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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
[[quoteblock]]Public Policy doesn't have a particular ideology. It operates on reality.
What is Public Policy?
So would you say gay marriage is a left wing public policy idea? Of course. It's promotion of equality.
Anyway that's literally the definition of Third Way Democrats. Democrats who believe in left wing social policies and right wing economic policies.
I mean look them up.
Between the 1980s and the present, the so-called New Democrats have existed in two distinct forms. In the early 1980s, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was formed, chiefly by white Southern and Western Democratic politicians, with the goal of winning back “Reagan Democrats” — white working-class members of the dying Roosevelt coalition, who combined support for universal social programs like Social Security and Medicare with hawkish military attitudes and socially conservative values on attitudes like abortion, censorship and gay rights. Early in its history, the DLC proposed a program of educational and other benefits for young Americans in return for national military or civilian service, along the lines of the G.I. Bill.
The original New Democrats were hard to distinguish from Southern and Western “Blue Dog” Democrats (“blue dog” is a play on the term “yellow dog Democrat” for someone who would vote for a “yellow dog” as long as it was a Democrat). Al From, the founder of the DLC and its leader until 2009, had been a staffer for Willis Long, a Democratic representative from Louisiana. Among the presidents of the DLC were Al Gore, senator from Tennessee, and Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas.
But in the 1990s a combination of events shifted the center of gravity of the New Democrat movement from the South and West to the Northeast. After the New Democrats succeeded in electing one of their own, Bill Clinton, to the White House in 1992, the 1992 midterm elections not only gave Republicans control of the House and Senate but wiped out Democrats in the South and West. After 1994, the Democrats were much more dominated by urban areas, minorities and white social liberals.
Meanwhile, the end of the Cold War combined with Republican victories in the federally funded military-industrial “gun belt” of the Southern periphery eliminated a traditional base of support in the Democratic Party. The center of gravity of the New Democrats shifted from the former Confederacy to Wall Street. The original New Democrats had been symbolized by Sam Nunn, the conservative Democratic senator from Georgia, chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services. The second-wave New Democrats of the 1990s were symbolized by Robert Rubin, the New York financier and Democratic fundraiser who became Bill Clinton’s secretary of the Treasury and pushed an agenda of international financial liberalization and financial deregulation.
During the two terms of George W. Bush, the evolving New Democrat or “neoliberal” movement was dominated by socially liberal economic conservatives in Wall Street and Silicon Valley. These centrist Democrats jettisoned the white working-class Southerners and Westerners who had been wooed by the original New Democrats, and focused instead on winning over former moderate Republicans in the Northeast and West Coast who combined liberal attitudes on abortion, gay rights and environmentalism with opposition to “big government” and concern about federal deficits.
In 2008, many Wall Street Democratic donors abandoned Hillary Clinton and supported a relatively unknown first-term senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. In his first term, Obama has governed as an “Eisenhower Democrat.” He combined a foreign policy realism reminiscent of Republican realists like Eisenhower, Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell (who voted for him in 2008 and endorsed him in 2012). In domestic policy, his major success has been the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, which was based on the “individual mandate” system promoted in the 1990s by the moderate Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and adopted by “Romneycare” in Massachusetts. To the dismay of progressive and populist Democrats, Obama refused to support radical reform of the financial sector, which had largely funded his campaign in 2008, and surrounded himself with Wall Street insiders like Timothy Geithner and William Daley.
As presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have both reflected the priorities of the second New Democrat coalition, uniting donors from Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley with a “new majority” coalition of racial minorities, immigrants, liberal women and young voters. Because Democratic voters are disproportionately poor, this has produced a Democratic Party that, in economic terms, is an hourglass coalition of the top and the bottom. Economic populism frightens the party’s billionaire donors, while social populism, which has often been associated with white working-class xenophobia, racism and religiosity, frightens blacks, Latinos, immigrants and white social liberals. The result is what Mike Konczal and others have called “pity-charity” liberalism — a kind of liberalism that appeals to the sympathy of the rich for the poor, rather than appealing, as the New Deal did, to solidarity among the middling majority. It was a version of progressivism ill-suited to the Great Recession, which demanded the visionary leadership of a Franklin Roosevelt, not the managerial competence of a Nelson Rockefeller.
