"There’s Hope for Republicans Yet" ----- by Robert Scheer (Good Read)

[KoKo]

There’s Hope for Republicans Yet
by Robert Scheer

What has changed in American politics is that the growing army of disenfranchised stakeholders now fit as comfortably within what has been thought of as the plutocratic Republican Party as within its faux-populist rival. In an attempt to exploit the palpable populist anger in the Republican base, Romney’s opponents, as The Wall Street Journal reported, opened a “Pandora’s box of bitter attacks” claiming “in his business career he was a corporate predator, a heartless shredder of companies and jobs and the personification of all that is wrong with capitalism. ...”

It is a line of attack that has worked because, as the Journal’s Gerald F. Seib points out, “Today’s Republican Party has become steadily more blue-collar, more populist and more influenced by voters who act as much like independents as Republicans. All of that makes the idea of attacks on capitalist behavior arising from the traditional party of capitalists a little less bizarre.”

The stats to back up that assertion are compelling; according to exit polls, 75 percent of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire had family incomes of below $100,000, and almost half did not have a college degree. It was from their ranks and among the nearly half of voters who identified as independents that Paul and third-place finisher Jon Huntsman pulled much of their support.

National polls support the notion of a more populist Republican base, and as the combined results of WSJ/NBC News polls over the last year show, blue-collar voters were slightly more likely to identify as Republicans than Democrats. Most startling was the finding from those same national polls when respondents were asked which party was responsible for the economic crisis: “Republicans were precisely as likely as Democrats to blame ‘Wall Street bankers.’ ”

But as the presidential election is now shaping up, voters will not be given a choice to rebuke Wall Street by either major party. Expect razor-thin differences between Romney and Obama on the key issues at the heart of our economic crisis—the ravages of predatory multinational corporate capitalism that turns the nation state into a vehicle for ill-gotten gain, mocking both Adam Smith’s claims for the invisible hand in a truly free market and the assumptions of Jeffersonian democracy in which governance is in the hands of the common folk who are also stakeholders.

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This whole article is an excellent read....He makes much sense of what we are dealing with...
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/13-5

[No Elephants]

1. If both Republicans and Democrats who are polled blame Wall Street bankers for their problems, we

can expect a lot of bs during the campaigns about Wall Street.

Whether anything will actually be done after the campaigns end is another story entirely.

My advice: Be leery--and keep both your hands on your wallet.

However, as I posted in GD a day or so ago, I am encouraged that we are hearing Republicans criticizing Republicans who have been very successful in business for being too greedy for America's own good.

Hearing them suggest that maybe making 90 million and leaving some Americans with jobs is morally superior to making 180 million destroying American lives and the American economy.

I can't recall ever hearing that before from Republicans.

I'm sure that OWS had nothing at all to do with any of the above, only with ruining lawns. :sarcasm:

[rpannier]

2. Had she waited a few more months to announce she was running Bachmann might be leading now

But I guess she felt she had to cut off Palin

As much as I shudder to think about her getting the nomination -- she should have waited