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I'm looking at the two parties and how they've run their primary contests.
It's clear that on both sides, the two parties are fairly splintered on which candidate to support.
The Democrats have three still standing with a shot to get the nomination. The Republicans have five.
On the Democratic side, all of their three major candidates agree on basically every issue, almost to the tune of having to go into great minute detail to tell their policy differences apart - and even then there's still hardly any daylight between what they stand for.
On the Republican side, you have a much greater divide between what the candidates stand on issues. You have two guys, Romney and Guiliani, who are more supportive of abortion and gay rights - no matter how much they're pandering to the RW right now. You have a guy like Huckabee who is much more liberal on taxes than the rest of them. You have a guy like McCain who is much more honest about how to deal with immigration than the other candidates. And then there's Ron Paul on Iraq. I don't think I need to say any more about him. You can call him the Dennis Kucinich of the Republicans, but he's much more than that, because he's polling better, raising more money and COMPLETELY disagrees with the other candidates on the major issue of the day. He's more like the Joe Lieberman of the Republicans.
So, while on one side, you have ideological purity, on the other you have more of a contest of issues, and the GOP is trying to figure out right now which candidate and their complexity of stances on issues fits best within the current RW GOP framework.
This is leading to two completely different primary contests.
The GOP are fighting over issues, and the Democrats are fighting over fluff shit like charges of racism or sexism or experience vs. change.
When you get right down to it, we're having these disagreements, petty, petty disagreements, because we have candidates who will do what we want, and we know that, so we need SOMETHING, ANYTHING, to fight about. And if you can't fight about issues, like the Republicans are doing, then you fight about completely-unrelated-to-the-national-debate type shit like MLK vs. LBJ and crying and being mean to other candidates.
I'm not posting this to say, oh look at the great job the GOP is doing about debating the issues. Yes, they've had fluff shit arguments too - like Romney's mormanism and stuff like that, but on a whole - the GOP have been debating issues a lot more than the Democrats have.
Just my observation. Feel free to disagree.
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