The most recent version of the New Democrat project may be doomed, even if the self-described New Democrat Barack Obama is elected to a second term. In 2012, most Wall Street donors, offended by Obama’s mild criticism and alarmed by the support shown by many Democrats for Occupy Wall Street, have swung their support away from the Democrats to the Republicans.
It is unlikely that most of them will ever come back. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, moderate as well as progressive Democrats are going to emphasize deficit reduction through tax increases far more than even moderate Republicans. The easiest way to raise lots of revenue is to raise today’s low rates on capital gains, perhaps even making the capital gains and income tax rates equal. Any such reform will cut deeply into the incomes of many Wall Street rentiers whose “progressivism” extends only to cost-free support for gay rights and abortion rights.
At the same time, the moderate conservative economic agenda adopted by Clinton and Obama, like the more extreme conservative agenda that Democratic neoliberalism copies and dilutes, has failed to slow the growth of inequality or stop the long-term erosion of the American middle class. In the 1990s, New Democrats like Clinton argued that Americans should embrace free trade and become “knowledge workers” to flourish in a win-win global economy. By 2012, such optimistic rhetoric rang hollow. Most of the jobs being created in the U.S. are low-wage jobs that require only high school diplomas. And in this year’s election, Obama and Romney have competed to denounce Chinese state capitalism and mercantilism, instead of indulging in happy talk about the wonders of globalization.
The first-wave New Democrats sought the votes of white working-class Reagan Democrats. The second-wave New Democrats abandoned the Reagan Democrats and sought to convert former moderate Republicans in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast. But if Obama wins reelection, it may be because of Democratic partisanship among Latino voters.
If the Democrats depend increasingly on the Latino vote, then New Democrat policies may be politically irrelevant, if not harmful. In many ways Latino voters are more like the white working-class Reagan Democrats than like the white Rockefeller or Eisenhower Republicans whom Democrats have persuaded to switch parties in recent years. It is easy to imagine the growing Latino population supporting affirmative government to help the working class and middle class, as the heavily working-class “white ethnics” of the industrial cities did in the mid-20th century. And industrial policy like Obama’s GM bailout is likely to appeal to Latino working families as well as to working-class whites. In contrast, the Clinton-Obama synthesis of free-market conservatism with the identity politics of the cultural left is less likely to resonate with these new voters.
Symbolizing the end of an era, the Democratic Leadership Council closed its doors in 2011. The Democratic Party will continue to evolve, reflecting demographic and cultural and economic shifts. But this year’s election may be the last in which the Democratic nominee for the presidency calls himself a “New Democrat.”
Sean Spicer claims the White House is absolutely confident that Trump was illegally 'wiretapped' by Obama
, despite the Testimony today from 2 Major Intelligence Heads saying it didn't happen.
At this point, I want the Democrats to begin Impeachment Proceedings the minute they take over the House in 2018 over this. I think this is legitimate grounds for impeachment.
edited 20th Mar '17 2:42:50 PM by DingoWalley1
Between the wiretapping claims and Trump being a Birther, I'd say Obama has ample ammo to use for lawsuits.
Speaking of Trump: US names localities that refuse to detain undocumented immigrants
edited 20th Mar '17 3:03:08 PM by MorningStar1337
Liberal fallacy #872: Imagining that the New Deal was some kind of perfect, magical solution to all our problems that was ruined when nasty plutocrats got their hands on it.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
It was deeply flawed for its failure to meaningfully address the issues faced by minority populations, but it was not necessarily a forgone conclusion that the civil rights movement would result in its dismantling. Nor does that particular thesis account for the similar (though less pronounced) decline of social democracy experienced in homogeneous European countries around the same time (the mid to late 70s) as the rise of the modern GOP.
edited 20th Mar '17 4:23:00 PM by CaptainCapsase
No one here said it was.
