There is a way to do that and it's to drop the gun control crap. It would pull in more than it would lose (and besides where they hell are they going? lol)
Frankly, I think I basically agree -- most arguments I see for gun control I think are really arguments for social justice and whatnot. I feel like saying we have a gun problem because of urban unrest is like saying we have a wheelchair problem because of polio. In some ways, I think the biggest complication here is that a lot of Democratic voters (me included) really don't think that much about gun control, and so the people who do have strong feelings end up setting the platform. I could be wildly misunderstanding my party, though.
Good post.
Might be hard to pull that off and still support free trade as much as they do now.
Thanks. I agree that connecting with the working class more effectively while still supporting an import-based economy is really a tightrope walk -- it's not intrinsically problematic that blue-collar jobs are shrinking unless blue-collar is all you know how to do, but if it is it's disastrous. I wonder whether we might benefit from something like the WPA again. If there's one organization that can always use "unskilled" labor for something, it's the federal government -- and as a benefit, we also get an infrastructure revitalization investment we desperately need.
George Will nailed it this morning:
This is a deeply ironic analysis, since FDR's creation of welfare had the effect of dislodging the "ward boss" politicians who did, in fact, make their living off of providing direct services to constituents, in the form of graft, corruption, and of course the threat of withdrawing support. Either the federal government is going to do something (besides raise an army) or it isn't. If it does things, inevitably those things are going to benefit certain groups more than others, and you can call that special pleading of you want to -- but if it doesn't do things, local services will spring up to do those things, and without federal oversight there's no guarantee, and every likelihood, that those local services are not going to be even more corrupt and beholden to special interest, with their biggest special interest being their own continuance of power. It's regulatory capture in one person -- very efficient, in a sense. The larger the governing body, by contrast, the harder it is to suborn it effectively. Check out Edwin O'Connell's
The Last Hurrah for an interesting discussion of this at one point (it's also just a good book).
Man, the Associated Press has really been laying into the RNC. They did an article about the platform adoption on Tuesday in which Medicare vouchers were the lede, too.
