Reading Tim Dickinson's article in the Rolling Stone made me realize how brilliant and devious the republican electoral strategy is, whether consciously devised or simply the result of evil intuition. Angry, dissatisfied voters usually piss hardest on the party in power during midterm elections. For the republicans, that means the shortest and most direct route back to power is to insure an angry and dissatisfied electorate. And partisanship provides the perfect cover-- it even gets the democrats to participate in their own slaughter. Clever devils.
Here's the link to Dickinson's article in RS:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story... Only a year ago, the Republican Party had been given up for dead. Top GOP strategists despaired that their party — decimated by two consecutive bloodbath elections — was leaderless, dominated by Southern conservatives and lurching rightward into irrelevance. "The Republican Party seems to be slipping into a position of being more of a regional party," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned his colleagues. "In politics, there's a name for a regional party: It's called a minority party."
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The GOP's resurrection has not come on the strength of transformative ideas that can actually solve the nation's problems: Republicans continue to peddle warmed-over Bush — from bankruptcy-inducing tax cuts to the privatization of Social Security. Instead, it has been achieved through what one party strategist admits is "tactical small-ball." The GOP game is as simple as it is hypocritical. First: Reject every Democratic proposal — including some of the exact same initiatives that Republicans championed under Bush — while branding the consensus-seeking Obama as a radical leftist. Second: Stoke populist fury over exploding deficits, even though they're the fallout of eight catastrophic years of Republican rule. (President Bush inherited a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion and left behind a forecasted deficit of $3 trillion.) Three: Promise to fix what's wrong with Washington — despite having waged an all-out war to make government appear as broken as possible.
It has come to this: The unreconstructed party of Jack Abramoff and Dick Cheney is now making the cynical bet that it can win a "change election" of its own this year by drafting a new "Contract With America," focused on initiatives for "good governance" and accountability. And come November, that bet might just pay off. "Does the Republican Party lack a clear leader? Absolutely. Do they lack a positive message? Of course. Do their demographics suck? Yeah," says Cook. "But in a midterm election, none of that matters. Because midterm elections are a referendum on the party in power. And to throw one side out, you've got to throw the other side back in."
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