<strong>Written By:</strong> Ed Deak
<strong>Date:</strong> 2008-01-07 10:41:29
<a href="/article/75946138-winds-of-change-are-set-to-blow-away-the-american-right">Article Link</a>

This is terrible news for the major party establishments. That was evident on Thursday night, on a chartered jet from Iowa to New Hampshire in the wee hours after the caucuses. On board was the press corps that follows Hillary Clinton, as well as her aides who worked their way down the aisle furiously spinning the night's disastrous results. With strained faces, the likes of longtime Clinton pollster Mark Penn and former Democratic party chairman Terry McAuliffe talked themselves hoarse over the engines, arguing that Hillary could survive a third-place Iowa finish some people consider a political death sentence.

Perhaps. But it's clear that in spurning the mighty Clinton machine for an upstart such as Barack Obama, Iowa Democrats were also rejecting their party's old guard. Likewise, in choosing the little-known Arkansan Mike Huckabee, Iowa Republicans also defied their party's establishment. GOP [Grand Old Party] barons from Washington to Wall Street - the think-tankers, columnists and money men who supported the Bush administration - see the folksy preacher as an unelectable 'rube' [hick] with an intolerable weakness for higher taxes and social spending. But with Huckabee's clear win over Mitt Romney, they, too, were rebuffed just as thoroughly as were the Clintonites. Iowans of both parties have issued a call to reboot their political system.

It's too soon to say whether these insurgents can win their parties' nominations. (Obama's prospects look much better than the underfunded and more widely resisted Huckabee's.) But it seems likely that this taste for upheaval will carry through to the 2008 election. With no incumbent President or Vice-President on the ticket, and with the traumas of 9/11 and Iraq beginning to fade, voters will make a reassessment of their beliefs and preferences. In all probability, that will restore the Democrats to the White House after eight years of exile.

Why? Because America is becoming a fundamentally Democratic country. That may surprise observers startled by the long reign of the Bush administration. But the notion that the Bush era showed the US to be a 'conservative' nation is wrong. And the 2008 election will prove it.

Among those who buy into the fallacy that the American instinct is truly conservative, former White House svengali Karl Rove is the best known. When George W Bush was elected in 2000, Rove boasted that the country was embarking upon a political 'realignment' that would usher in a generation of Republican rule. His ambition seemed comically grandiose. Until 9/11. The World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks threw the American psyche into a reactionary jolt, one that Rove and his President happily exploited.

On 10 September 2001, Bush had been a faltering President struggling against Democrats in the Congress. Two years later, Republicans had exploited national security fears to consolidate their power on Capitol Hill and launch an invasion of Iraq. Polling even showed that public opinion slanted rightward on issues such as abortion and gay marriage, as people sought comfort in 'traditional values'.

To Rove and his cohorts, 9/11 simply accelerated an inexorable shift within the American electorate towards Republican values such as lower taxes, hawkish foreign policy and social conservatism. Thus, when a Democratic surge cost Republicans control of the Congress in November 2006, conservatives dismissed it. The American psyche hasn't shifted, they said; rather, the Republican brand has suffered a horrible run of luck - from Bush's mismanagement of Iraq to hurricane Katrina to sex scandals involving Republican members of Congress Mark Foley and Larry Craig as well as the thieving GOP superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. As Brit Hume of the conservative Fox News network put it on election night 2006, Democrats had carried the day, but 'from what we could see from all the polling and everything else, it remains a conservative country'.

By this thinking, Republicans are down but hardly out. Once a new messenger begins making the case for conservatism, free from the taint of Bush and Cheney, Americans will welcome the GOP back into their loving arms. But this thinking is delusional. Republicans aren't the victims of a string of misfortunes; they were the beneficiaries of a deeply unsettling period of war and terrorism. Now that fears of terrorism have dimmed and the Iraq war has turned from a political benefit to a political liability, it will likely become evident that the foundations of their party are crumbling.

<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2236161,00.html">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2236161,00.html</a>

   

We'll see. The Republican "ultra-right" wouldn't be above manufacturing (another?) 9-11. You heard it here first, folks!

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"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."
-Max Planck

   

Republicans, Democrats? There will be no winds of change in America untill there is different economic system in place. What happened in Iowa has very little if anything to do with policy. Hell policies are not even discussed. What we have here is some sort of popularity contest, like the American Idol. Who's got the nicest suit and tie. Where does Hillary get her hair done etc. The majority of Americans don't even vote, since they know that the current system is rigged.

As long as Obama can buy ads and deliver greeting card platitudes fit for a TV audience he will be in the running. The capability for an American President to make necessary progressive changes is nil. No candidate who is against illegal imperial wars or speak for meaningful social change will get any airtime or ink.

Democrat and Republican candidates alike do not respond to 'we the people' but to their base which is Corporate America.

   

Obama's out, too radical, too black, too out of the loop.

Hillary is in as the sacrificial loser lamb, to fall in the finals to the Republican. What do you think Georgie was talking to her about when he summoned her to the White House late last year?

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“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous, the essential act of warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour”