http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/carville_democrats_rule/2009/04/28/208261.htmlCarville: Democrats Will Rule for 40 YearsTuesday, April 28, 2009 1:36 PM
By: Dave Eberhart Article Font Size
James Carville, political consultant and media personality, lays out his case for Democrats ruling Washington for the next 40 years in his latest book: “40 More Years, How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation.”
In the introduction, Carville builds the case for why he believes the Democratic Party is stronger than ever in American politics.
“Obama created a new party,” Carville writes. “He brought new people in all across the country, and in 2008 those new people were donating, registering, and voting alongside the existing base of Democratic voters.”
As a brutal aside, Carville notes that he believes the revitalization of the Democratic Party has occurred despite — not because of — Howard Dean’s “disastrous tenure” as DNC chairman.
“He was not simply unsuccessful but incompetent, particularly in the case of the 2006 midterm elections. I said then and I’ll say again that Dean’s leadership was ‘Rumsfeldian in its incompetence,’” writes Carville, a political science professor at Tulane University,
All in all, Carville seems to want to drive a stake into the heart of the GOP. By way of example:
“What seems to be escaping notice is just how serious the problems of the Republican Party as a whole are for the long term. It’s not just a Bush thing, and it’s not just about Republican prospects in 2010, 2012, or 2014…”
Grim stuff for the short or long term, but Carville recounts that in his conversations with Republicans, nobody is disputing his dire assessment of the political reality.
In a nutshell, he concludes that the GOP has simply lost the youth and Hispanic vote and is starved for credibility.
Carville writes that to understand the emergence of a lasting Democratic majority, one must first review the “profound and relentless incompetence” of the Bush administration – “and the pursuant collapse of the Republican Party.”
He suggests that this understanding requires a looking back at the failure of Republican ideas, “including a wholesale rejection of the myth of conservative superiority on the economy, and holding our noses long enough to survey the gallery of truly repellent scoundrels, scandals, and screw-ups that the Republican Party has been responsible for over the last eight years.”
Very succinctly he makes the argument for why Democrats are going to keep winning — Two words: young people. “In short, the Republicans are going to keep getting spanked again and again for forty more years because we're right and they're wrong, and Americans know it.”
However, despite the boon of the alleged GOP incompetence, the Democratic Party will not be able to simply glide along on the voter backlash or its laurels. The road to perpetual victory is, according to the pundit, “to rebuild Americans’ trust in government as a force of good.”
All very serious stuff in this Simon and Schuster offering, but along the way, Carville has fun with the likes of Sarah Palin for once running an Alaskan city hall that “looks just like a Louisiana bait shop.”
Always a big target, Bill O'Reilly is lambasted as stupid, bigoted, and “remarkably nasty, even for a far-right nut job.”
As for Hillary Clinton, who he charges with running a messy campaign: “The kind of campaign you run doesn’t have much to do with the type of president you'd be.”
“The Republicans have been down before, and the Democrats have won Congress before,” Carville writes in his most serious vein, “and we’ve still managed to lose. This time we strung our policies together into a coherent, appealing narrative. And we did it with the help of the historically diverse, historically Democratic young people who will be the foundation for a lasting Democratic majority.”
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