May 14, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


ALL MCCAIN HAS IS WEDGE ISSUES

If most of us voted for our own interests, Republicans would never win an election. Republicans consistently represent the rich and powerful to the detriment of everyone else. But Republicans have consistently used racism, abortion, "family values," flag burning, school prayer, and bigotry against gays to arouse the most primitive instincts of people. This article by Harold Meyerson points out that all John McCain has is wedge issues. Republicans lose on all the issues that matter most to Americans. The column is at www.washingtonpost.com:

There are good reasons Republicans are focusing on identity rather than issues this year: In poll after poll, there's not a single major issue on which the public agrees with them or their presumptive nominee. Not Iraq, certainly. Not the economy. Should the election turn on the question of "What are you going to do for America?" rather than "Are you a real American?" Republicans are doomed. They offer no solutions for the stagnation (or decline) of American living standards, or for the weakening of America's economic power. They offer no resolution to America's war of choice in Iraq. Their party leader, the incumbent president, let a great American city drown. They are the American party, and McCain the American nominee, that hasn't a clue about how to help America in its (prolonged, I fear) moment of need.

What remains for the GOP is a campaign premised more on issues of national identity, aimed largely at that portion of our population for which "American" is synonymous with "white" and "Christian," than any national campaign has been since the American Party (also known as the Know Nothings) based its 1856 campaign chiefly on Protestant bigotry against Irish and German Catholic immigrants. In Appalachian America (the heart of which went to the polls yesterday in West Virginia), as Mark Schmitt notes in the forthcoming issue of the American Prospect (which I edit), a disproportionate number of people write "American" when answering the census question on ethnic origin. For some, "American" is a race -- white -- no less than a nationality, and it's on this equation that Republican prospects depend.