I think that is largely true. I am socially and fiscally conservative. I line up with the right on nearly every issue. Members of the Republican party preach from a high moral pedastal, but get caught in scandals. Tom Delay, Bob Ney, and Duke Cunningham, and Mark Foley did not practice the ethics and morality they preached. As much as I do not like their politics, you never hear about a liberal who sneaks around going to anti-abortion rallies, or secretly favors school prayer. I guess what I'm saying is that while the liberals are scum, they don't try to pass themselves off as Lysol.
the republicans lost because they lost their compass. weak, indicisive leadership by both houses of congress and the failure of a president to appease the base. bush campaigned as a conservative but proved to be much more like bush 41 than reagan. add an unpopular war and it adds up for a democratic victory. the dems shouldn't mistake this for a mandate though. running much more moderate candidates and hiding out pelosi and reid helped bring home several tight races. the dems now have their chance to lead.
I really don't think it was personal moral failings. The republicans lost because they took their extremely narrow presidential victories and their extremely small Congressional majorities like they were landslide victories instead of the slim margins that they were. They decided they could abandon the practice of consensus building in order to get things done and involving the rather large minority into the decision making. Instead they took license to swing all the issues they cared about far to the right with no consessions to the democrats. Far outside the mainstream American values it turned out, with 47% of voting Americans describing themselves as moderates. Then they got caught up in the scandalous Abramoff practices of the Big Business DC lobbying army and ended up with more government spending than the "tax and spend" democrats they had criticised. They cut the taxes as they raised the expenditures and the deficit soared as we had to sell federal bonds to China to pay for the $124 billion a year interest on it. They lost because people saw corporate profits soaring and the ultra-wealthy widen the gap over the middle class and the well-off. Salaries for the middle class haven't gone up much, the tax relief has been small, and if not for the cheap, foreign-made goods that we now depend on, it would be difficult to maintain the lifestyles thay have. But they lost mostly because they blindly supported the flawed neo-con policies of George W. Bush and his cronies into series of foreign policy disasters. It became apparent to the citizens that they were putting party loyalty ahead of the good of the United States and the will of their constituancies.
You give voters way too much credit, Red. The vast majority of them are completely ignorant of the issues and vote based upon whatever Kool-Aid flavor they drink the most of.
Bush is definitely not a Reagan Republican and proved to act more like a Democrat than many Democrats themselves. Maybe this will put the party back on the right track.
Republicans lost because the media relentlessly pounded away at the IRAQ war, Bush, and everything else they could leverage to prove that Republicans are the cause of all the evil in the world. It finally put enough doubt in enough minds to swing an election. It's like they kept pointing to a green canvas and preached that it was blue. About 30% thought it was blue, but are color blind. About 15% knew it was green, but said it was blue because they perceived some kind of gain to be had. Then enough of the rest relented, thinking it must be blue if they keep telling me its blue. They let other people think for themselves. I mean really, the economy is great. Our taxes are lower. We're winning the war on terroism that the terroist initiated. I know soldiers that served in Iraq that said all-in-all, things were pretty good over there. Just isolated pockets over-exposed. Yeah soldiers die, but hey...it's called war for a reason. I wonder how many more Americans were murdered in America than were killed in Iraq. But hey, the Media, they're dogged and resolute, and they won. (cue polite applause) But the canvas is still frickin Green.