But dismantling of the welfare state and deregulation has increased problems not decreased them.
Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of the American population earned an average of $16,000 in pre-tax income in 1980. That hasn't changed in over three decades. As if that's not depressing enough, living the American Dream is also getting harder to do. Millennials, born in the 1980s, only have a 50% likelihood — a coin toss chance — of earning more money than their parents did, according to new research released this month from the Equality of Opportunity Project. It wasn't always this way. In the 1940s, almost everyone in America grew up to be better off financially than their parents. While money isn't the only definition of success, more wealth typically leads to bigger houses, grander vacations, fancier cars and more opportunities to advance.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/22/news/economy/us-inequality-worse/
I mean left-wing policies are the only way to help fix this problem. And Centrists and Right wingers aren't going to do that because it conflicts with what their donors want because they love that they're getting richer.
That's why Centrist Democrats can afford to be socially liberal. That doesn't conflict with a company's pocketbook.
edited 20th Mar '17 4:46:56 PM by MadSkillz
Democrats would have 4 years until a new Presidential election, and that would guarantee a loss due to overt obstructionism.
See, but we weren't outraged at the Republicans for obstructing, we were outraged at them for what they were obstructing. We want them to obstruct the horrible things this administration is trying to pull.
Really good speech from today.
Hey, that's my Congressman!
Government issues an electronics ban on certain US-bound flights
. Specifically flights form Middle Eastern and North African countries. Apparently the ban was in place because of "credible information" about a threat.
edited 20th Mar '17 5:30:38 PM by MorningStar1337
Well, there's no rest for the wicked, and going out your way to screw with people is the best use of the time.
x5 No, but that could easily have been the bandwagon effect. The UK and USA were still entirely different states in the Reagan-Thatcher-era despite the similarities. The USA is just an elephant in the tent and our elections are quite the show for the world. Also, they turned out differently. Thatcher didn't seem to have gutted social democracy as thoroughly as did Reagan and his successors. Still, US influence almost inherently pulls Europe to the right. (For a small example, observe the US funding of Dutch far right groups in their election).
edited 20th Mar '17 7:33:15 PM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our livesI actually wasn't arguing with you. I was responding to Fighteer. I agree with you.
RE: Xenophobia
Had this pop up on my radar today - a waiter asked 4 women for proof of residency before he would serve them
. Suffice to say, he got fired pretty damned quick.
And while it's not exclusive to the US, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was convicted of misuse of public funds today
, and yet retains her role in the organization for possibly the most awkward rationale.
Because keeping someone who's been convicted of misusing money that doesn't belong to them is such a great idea to counter the Populist movement.
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"Reuters: Tillerson plans to skip NATO meeting, will visit Russia in April
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These clowns are the most incompetent traitors of all time.
New Survey coming this weekend!![]()
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Thanks for showing your ties to Russia right in the open, moron (I mean Tillerson, not Tactical)! Might as well paint a bullseye on your forehead while you are at it! Also, Rockefeller died: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-39333416
edited 20th Mar '17 8:54:58 PM by Bat178
It's crazy how these idiots in the GOP still refuse to throw Trump under the bus. Their base ALWAYS falls in line, so why not just take an L, impeach the fucker, avoid a moron with the nuclear codes, and continue on business as usual. Your base has been taken it for 50+ years. What's another two until the midterms/2020?
The ONLY thing that makes sense is that Russia has damaging material on them from their hacked databases as well.
New Survey coming this weekend!

Blocking Gorsuch only works if they can dig up enough dirt in the hearings. I can say that from what I know so far, dude's not someone I want on SCOTUS.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman