The Union Label

Kevin Drum thinks the GOP will fight any liberalization of union-organizing regs:
You can certainly make the case that a serious obsession with Roe is a minority position even within the conservative movement. … Union busting, conversely, strikes me as being so deeply embedded in conservative DNA that it’s virtually impossible to imagine an American conservative movement that didn’t [...]

The Downside of Populism

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers puts his finger on the GOP’s dilemma:
It’s why as a 27-year-old voter, the Republican party has been off the table for me since I could vote in the 2000 election. No matter how much I like or identify with any of “conservative” ideas, I refuse to stand in any tent, [...]

Losing the Well-To-Do

Charlie Cook believes the GOP’s hold on middle-class voters is slipping:
Republicans have lost an enormous amount of support among upscale voters, basically just breaking even among those with household incomes above $50,000 a year, a traditional GOP stronghold. Similarly, McCain’s losing to Obama among college graduates and voters who have attended some college underscores how [...]

The New Majority

Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg joins those who believe GOP populism appeals to an increasingly narrow base:
In this poll, for example, when asked if homosexuality should be accepted or discouraged by society, moderates and liberals agree that it is a way of life that should be accepted by society by 65- and 33-point margins respectively, compared [...]

Snub or Choice?

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly believes it likely that Sarah Palin’s failure to emerge from last week’s Republican Governors Association’s meeting with a leadership post represented a snub by her colleagues. I’m not so sure. Who’s to say she wanted one? Her track to higher office rests on her populist appeal, not on her ability [...]

At Least It’s An Ethos

Dan Riehl:
Some of the alarmists out there might want to take a moment to consider all the ramifications here. It may sound harsh, but the Great Depression produced many things — one of them was called the Greatest Generation.
Which on the heels of the Brooks column calls to mind the best quote from The Big [...]

Brooks: “Nihilists”

An extraordinary columns today from the NYT’s David Brooks, pronouncing that the GOp has moved well beyond intellectual bankruptcy:
This generation of political leaders is confronting a similar situation [to the 1933 economic crisis], and, so far, they have failed utterly and catastrophically to project any sense of authority, to give the world any reason to [...]

Bail Out

Ross Douthat, in the wake of Monday’s House vote:
The most likely scenario, as of 3 PM this afternoon: The stock market continues to drop. Some version of the bailout passes in the next week. The American economy staggers into a recession, but passes through the storm without 1930s-style suffering; the Republican Party is not so [...]

Friendly Fire (IV)

Wick Allison:
The Bush tax cuts — a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war — led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger [...]

Friendly Fire (III)

Peter Suderman:
Podhoretz notes, as I did yesterday, that the candidates are “falling back on their points of comfort. McCain is talking about greed and lack of accountability — all of which are long-standing talking points of his, though they are usually applied to Washington and not to Wall Street.” He argues that this isn’t enough, that [...]