The GOP's kindly friends in the Democratic Party have been telling them for months that that the Republican Party needs to get with the program on immigration, otherwise they'll never ever get an Hispanic to vote for them.
Fuggedaboutit, say conservative election analysts Jay Cost and Sean Trende. The GOP's main problem is that people don't think it cares about average people like them. Exactly, because my friend Stephen thinks of the GOP as the party of the bankers.
If only. If only it were true and those greedy bankers were busily slipping money to Tea Partiers instead of marching in lock-step with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-WallStreet) because they know what side their bread is buttered.
The biggest problem Mitt Romney had in 2012 was the downscale white voters that didn't show up to vote. In a choice between an "urban liberal like President Obama or a severely pro-business venture capitalist like Mitt Romney" writes Trende, they decided to stay home.
You can see how Obama's Joe Soptic TV ad nicely made the point that Romney was exactly what he was, a severely pro-business venture capitalist. It doesn't really matter that what the downscale white voters objectively need according to settled science is a million venture capitalists shaking up the economy and renewing failing, badly managed corporations, because the good old jobs with good wages are gone forever. Not only that, but the downscale white voters are not now, and never will be again, the little darlings of the ruling class that they were back in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
But enough of the past. Cost and Trende argue that there is nothing in the Senate's immigration bill for ordinary downscale voters. Any politician that planned to appeal for the votes of ordinary, average people would be making populist attacks on the immigration bill, saying that it took jobs away from ordinary Americans and handed them to corporate and union fat-cats.
Gee, Sarah Palin just did that, calling the Senate bill an "amnesty bill filled with favors, earmarks and crony capitalists' pork".
This is what politics is all about. Politics is division. It is about hanging the labels of crony and greedy and banker and special interest on the other guys, and for Republicans that means the Democratic Party. It is about showing that the Republican Party is the party that really cares about the ordinary American that isn't enrolled in the rank and file of the special interests: your greenies to reds to pinkos to blacks to browns to fems to gays. Whatever happened to an America that cared for ordinary people, without separating and mobilizing them into warring and exclusive identities?
What a joke. Here we have bourgeois capitalism, that has raised the common man from indigence to a suffocating prosperity. Yet the common man is convinced that capitalism and capitalists are out to screw him.
Oh, I know. In the old days the poor man could only hope to attach himself to a powerful patron. And still he would starve and his children would die. For many people, even most people, it still goes against instinct to imagine that the way to prosper is to throw yourself on the mercy of the consumers, and believe in the idea that you prosper by serving others rather than forcing them to cough up a livelihood for you upon the threat of force.
But that's the world we live in. Until we can change it for the better.
Fuggedaboutit, say conservative election analysts Jay Cost and Sean Trende. The GOP's main problem is that people don't think it cares about average people like them. Exactly, because my friend Stephen thinks of the GOP as the party of the bankers.
If only. If only it were true and those greedy bankers were busily slipping money to Tea Partiers instead of marching in lock-step with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-WallStreet) because they know what side their bread is buttered.
The biggest problem Mitt Romney had in 2012 was the downscale white voters that didn't show up to vote. In a choice between an "urban liberal like President Obama or a severely pro-business venture capitalist like Mitt Romney" writes Trende, they decided to stay home.
You can see how Obama's Joe Soptic TV ad nicely made the point that Romney was exactly what he was, a severely pro-business venture capitalist. It doesn't really matter that what the downscale white voters objectively need according to settled science is a million venture capitalists shaking up the economy and renewing failing, badly managed corporations, because the good old jobs with good wages are gone forever. Not only that, but the downscale white voters are not now, and never will be again, the little darlings of the ruling class that they were back in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
But enough of the past. Cost and Trende argue that there is nothing in the Senate's immigration bill for ordinary downscale voters. Any politician that planned to appeal for the votes of ordinary, average people would be making populist attacks on the immigration bill, saying that it took jobs away from ordinary Americans and handed them to corporate and union fat-cats.
Gee, Sarah Palin just did that, calling the Senate bill an "amnesty bill filled with favors, earmarks and crony capitalists' pork".
This is what politics is all about. Politics is division. It is about hanging the labels of crony and greedy and banker and special interest on the other guys, and for Republicans that means the Democratic Party. It is about showing that the Republican Party is the party that really cares about the ordinary American that isn't enrolled in the rank and file of the special interests: your greenies to reds to pinkos to blacks to browns to fems to gays. Whatever happened to an America that cared for ordinary people, without separating and mobilizing them into warring and exclusive identities?
What a joke. Here we have bourgeois capitalism, that has raised the common man from indigence to a suffocating prosperity. Yet the common man is convinced that capitalism and capitalists are out to screw him.
Oh, I know. In the old days the poor man could only hope to attach himself to a powerful patron. And still he would starve and his children would die. For many people, even most people, it still goes against instinct to imagine that the way to prosper is to throw yourself on the mercy of the consumers, and believe in the idea that you prosper by serving others rather than forcing them to cough up a livelihood for you upon the threat of force.
But that's the world we live in. Until we can change it for the better.
So why does Paul Ryan support amnesty?
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