I think I missed the sniffliest first quarter. Bur I'll check it on the web.

Yeah, the rest was not so sniffly-worthy

Jesse, she's off the show.

A good article on the Republican politics of class warfare: [link]

billy, at this point, everytime I interact with a foreigner, I have the urge to apologize for my country. I know you've interacted with the board here, and spent significant time over here, so you're probably not judging all Americans by what's going on currently in our politics, but geez, I wish an apology from me would either make things better or remind you that we're not all like that.

Thanks, Liese and bon bon. Bummer!

billy, at this point, everytime I interact with a foreigner, I have the urge to apologize for my country. I know you've interacted with the board here, and spent significant time over here, so you're probably not judging all Americans by what's going on currently in our politics, but geez, I wish an apology from me would either make things better or remind you that we're not all like that.

Hee. Honestly, I'm surprisingly optimistic about your political landscape. I think the Bush Presidency is a reminder of Lincoln's adage about fooling the people. The Economist published an article in 2006 that stuck with me: [link] I think this is pretty accurate. Rove came up with a winning strategy for Bush: tack hard right, play up the social issues, fire up the agitated god-botherers. Polarise, polarise, polarise. And no one does agitated like the Republicans' agitated god-botherers (not to mention the message of all terror, all the time), so it worked.

But this strategy is going to kill the party for some time to come. You can fire up your base, but you're going to fire up your diehard opponents with it too. See this election: nominating Palin covered McCain's right flank, but it did even greater wonders in getting the Democrats to embrace Obama. His support among Dems rose 15-20% post-Palin. And the people in the centre, they don't trust the extremes of either party so much. If you're spending your time shouting God, gays and guns, your position in the centre is going to be soft.

Upshot: this strategy doesn't necessarily stop you winning; but it stops you winning big. You're not going to pull a Reagan. Both elections, Bush won by one state, with a narrow and hotly contested margin. And he only got that far against uninspiring opponents, and in 2004 in a climate of fear. Rove won for Bush, but not for the Republican Party.

Taking it further, since you (and we) have a two-party system, those parties have to multitask. The Repubs include supporters like the aforementioned agitated God-botherers, small-government free-marketers, pro-business corporate welfare aficionados and neo-cons (now on the wane). But the Bush Doctrine panders to only one segment - the South. Small-govt conservatives are outraged with Bush. They're directing it at McCain in the aftermath of his mortgage plan. There's a faultline developing here. Social moderates are going to find the Republican Party that Bush and Rove created less and less hospitable.

The culture wars drive that further. To quote the first article I linked to: "over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts." This isn't the party of Lincoln. It's not even the party of Nixon. Hell, it's barely the party of Reagan. He could win 49 states; Bush could only ever win just enough. And now the pendulum's swinging back. Times are volatile, and people are remembering that competence matters.

(Finally, I may add, the Dems have seized the opportunity. they ran a 50-state strategy in '06, and in '08. They're building a new broad church, and it's working.)

So America is, after all, smarter than that. I get the fear after 9/11. When it happened I was in an office tower next to City Hall in Pennsylvania, with confirmed strikes in NYC to the north and Washington D.C. to the south, and one plane missing somewhere over Pennsylvania. But America is waking up from it. There's a lot of damage been done, in many different arenas, and there'll be consequences; but America is waking up from it. So is the rest of the world, I think.

Plus, in no other country can the electoral process be this entertaining. Seriously, Palin?

Plus, in no other country can the electoral process be this entertaining. Seriously, Palin?

Heh. Don't you guys have your own brand of right-wing crazy going on down there, or am I, ahem, misremembering?

Also, I so hope your analysis is right, billytea.

Heh. Don't you guys have your own brand of right-wing crazy going on down there, or am I, ahem, misremembering?

Oh yes, we had Pauline Hanson, kicked out of the Liberal Party in the 90s for less than progressive views on race. She was memorably (to me, anyway) lampooned in a radio sketch as a bag of sawdust with two slogans painted on it: "Asians go home" and "No handouts for Abos". She founded a party, One Nation. Our legitimate rural party, the National Party, managed to see them off at the peak of their popularity, and her party was subsequently riven by infighting and financial scandal. She was last seen appearing on Dancing with the Stars.

Seriously, we had an election end of last year, in which we kicked out John Howard's Liberal Party. (Here, the Libs are the conservatives, and water spirals the wrong way down the sink.) He was an unrepentant social conservative, who'd failed in his first bid for the Prime Ministership in part due to a reputation for anti-Asian bigotry. He made it into power in 1996 on the back of a deeply unpopular Labor Party and a deferred payback for the recession of the early 90s (that also helped Clinton come to power), and immediately set about ushering in a bold vision of yesteryear.

In 2001, facing election defeat, he decided to demonise illegal immigrants. A boatload got into trouble coming from Indonesia, the coastguard radioed a nearby Norwegian ship (the Tampa) to rescue them, the Tampa then requested to offload them on Christmas Island, and Australian protectorate and the nearest land. Howard refused. Some reprehensible fearmongering followed about protecting our borders from the wrong sort of people (insufficiently prone to melanomas, I think; we have the highest melanoma rate in the world, and dammit, we're proud of it), including claims that the illegals on the boat had deliberately thrown their own children in the water to try to force the coastguard to pick them up (see, they don't care for their children the way we do). In fact, they were in the water because their ship had sunk. The govt never apologised.

He lost the election last year, and in a fitting postscript, became only the second PM in our history to lose his own seat as well as the election. (His seat, Bennelong, had been safe Lib when he entered Parliament. But it had changed, and by 2007, included a large population of Asian immigrants. Poetic indeed.) He was more Nixon than Bush; he had a lot of political nous and rat cunning, but no warmth and little in the way of scruples. Like Bush, however, he left his party deeply divided and without a clear way forward.

Incidentally, I believe he was also the only head of government actually in Washington on 9/11.