Scenes from the GOP Meltdown (NY Post op-ed)

[brooklynite]

October 19, 2005 -- ECHOES of 1994 are getting louder. Except that back then hungry Republicans gobsmacked complacent Democrats by taking over Congress with the help of the Contract With America — and this time it's the Republicans with their fingers in their ears.
The latest wake-up call comes by way of a Gallup poll released yesterday: Public disapproval of Congress is at an astonishing 64 percent. That's four points higher than in 1994, when the electorate was disgusted by the ruling Democrats after years of scandals and corruption — and ticked off at an increasingly unpopular president and wasteful spending.

So far, most Republican officeholders and party bigwigs are still pretending it's all just one big bizarre coincidence.

Not Frank Luntz. The pollster, a chief architect of the Contract With America, thinks the threat is clear as a bell. "You have the economic anxiety that existed in 1994," he told me yesterday, plus the hostility toward elected officials, anger toward Washington and desire for change — all four of the ingredients needed to create a "wave that throws out incumbents."

...snip...

But the real problem goes much, much deeper: The Republican Party has ceased to stand for anything other than its own perpetuation in power.


http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/55671....

[EuroObserver]

1. Another sign Murdoch flipping?

[Eric J in MN]

5. It's an op-ed, not an editorial

(not the official position of the paper)

[woodsprite]

2. The Dems need a "Revitalize America" plan or something catchy,

but not trite. The desire to put the policies into place to fix what the neocons have broken is already there with most dems. All they need to do is package it and sell it to the American people. We need to think like repubs would (or did) when they were trying to sell us the Contract with America. We also have to tie their Contract With America back to all this mess that's going on now and tie it to Gingrich's name. I feel he's gonna be a strong repub in the primaries (if they don't run an incumbent VP).

[Demeter]

3. I'd Say Shades of 1973!

I'd love to see Cheney do an Agnew, and Dubya resign and the whole lot be tried, convicted and jailed. But no Presidential pardons! They didn't learn last time, so this time they get the book thrown at them. No more nice guy treatment.

[ixion]

4. "ticked off at an increasingly unpopular president"

so ticked off, in fact, that we reelected him.

[katty]

6. Frankie pollster finally has to spit out what we all know...

>The Republican Party has ceased to stand for anything other than its own perpetuation in power.