Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

I enjoy honest candid articles like this. The CNN link story indicates that with 38% indicating they will vote for Bush, and 38% saying they will not vote for Bush, I think the article makes a valid point about the other 24% swing vote having a potentially large influence in Nov. 2004.

I wonder if the uptick in the poll is due to the refreshing positive economic numbers resulting from corporate earnings reports being positive? The economic picture is brighter partially due to increased domestic consumer spending, but, mostly from what I have been hearing on CNNFN and NYTimes, from the reduced overhead of layoffs and increases in productivity.

If the bills taking overtime pay away from some 8 million while granting overtime to some 1+ million workers pass into law, corporations may see even greater productivity gains. But those gains will do nothing for the joblessness in the near term.

The economy, I believe, may play an important role in congressional races, perhaps more so, than in the presidential race.

Enjoyed your article, Greg.

I have read that this bounce in numbers is because the California recall has temporarily shifted the criticism of the president out of the spotlight. The GOP run media has been going on an on about how the economy is going to take off like a rocket but we have not seen it yet. One phrase we are going to hear about next year is Jobless recovery. That is where people who own stocks make even more but there is no real job growth for the working.. and voting citizens. People are going to vote on the fact that they are not better off than they were four years ago.

It’s my belief that this country benefits from having one of the largest, most prosperous middle classes in the world. All countries have their share of the rich, and often more than their share of the poor, but we have the added bonus of having a majority of people in our country participating in the middle class.

Which is why we should do our best not to have jobless recoveries. Jobless recoveries indicate that the rich, the investor is prospering at the cost of the working class and the middle class. it means that our productivity is more dependent on speculation and a business environment that is being played fast and loose than before.

We will only truly have recovered when the talents and the skills of the workforce are being put to full use, and we are basing our estimates of productivity on real gains and not fictional.

As far as his gains in the polls go, lets see how long that lasts. If Democrats can rejoice too soon on Bush’s poll troubles, Republicans can commit the opposite mistake.

Also, if you trust earnings estimates as a gauge of economic growth, you’re in trouble. Those things are so unreliable it’s not even funny. People got obsessed with PE ratios and meating about the same time we got so impressed with the tech stock bubble. But it’s all dependent on a bunch of numbers that get more manicured than a Beverly Hills movie star. Earnings estimates are only a cross section of one part of the business, and not a reliable one. So let’s start asking better questions than “are you going to hit the wall street consensus on your earnings” Because otherwise, we’ll never recover that well from this slump.

Personally, I think that too much attention is being paid to earnings and polls. Not that they aren’t a barometer of what COULD happen in 2004 but it’s tough to understand where any candidate truly stands if they are just tailoring all of their speeches and soundbytes to garner the best “ratings”. One of my biggest complaints about the whole process, or what it has evolved into, is that there seems to be no truth in much of what anyone says. The whole thing seems to be one big PR spin, no matter who the candidate is. At first, I thought Dean represented a break from this but, as I’ve watched his campaign grow, I found that he is using the same (or similar) tactics as everyone else. Regardless of the candidate, I’d like to hear the naked truth stripped of the buzzwords and clichés. I write for the Democratic side of this site because that’s the direction I usually tend to lean but I would rather vote for a human than a mouthpiece who is only worried about getting better ratings in the polls so that he (or she) can earn more money for their campaign.

Of course, that person would most likely never get elected…

Or would they? Are we rendering our thinking so rigid, that we never plan or work for alternatives to these sorts of thinking? I think somebody once said, you never truly destroy a way of thinking until you replace it. As long as we allow these people to dictate who is electable, as long as we make pleasing that constituency the sole condition of electability, we concede any disagreement we have in principle by our actions.

Now, I’m not above voting for the lesser of two evils, but I am above letting those people off. We should make it clear that if these people want to be electable they cannot simply, blandly, repeat what a certain selfish segment of our population wants.

I think, in part, we are frozen because we have bred the sense that the politicians and the voters have to act in their interests and their interests alone. We have lost the sense that individuals in this country should take their patriotism and manifest it in public, shared works. We have lost the sense that active involvement in our government rather than passive assent or resistance is the way to affect change. We can no longer afford to drop out, to remove ourselves, to act as if we are a society in decay.

We are a nation in transition, a nation where the old norms no longer serve our purposes, but where the old wisdom still applies. We have to manifest a new sense of our civic duty to fit the new world we are in.

We no longer live in the world of the founding fathers, but the character of human beings and reality itself have not changed since that time. We cannot look to the future or the past alone to do good in this country. We have to think and act for ourselves.

Vote your conscience.