□ [新聞] The winds of change are set to blow away the American right

[swallow73 (swallow73)]

認為美國人太保守，不會接受女性或黑人擔任總統的
板友或許可以參考一下這篇衛報社論。基本上該作者
認為美國社會現在正往左傾，除非出現像是911之類的
大絕，民主黨推出的女性或黑人參選人都可望贏得總
統大選。

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2236161,00.html

The winds of change are set to blow away the American right


In the first of his dispatches, our new American columnist argues his
country's heartland is moving away from conservatism

Michael Crowley
Sunday January 6, 2008
The Observer


For several years now, American politics has been in upheaval: terrorism,
war, scandal, the meltdown of the Bush administration. But the results of
Thursday's Iowa caucuses were the clearest sign yet that something
transformative is happening - old orders are being cast away, new faces are
surging forward. Iowa suggests that American voters are in a mood to place
bets and take risks.

This is terrible news for the major party establishments. That was evident on
Thursday night, on a chartered jet from Iowa to New Hampshire in the wee
hours after the caucuses. On board was the press corps that follows Hillary
Clinton, as well as her aides who worked their way down the aisle furiously
spinning the night's disastrous results. With strained faces, the likes of
longtime Clinton pollster Mark Penn and former Democratic party chairman
Terry McAuliffe talked themselves hoarse over the engines, arguing that
Hillary could survive a third-place Iowa finish some people consider a
political death sentence.

Perhaps. But it's clear that in spurning the mighty Clinton machine for an
upstart such as Barack Obama, Iowa Democrats were also rejecting their
party's old guard. Likewise, in choosing the little-known Arkansan Mike
Huckabee, Iowa Republicans also defied their party's establishment. GOP
[Grand Old Party] barons from Washington to Wall Street - the think-tankers,
columnists and money men who supported the Bush administration - see the
folksy preacher as an unelectable 'rube' [hick] with an intolerable weakness
for higher taxes and social spending. But with Huckabee's clear win over Mitt
Romney, they, too, were rebuffed just as thoroughly as were the Clintonites.
Iowans of both parties have issued a call to reboot their political system.

It's too soon to say whether these insurgents can win their parties'
nominations. (Obama's prospects look much better than the underfunded and
more widely resisted Huckabee's.) But it seems likely that this taste for
upheaval will carry through to the 2008 election. With no incumbent President
or Vice-President on the ticket, and with the traumas of 9/11 and Iraq
beginning to fade, voters will make a reassessment of their beliefs and
preferences. In all probability, that will restore the Democrats to the White
House after eight years of exile.

Why? Because America is becoming a fundamentally Democratic country. That may
surprise observers startled by the long reign of the Bush administration. But
the notion that the Bush era showed the US to be a 'conservative' nation is
wrong. And the 2008 election will prove it.

Among those who buy into the fallacy that the American instinct is truly
conservative, former White House svengali Karl Rove is the best known. When
George W Bush was elected in 2000, Rove boasted that the country was
embarking upon a political 'realignment' that would usher in a generation of
Republican rule. His ambition seemed comically grandiose. Until 9/11. The
World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks threw the American psyche into a
reactionary jolt, one that Rove and his President happily exploited.

On 10 September 2001, Bush had been a faltering President struggling against
Democrats in the Congress. Two years later, Republicans had exploited
national security fears to consolidate their power on Capitol Hill and launch
an invasion of Iraq. Polling even showed that public opinion slanted
rightward on issues such as abortion and gay marriage, as people sought
comfort in 'traditional values'.

To Rove and his cohorts, 9/11 simply accelerated an inexorable shift within
the American electorate towards Republican values such as lower taxes,
hawkish foreign policy and social conservatism. Thus, when a Democratic surge
cost Republicans control of the Congress in November 2006, conservatives
dismissed it. The American psyche hasn't shifted, they said; rather, the
Republican brand has suffered a horrible run of luck - from Bush's
mismanagement of Iraq to hurricane Katrina to sex scandals involving
Republican members of Congress Mark Foley and Larry Craig as well as the
thieving GOP superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. As Brit Hume of the conservative
Fox News network put it on election night 2006, Democrats had carried the
day, but 'from what we could see from all the polling and everything else, it
remains a conservative country'.

