From: mpolen@suntory.mti.sgi.com (Mike Polen)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Soul of the Republican Party
Date: 21 Dec 92 17:53:05 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
NNTP-Posting-Host: suntory.mti.sgi.com

Chris Fulmer) writes:
|> Mike Polen) writes:
|> |> [...]
|> |> Talk about seeing what you want to see.  In 1992 the Republicans did 
|> |> terrible in the voting booth, but they did an excellent job of demonstrating
|> |> clear ideological differences between the two parties.  [...]
|> 
|> Well...
|> 
|>   What happened this year was that George Bush's presidency was not marked
|> by conservativism, but rather by moderatism.  (Remember Pat Buchanan's cry 
|> that Bush had "Betrayed the Republican Party"?)  Reagan's, on the other
|> hand, was clearly conservative, and (despite what current revisionists would
|> say) he ended up as one of the most popular presidents in history.
|> 
The original statement was that demonstrating clear ideological differences
always worked to the Republican's benefit.  I stand by my statement that
they painted just such differences.  Now you argue that the ideology they
defined was the wrong one.  Different discussion.

|>   The campaign is the thing that more-or-less tried to paint Bush as a 
|> true conservative.  The party conservatives: Quayle & Kemp, for example,
|> managed to interject some conservative issues, Family Values being one 
|> of them.  However, the campaign itself see-sawed between portraying
|> Bush as a moderate and as a conservative.  The result was a mixed 
|> message of a wishy-washy president who didn't really stand for anything.
|> 
My view was that the "conservative platform" of the Republican Platform
committee, which was decidedly more conservative than Bush, cost Bush
votes, not vice-versa.

|>   The advantage of this for conservatives is that solid conservatism
|> is where we've come from, so it sound vaguely familiar and wholesome --
|> Family Values, Small Government, Praying in school, etc....  I don't 
|> think that there'll be much disagreement that "Traditional" family 
|> values are disappearing, or that government is getting bigger.
|> 
|>   The Solid Liberals, on the other hand, are unfamiliar to most
|> Americans.  Gay rights, Funding of Obscene Art, Support of Flag
|> Burning, etc..., are all things which are fairly new, and as a
|> result are kinda scary.  
|> 
Arrogance becomes you.  Americans are supporters of non-discrimination
(vs your "Gay rights" epithet), fredom of expression (a true conservative
platform unless you deem it obscene), the right to political 
protest (one of the true disctinctions between our our form of gov't
and the rest of the world, not to mention that the flag is just cloth 
- reactions by right wingers made it a form of protest more effective 
than the burners ever hoped), etc.  None of these items
are "kinda scary,"  and if this is "Solid Liberal," then it is not
unfamiliar at all.

Your definition of conservatism is very activist and (dare I
say) liberal when it comes to using government to enforce your
particular brand of religious and social agenda.

-- 
These opinions are usually my own, sometimes my dog's,
occasionaly my (grown) children's, never my employer's.