Quote:
Originally Posted by goober
It's the center that wants National Health.
It's the center that wants Public education to include college.
It's the center that wants Social Security.
These are all the things that the right vilified as a "radical left Agenda", but it's what the people want. The people would also like to see some restraint in militaristic adventurism, at least to the point where we only pick fights we can win.
The right played a good game, they used wedge issues and fake wars to get in a position to alter the tax structure and deliver trillions to the wealthiest Americans, who after all, finance the right.
They had their shot, and they blew it on all fronts, and now we can go back to leaders who actually seek to build an America that works for all Americans.
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Goober you are wrong. I can only speak for a comparitively small group of people I am friends with who are all centrists but it is not national health care we want. We want a better system that is a given, but the last thing we want is another huge government run entitlement program. I have never heard a tue centrist call for college education to be publically finded. This is an agenda item of the left not the center. I would have no problems providing more aid and easier terms on loans, but that is a far cry from free college education. About the only thing you got right, and even then not all the way, if SSI. While most of my friends are in favor of continuing SSI in its current format we are not opposed to tinkering with it to make it something more stable and beneficial to those in the future. After all most of us assumed upon retirement SSI would not be there when we were in our 20's.
The agenda you defined above is a liberal agenda. I am not nor have I been for over thirty years one of the righties you refer to, but I can still deliniate between the left the right and the center. You are right when you claim the conservatives overplayed their hand, but they were no worse at it then when liberals were in power for 40 years it just took them a lot less time to get the public fed up with them thats all.
Goober I have read your posts and you as well as Samantha who your ideas are closely related to are not centrists. That doesn't make you a bad person unamerican or anything like that, but lets ask ourselves why you would wish to portray your agenda as a centrist agenda. It reinforces the lessons we have learned in the 06 election. THe Dems took a gamble and it paid off for them in the short run but the jury is still out on whether it will be an advantage in the long run or not. COnservatives banked on the fact that when they told themselves this is a conservatve nation they were right. Well based on the Euro definition of conservatism they may have been but not based on the US definition, especially when you throw in the fact that som much of their rhetoric is social conservative based even if their policies aren't. So the Dems went out in 06 and tried to find moderate and conservative Dems to challenge Repubs in areas they thought the Repubs were vulnerable. THey kept the same liberal Dems in the districts they thought were safe and even tossed a fairly liberal Dems for a more liberal Dem in one state. Their moderate to cinservative strategy paid off but these are not the traditional Dems and they are going to have to face that in some close congresional elections these new Dems are not always going to go the same way the liberal leadership wants it to.
Now in the areas where the Dem candidate was safe the liberal won, no suprises there. But in Connecticut the Dems got their butts handed to them. They threw out one good fairly lib candidate for a much more lib candidate. The voters promptly rejected the more lib candidate, in the northeast of all places. This and the moderate Dem victories are all the proof you need that this is not a liberal nation, nor a conservative nation. It is in fact a nation that is happy with a confluence of the two ideologies, taking the best from each and rejecting the chaff of each. As I said in my last post the nation is finding its way home again to the center. We are tired of all the partisan bickering and name calling. That approach has not solved any of our problems and created divisions we just can't afford in this time.