Open letter to the GOP leadership on the eve of their convention

[pseydtonne]

We Democrats cannot believe the gift you have provided us this week.

We were going to lay low, sink into ice cream and worry about the congressional elections next month. Next week is the RNC Convention in Tampa: it used to be bad form to confront a party during its spotlight week, but it also used to be bad form to question the citizenship of the president.

So instead you gave us anti-science, pro-rape and lots of other reasons that no woman will be voting for at least a few of your candidates when you need them badly. Thanks!

Thank you for giving our party another four years in the White House and possibly strengthening our stance in the Senate. We'll be sure to... ummm... probably get more grief from the House. I was going to say "push through the vaguest liberal plans possible," but that still won't happen. Nixon came up with the fundamental parts of the health care plan and you're still against it. You'd probably call Goldwater a panty-waist liberal now, if he hadn't been from Arizona.

We understand that it's no fun to come up with substantive ideas when there are actual problems, so you'd rather wait out this election. You're at risk of the Tea Party fracturing you, so you need to keep everyone just happy enough. Hating Obama unifies the GOP more than getting any of your team into office.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to put gay marriage into our platform. We're eager to see how you respond next week. Heck, you may even choose to oppose mixed-race marriages and . You've already chosen to come out against the Seventeeth Amendment, because you hate seeing people vote for their representatives.

Also, I need to give the GOP props for its work week closer: Romney hinting at birtherism to distract from Akin and that John Bircher judge in Texas proposing to train for a civil war after Obama hands the U.S. to the UN.

If you're a moderate Republican, this must be worse than watching the Red Sox this year.

Comments

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Silly GOPpies.

Small but substantively important correction: the 17th Amendment provides for direct election of senators, not representatives. I know what you meant :-)

It might be interesting if they actually repealed the 17th Amendment, though. Then all that huge amount of dark money being sloshed around in Senate races will suddenly start getting sloshed around in statehouse races across the country, because the statehouses would be where senators start getting elected. More interesting, many states that tilt red at national level politics still have a pretty strong blue contingent at the state level. They could lose seats.

[oneagain.livejournal.com]

A bit depends on how successful the voter suppression is, sadly. If we manage to get Obama back, here's hoping for a Democratic majority in the legislature, and that the first thing they get done is laws against voter suppression. It's sickening.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Don't get me wrong. They are definitely going to shave a couple of points off of Democratic turnout counts come November. However, they are looking at a higher point spread in states they consider critical for Mittens.

I am spending more energy looking at the House and Senate races. This is going to be a tough year in the Senate for the Dems because of the very high ratio of incumbent Dems to incumbent GOPpies--and the redness of some states where Dems are retiring. The House I think, is in play for the Dems to take it back.

Whichever party takes the Senate, we might see a revision of filibuster rules. If there is such a change, the Democrats would point to massive GOP obstructionism and say that the filibuster was abused in the previous Congressional session. If the GOP takes over, their rationale would still be that "the filibuster was abused." They just won't bother mentioning that they were the ones abusing it, especially not to their base.

Much though I know the filibuster is meant to be there to promote reasoned debate and principled obstructionism, it definitely has lost its charm while the GOP has been in the minority in the Senate over the past 20 years.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I am so glad you feel this way.

I think they're going to win, and win big, and prove that doubling down on misogyny and racism is the way to go.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've been watching the polls all through the campaign, and especially the attempts to aggregate state polling to get electoral-vote counts.

Obviously the race isn't a done deal, and if you look at national polls you sometimes see Romney up. But there is no and has never been any indication of a smashing Romney landslide. In fact, the feature of the EV projections that stands out is mostly how stable the race has been: Obama with a modest but persistent margin, that gets larger or smaller but never quite goes away. (I wouldn't be surprised if it does temporarily go away during the Republican convention, just like in 2008. But the Democratic one comes immediately after this year.)

Now, the Republicans actually do still have a good chance of narrowly winning control of the Senate, without giving up the House. This concerns me. If Obama stays in, the upshot is that we get even more Congressional obstruction for a couple of years. But Akin did provide an opening.