackson style race baiting tactics have become so completely repugnant to them. In fairness it should be said that the black voters are starting to show up in Republican circles… And the Republicans to their credit are welcoming them to the fold… A doubling of that population in the last year alone in blacks calling themselves Republican is an understandable worry to the Democrats. Worried they are, certainly, but they understand this loss no better than they have their previous losses.
Democrats today, following this most recent pummeling are trying to figure out just what the name on the side of that truck was. It’s a sure bet that the press doesn’t understand it, either. At the moment, the blame shifts from stolen votes (Hacking the election) to ‘redneck’ support of the President… the mantra that the voters are stupid, and so on.
The real reason, however, is simple enough to someone willing to look at the real cause; It’s that the people of America are in increasingly larger numbers, simply not buying what the Democrats are selling anymore. This is by no means a matter of the country swinging to the right, as many will claim…. This is a matter of the Democrats swinging to the left, and away form the vast majority of Americans. The left, with the power of a cowed Democratic party behind item, have started a war on America, and American Values, and American culture. Anyone who opposes them are labeled Redneck, Religious fundie, Nazi, storm trouper, etc etc, etc. You know the drill. It’s gotten to the point where the leftists have taken over the Democratic party to the degree that they’re able to issue edicts… it’s either lockstep with the far left, or step off.
And lockstep the Democrats do.
Let’s be clear, here; Democrats are in trouble today because they have been taken over by the far extreme of their own party, and refuse to recognize it, or else are deathly afraid to make any complaint about it, for fear of being excommunicated from the party. The message clearly has been sent to the rank and file of the Democrat party: Lockstep or step off. And nobody within the party, dares stand up to the Democratic party’s radicals. Thus are the Democrats are destroying THEMSELVES… mostly by holding silence about what they see. The degree to which the Democrats lose voters is directly connected to the amount to which they bow to their extreme left wing. And they still don’t understand this, or are unwilling to admit it and act on it.
The Republicans won so big this time for that reason. Republicans went to the fundamentals of America and it’s culture, and brought such people out, both Democrat and Republican, people who have never voted before, and people who have not voted in years, to vote for George W. Bush because he stuck to representing and speaking up for, the American fundamentals.
As I say, the Democrats can’t figure this out. As such I hold to my prediction in these spaces of a a little over a year ago; we will now see the Democrat party as we know it, in it’s death struggle. It’s started already. Look at the calls for revenge the morning after the election, from one of their own:
“Second, gut any Bush hopes for legitimacy. Find the places in Florida and Ohio and every other state where a plausible argument for Republican vote fraud can be made. It doesn’t matter whether it did happen or not. What matters is if it can be plausibly alleged to marginal Bush supporters and to the media. We also have to let the issue go where it’s implausible. Hammering on voter fraud where it’s not at least plausible on that level is only going to hurt our credibility. We have to sink our fangs into Republican ankles and hang onto them for dear life on the legitimacy issue. We have to make him “Bush the only American President who was never elected” whether it’s true or not.”
We’re already seen calls in the house and Senate for revenge on the President… more of the same blocking tactics they’ve used for the last four years. Apparently, like devoted communists, they figure if they just get louder, it’ll get better. It’s like the restaurant I cited earlier… instead of admitting the problem is in their restaurant, they go about trying to poison their competition’s customers. Honor has nothing to do with these creatures.
I asked several years ago, during Clinton, where all the good Democrats were, and refined that question over the years after the 2000 election cycle, following the Clinton and Gore misadministration. It remains a question.
I will ask you to remember Bill Clinton. If catching someone in a lie swayed Democrats out of this rabid leftism at all costs, it certainly would have happened then; and we both know it did not. I will remind you of an Oldsmobile being driven off a bridge a few years earlier. Either of those would under the conditions of an honorable electorate, have ended their careers, and swung elections for a few decades to come.
Neither happened, and we both know why… The Democrats, as a rule, have a history of holding party and leftism, over truth. Kerry’s rabidly leftist base disagreed with his even being in the service in the first place. Any lie he told in that regard was viewed by such people as a badge of *honor* among them. Such was the state of the party on Tuesday night, and given the clip from Kos, above, it remains there.
If this is what the Democrats have come to, it’s about time America got up out of the gutter the Democrats have dug for themselves, and called an end to the Democratic party. Let’s get another party to take over the situation… one that better reflects the American people.
Think; What do they stand for? Do we know? Do even THEY know? Really?
Do we even know who is leading the Democrats today? The person most would look to, The Senate Minority leader lost his Senate seat the other day, and Kerry’s not a likely replacement as standard bearer, either. So who’s leading this parade? And what does the party stand for? Does anyone really know anymore? Clearly, it’s not Standing for America; Americans made that very clear on Tuesday.
I’m not at all concerned about a lack of competition, assuming the Democrats actually go away as a party, not one bit. Remember, we’re talking a free market of ideas, here. The Democrats are not the only other party out there…. the Libertarians are out there for example of many. Trust me; the Democrats going away will be no loss whatever to this country, particularly with people in it like I’ve quoted here.
The Democratic Party in years past had much to commend it. That situation, however, has long since ceased to be, as the more radical elements in the party have taken over, and their electoral losses are connected directly to the degree that the left takes over.
It’s time for the Democrats to wink out of existence, and for another party to take it’s place.
Updated 110704
Tags: BitsBlog
