-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Man, you must not read the entire articles you link to. It states in the article that both parties have moved toward the extremes. Did you ever consider that a move further right by one party might be a direct reaction to a move further left by the other? Or it could be the other way around. I stated to Brass the other day that my "moderate" views from the 70's - 90's are now considered extreme by some on the left. RCG claims the same for himself in the opposite direction. It all depends on one's perspective. Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institution who studies public opinion, is definitely of the pox-on-both-house camp: "Clearly, I think both parties have moved to the extremes since I've been watching politics. I don't think there's any doubt about that. The Democratic Party has been pulled to the left and the Republican Party has been pulled to the right. Part of that is redistricting." Poole acknowledges that Democrats have contributed their share to the polarization of the political process, especially, he says, through their use of identity politics, appeals to race, ethnicity and gender.
A 100 years, eh? That would be 1912, which was quite a season for political division. I'll leave it to the reader to decide who is more of this or that. http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1152/article_detail.asp
could there be a more middle of the road democrat almost moderate republican than obama? the democrat party has moved so far market friendly they are hard to tell from republicans. just look at obamacare. could there be a more business friendly way of providing healthcare? the insurance companies can hardly wait. in the days of the real leftwing democrats there would be public health care.
It has yet to be determined how "middle of the road" healthcare will be, and what your perspective of that middle is. When the real costs begin to materialize, we'll see how much of an individual's life style he or she will be willing to change to meet standards that will need to be established. Do you believe the gov won't feel the need to control what you eat, drink, and what you do to reduce overall medical costs? Perhaps they will deny you care if you're too fat, or you smoke, or you got burned in a meth lab explosion (saw a special on that...millions and millions in cost to treat un-insured burn victims from that illegal activity.) I could go on, but you see my point. Of course, they say they won't deny coverage to anyone now, but politicians are notorious liars. Are people going to be willing to give up drinking, eating salt and grease, lose weight if they are fat, even get rid of their guns (bullet wounds are extremely expensive to treat {there has been a recent battle in my state regarding doctors asking patients if they own guns http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/28/us-florida-guns-idUSTRE73R84820110428}), and so on? Some would say many politicians already want to control some of these things for our own good (http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/food_nanny_mike_to_ny_halt_the_salt_XpeycWZo3bLV2ODxFkv8VM). Providing a gov run healthcare system, they will have a pretty damn good reason to, don't you agree?
Susan B Anthony was also firmly against the sale of alcohol; grafting nineteenth century controversies onto a twenty-first century framework is a little silly. As for illegal immigration, Tom Donlan of Barron's, who may still write their editorials, wrote that "the only problem with illegal immigration is the illegality of immigration." As you well know, for a while there there were quite a few on the right who were just fine with it. The distance the right has moved can be defined by health care: Nixon proposed an employer mandate to Ted Kennedy, which Kennedy rejected. Obama more or less had to swallow whole - I'm sure it wasn't his real objective - Romney's health care plan. Which Romney is now running against. You can accuse Romney of inconsistency, but that's actually inaccurate: the party he is a member of moved wholesale way over to his right, and he had to move himself to keep up. When I was young, there was such a thing as Rockefeller Republicans. Nixon was actually one of them, although he was a bit to the right of most of them. My mom used to vote for Republicans about a third of the time back then. Those days are long, long gone.
well some of us realize that if your kind would quit taxing the shit out us "the American Dream" would be a heck of a lot more available.