Reply #14: here is what is odd

[Two Americas]

The right wingers went all out to paint Obama as "far left" and "socialist" and "ultra-liberal." I see no reason to believe that they were any less successful at that then they have been in the past. But that didn't stop people from voting Democratic this time. They voted for "far left," and conversations that I had with hundreds of rural voters before the election support that. Until this election, I had rarely heard people say "we need another New Deal" and I heard it everywhere this past Fall, dozens of times every day. When people who had always been republican voters told me they were going to vote for Obama, I would jokingly say "but, but but he's a socialist!" The response was often a dead serious "well that may be just what we need now." I have been around white rural voters for decades, all over the country, and never heard things like that before. There is a massive shift happening out there, and a contingent within the activist community seems to be the last people in the country to get the message.

The people rejected Reaganomics, they rejected "free markets" and "trickle down," they rejected the bigotry of the religious right. Yet to hear people here advocating for some cautious "middle" or "center" program, you would think that it was the political Left that has been repudiated and rejected. You would think that the religious right had been vindicated and endorsed.