Who's afraid of the Republican base?

[babylonsister]

http://www.burntorangereport.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2286

Who's afraid of the Republican base?
by: Josh Berthume
Fri Oct 27, 2006 at 09:57:30 AM CDT

(GOP is in bad shape when you lose Dick Armey's support - promoted by John McClelland)

Democrats have long struggled with communicating their core issues to the base American electorate. New polls and general anecdotal evidence are showing that it has started happening by default. Democrats now control the agenda on issues that are truly important to Americans, and it is due in large part to an unlikely ally - traditional Republican base voters.
Josh Berthume :: Who's afraid of the Republican base?
This poll details something Dick Armey was talking about on MSNBC the other day. He went on a few shows to discuss the following remark:

The Republicans are talking about things like gay marriage and so forth, and the Democrats are talking about things people care about, like how do I pay my bills.

The problem the Republicans are currently having stems from the desire to establish what they refer to as a "permanent majority." The use of the legislative floor for shucking and jiving about gay marriage or any other moral issue couldn't go unpunished forever. Now people have started to notice that while the GOP put on the evangelical song and dance, two very important things were not happening:

1. They were not seriously fighting for laws that would advance the agenda of the evangelical religious right; and
2. They were not passing any other laws that really made a difference to people just generally aligned with conservatism but less ideologically motivated.

The GOP failed at immigration reform, they failed to do anything about Social Security, and they failed to do anything but make a hash of foreign relations and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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