WP: In '04, GOP Is a Target Missed

[kskiska]

Democrats Seldom Aim at Accountability Issue, Strategists in Both Parties Say

For years, Republicans prospered by casting themselves as Washington's out-party, promising to clean house in the nation's capital. In 2004, President Bush and the GOP Congress will meet voters wearing a different face: the party of government.

This fall marks the first presidential election in nearly a quarter-century -- since Democrat Jimmy Carter's failed reelection bid in 1980 -- in which one party controls the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. Republicans have not faced this situation since Herbert Hoover followed Calvin Coolidge into the presidency in 1928.

The Republican grip on Washington, the result of a decade of electoral successes, paradoxically has left the party in a vulnerable spot. The absence of a divided government, which many voters seemed to embrace in the 1980s and 1990s, means GOP candidates must run at least implicitly as defenders of the status quo.

At least as Democrats see it, Republicans should be hard-pressed to avoid accountability for any result -- whether it is the course of events in Iraq or the size of the budget deficit -- with which the public is dissatisfied.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12494-2004Oct30.html

[shraby]

1. They have left themselves wide open haven't they?

[ixion]

2. absolute power corrupts

absolutely. Left unchecked, it heads toward the extremes, in this case a corporate theocracy.

That's why the Founding Fathers wrote in checks and balances, and the fact that these creeps have undone so many of those is reason enough not to re(s)elect, at the very least.

[NEOBuckeye]

3. One more vote for Proportional Representation

It's ridiculous that in 2004, in a country as diverse as the United States, that we're still stuck with a Winner-Take-All government system that allows one party and its' select interests to dominate the nation's politics, effectively locking-out the opposition. The Bush-GOP government just demonstrates why we need a Parliamentary-style system of representative government, in which multiple parties and their interests are represented.

[Occulus]

4. Ya can't clean house with a FILTHY FUCKING BROOM!!!

We need a President with NO political connection, the intent to serve ONE term, and thus, nothing at all to lose.

I can dream.