Look, I realize there’s a belief - or a hope - out there amongst conservatives that reports of their demise are greatly exaggerated. Yes, the Leader’s poll numbers are mired in Carter terroritory; yes, Iraq is a complete mess, and there appears to be no way out; sure, the populist Limbaugh wing of the party and the staid GOP establishment are at each others throats. But look at the other side! They’re liberals!
Right. But as ABC News notes, “liberal” is suddenly no longer a dirty word.
Of course, your average conservative - as well as ABC News - will tell you that Democratic candidates tack left at their own peril. What if they’re seen by the general public as too liberal? What if there’s a whiff of patchouli about them? Surely suburban voters, even those fed up with Bushism, won’t go for that. And anyway, it’s not like liberals have any actual ideas or anything.
Except, first, in this climate, they may not need any.
And second, they do - and voters are likely to be pretty receptive to them:
Taibbi (and Rod) think liberals don’t have anything substantive to offer; I think that’s plain wrong, and it’s a dangerous delusion for conservatives, in particular, to entertain. True, what the left has to offer now is roughly the same thing it offered in the 1970s and ’80s, which is to say a dramatic expansion of the welfare state - but the ideas for how to go about this are much sharper than they used to be, thanks to years in the wilderness and a greater appreciation for free markets, and the political climate is a lot more favorable to a renewed push for social democracy than it was in, say, 1979.
Rick Klein and Teddy Davis at ABC News seem to think the Democrats risk alienating great swaths of the middle ground if they were to embrace some sort of universal health care coverage that includes some sort of tax hike to pay for it; they write that the Democrats endanger their chances by opposing the war in Iraq. Here’s a bet the eventual Democratic candidate will embrace both “extreme left” positions - and win not in spite of it, but specifically because of it.
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