By this thinking, Republicans are down but hardly out. Once a new messenger
begins making the case for conservatism, free from the taint of Bush and
Cheney, Americans will welcome the GOP back into their loving arms. But this
thinking is delusional. Republicans aren't the victims of a string of
misfortunes; they were the beneficiaries of a deeply unsettling period of war
and terrorism. Now that fears of terrorism have dimmed and the Iraq war has
turned from a political benefit to a political liability, it will likely
become evident that the foundations of their party are crumbling.

Look at voting patterns. During the Reagan era of the 1980s, the old
Democratic coalition of minorities and union-friendly, working-class
Democrats frayed as conservatives used cultural appeals to split off
blue-collar 'Reagan Democrats'. But over the past 15 years, two new groups -
women and professionals, especially those in America's rising 'knowledge'
economy - have flocked to the Democratic camp. Professionals, a broadly
defined class that ranges from doctors to actors, sympathise with some of the
GOP's instincts, but have increasingly tended to vote on the basis of their
social libertarianism on issues such as abortion and stem cell research.
Women have been alienated by Republican hostility to social programmes.

While a generation ago, women voted strongly in favour of Republicans, their
rising levels of education and participation in the workforce have brought
them into the Democratic fold, especially worrisome for the GOP, given that
women are more reliable voters than men. This shift has been largely
responsible for a gradual change in the electoral map, as these voting blocs
are turning once-solid Republican states such as Virginia, Arizona and
Colorado into places where Democrats can and do win.

Moreover, Republicans have alienated minorities in droves. First, there was
Katrina, whose images of African-Americans left unaided in New Orleans erased
the gains made by Republican outreach efforts to black voters. More recently
came the wave of demagoguery over illegal immigrants, who have become a
scapegoat for America's rising economic insecurity. Rove's realignment plan
counted on wooing America's Latino population into the Republican fold. Last
spring, Bush tried to grant millions of illegal immigrants a new path to US
citizenship (he was unsuccessful), but his fellow Republicans trashed the
idea as an 'amnesty'. The effect is evident in a December poll showing that
Latinos prefer Democrats to Republicans by a 34-point margin. Rove's dream
has been destroyed for the foreseeable future.

As the Democratic coalition expands, the Republican coalition is collapsing.
Ronald Reagan's greatest political triumph was his ability to join together
three groups with little in common: economic conservatives, religious
conservatives, and national-defence conservatives. Bush brilliantly sustained
this coalition, but over the past few years those branches have begun to
clash. Evangelical voters, who tend to have lower incomes, have grown
suspicious of the party's wealthy plutocrats. (The rise of Mike Huckabee, who
offers a strong class-appeal suspicion of the rich, is perfect evidence.) The
more socially moderate wealthy Reublicans are blenching at the rising pitch
of the anti-gay, anti-abortion Christian agenda. And everyone is wary of the
defence conservatives who led the way into Iraq.

Polls show that Americans have grown suspicious of free trade, support
raising taxes on the rich and back government intervention to increase health
care coverage. Thanks to the debacle in Iraq, Democrats have even closed a
generation-long Republican advantage on the question of who can best handle
national security, once one of the Democrats' most debilitating weaknesses.

None of this guarantees that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or John Edwards
will win back the White House. Another 9/11-style event may rescue the
Republicans. But the Iowa results suggest that voters are in a revolutionary
mood, that they feel their political system has drifted out of tune with
their true beliefs. After eight painful and confusing years, those beliefs
will likely reaffirm themselves next year in the form of a Democratic
President.

· Michael Crowley is a senior editor of New Republic magazine


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◆ From: 122.127.72.88
※ 編輯: swallow73       來自: 122.127.72.88        (01/07 07:19)
推 ncyc:這比較像投書，最後一行有寫作者是新共和雜誌資深編輯
→ ncyc:另外，我記得新共和雜誌立論向來被視為左傾的
→ ncyc:該雜誌老闆馬丁裴瑞茲在前年放過話：「新共和雜誌要對抗布希
→ ncyc:的稅務計畫、反對布希式社會安全改造…」，然後就是一連串與
→ ncyc:布希唱反調的言論。
→ swallow73:原來是投書,真是抱歉,社論跟投書的分別我搞不清楚.
→ swallow73:不過話說回來連衛報本身也是左傾的