[lbo-talk] Tea Party: less than meets the eye

[Alan Rudy]

I don't think any of my arguments necessitate an untapped reservoir of
potentially left-leaning voters.
If I was unclear, just about everything I've written is rooted in only
thinking abotut who votes, who votes for D, for R, for a TP or not at all,
and when... with only slight variations in the content of the population of
voters.
Obama's campaign energized a base and drew the middle/swing/independent
voters in 2008.  His Presidency has disappointed the base, middle, swing and
independents who voted for him and has passively fostered bipartisan
obstructionism, dissembling Repug pundits and media, and libertarian and/or
racist Tea Partiers.  This energizes the opposition and depresses proponents
indpendent of what the 50-60% of eligible non-voters think.
Who cares if Obama's done a lot of press conferences, the press conferences
are uninteresting, they don't have a clear message and he doesn't come off
as a man on a mission in them.

On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 10:21 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


>
> On Nov 5, 2010, at 10:16 PM, Somebody Somebody wrote:
>
> > Shane: How stupid can you get? The Dumbos were trashed be their 2008
> voters by *not voting*.
> >
> > Somebody: Both you and Alan seem to subscribe to the view that there's a
> vast reserve army of nonvoters silently waiting to be mobilized by a true
> left-wing leader. I wish that this were true, but I prefer to stick to the
> empirical data rather than to what's ideologically comfortable.
>
> This year's voters were whiter, righter, and older than the last crop,
> there's no doubt about that. I agree about the untapped reservoir's
> essential nonexistence though.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319