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Originally Posted by Imperator
I take issue with your remark regards the cold war, he was the beneficiary of a fairly constant practice, BUT he deserves credit for toughing it out when the politics were very much against him here and aboard and pushing them across the tipping point.
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Well, I'll say that he deserves this much credit for ending the Cold War. One, he didn't get us into a nuclear war (which is the only way we could have lost it). And two, when Gorbachev showed up, he was willing to negotiate with him and adopt a friendlier approach to the new Soviet regime, which showed that he wasn't quite the ignorant cowboy some people thought he was. Other than that, the Soviet Union was an unsustainable enterprise, an attempt to be a military superpower on an inadequate economic foundation. The cold war showed that a rigidly socialist economy underperforms a mixed or managed-market economy just as a laissez-faire economy does. The Soviet Union's failure was a given, sooner or later. You would think that those ideologically opposed to socialism would understand that.
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and far left will not get him elected, you know that, and I don't see democrats as the far lefty party either
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I don't think Obama is "far left." He's just, as the article said, well to the left of Clinton. But there's a reason to that, Clinton took the party way to the right.
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Democrats were the party of the people, moderates, and security minded folk etc. Blue collar, that’s is until mcgovern…
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This is often misunderstood. One has to distinguish between the economic issues and the social issues. Blue collar workers tend to be pretty far left on economic issues, but not so much so on social issues or foreign policy. The problem for the Democrats was that in the '70s, social issues and foreign policy became the predominant ones and they were caught in the firestorm of the cultural upheaval that happened from the min-60s through the early '80s. And the economic problems that emerged were ones they didn't have a lot of control over (nor did the Republicans of course). So they weren't delivering on their economic promises (and couldn't), and they became, compared to the Republicans, social lefties and peaceniks. And so you got the Reagan Democrat phenomenon, voters who disagreed with Reagan on economic issues but voted for him anyway.
Nowadays, the country has evolved, the generations have aged and shifted, and the cultural divide isn't what it used to be, and it's time for the Democrats to return to their roots, which means being centrist socially and on foreign policy and to the left economically. I think that will play well right now.
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anyway sorry for the OT digression.
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Really wasn't OT, since the implications of Obama's SS plan are involved here. Anyway it's your thread.
