DomKen
Posts: 19457
Joined: 7/4/2004
From: Chicago, IL
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quote:
ORIGINAL: TheHeretic
quote:
ORIGINAL: DomYngBlk
So genius, how the hell do you Conservatives ever manage to lose an election. Would seem the numbers are there.....or maybe they are wrong...
Nice to see you are finally getting a handle on who is who around here, YngBlk. You should capitalize Genius when you address me in the future, though. (fucking public schools)
Let's apply some recent history to your question, and see where it gets us, shall we? I probably have socks that are older than you, so we'll run with my lifetime instead. From 1968 we have two Republican terms of the Presidency, ending in a disgraceful scandal that brought an openly liberal Democrat to power for one term. America quickly decided that crooks were preferable to incompetents, and handed the White House back to the party of Nixon for three more terms. Clinton won his first term because of a split in the conservative vote, tried to govern as a liberal, and got slapped for it in the mid-term. He still couldn't get a majority of the vote, but triangulation did get him a second term. Unlike Reagan, Clinton was not able to successfully pass the torch, and George Bush II got two terms.
Bush II left a pretty bad taste by the end of his terms and Barack Obama was able to run as a blank enough page that people set aside his plainly evident liberalism, and saw what they wanted to see in his vague promise of hope and change. His time in office so far has filled in those blanks nicely, and when he runs again in '12, he will have to do it based on a record, rather than dreams. No getting the stank of liberal off this time.
So how does that add up? 42 years. 28 of them had us with a President who claimed the mantle of conservatism. We'll give Clinton 2 years as a liberal, before he declared the era of big government was over, and put his other 6 into the moderate column. 4 for Carter, obviously. He ran, governed, and lost, as a liberal. 2 years of President Obama's term. 28/6/8. Call all of Clinton liberal, we still get a 2/1 advantage for conservatives. Do the numbers seem a bit clearer to you now?
Or, here is the short answer to your question. Conservatives lose elections when they break from their ideals, liberals lose elections when they are true to theirs.
Of course you cherry picked a starting point. Why not consider a more reasonable standard of either the last 50 or 100 years.
You can spin it a lot of way for the recent past because so much effort has gone into lionizing Reagan, arguably the worst POTUS since Hoover, but the verdict of history is firmly established for the GOP during the 20th century. The most successful GOP POTUS of the last 100 years, Eisenhower, is at best a moderate and was little more than a caretaker. The most successful Democratic POTUS of the last 100 years, unabashedly liberal FDR, completely changed society and will go down in history as the man that led us through the darkest era we've ever seen.
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RE: In accordance with the fairness doctrine - 
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