3 Comments

1. Starbuck says:

   June 25, 2009 at 10:03 am

   I’ll meet you half way. I agree R politicians shouldn’t claim to be morally or ethically superior to D’s, and they shouldn’t claim to have better family values than D’s. Those would be very silly claims.

   Still, I haven’t heard any senior-level R politicians make such claims.

   Did either of the R leaders in Congress, Mitch McConnell or John Boehner, ever make such claims?

   Did the most recent winner of the R presidential nomination ever make such claims? Granted, McCain is pro-life. Question: Are you saying McCain should stop being pro-life because he cheated on his first wife? What sense would that make? Does being pro-life equate to “moralizing”? Are pro-life D politicians also moralizers?

   Your sidekick Pundit wrote “Republicans are constantly moralizing”. That’s a nice broad brush.

   Do any of the three most recently elected national R leaders – McCain, McConnell, or Boehner “constantly moralize”?
   If R’s are constantly moralizing, wouldn’t their leaders also do it? What’s an example of any of those three moralizing this week? This month? Year?

   What’s the most recent really good example of any high-level R doing any moralizing? No doubt it happens sometimes but in the context of everything said by R’s, isn’t it very rare? If it were truly constant, or even frequent, there’d be many great examples of it from this month or year.
2. Starbuck says:

   July 1, 2009 at 5:16 pm

   Thanks. I agree it’s a mantra, and it’s difficult to ever end a mantra – especially when D’s and the media (redundant I know) can effectively keep pushing it. They’re smart to do that, and probably they’ll ever want to stop.

   Actually I thought Huckabee was much more blatant than Palin about that stuff. For example, his deliberate public questioning of Romney’s religion believing Satan is Jesus’s brother was a lot more over the line than Palin doing things like praising small town values. She said a few Christian type buzz words too, I realize, but as we’ve seen even Obama has done perhaps a suprising amount of that too and faced little or no criticism for it.

   As long as evangelicals vote in big numbers in R caucuses/primaries in states like Iowa, there will be a real base for Huckabee-like R presidential candidates and like minded convention delegates. But I don’t see it as a dominating faction in the larger party including Congress, governors, etc.

   Btw, you should get them to put a link to you on the wnym home page. You’re not listed under contributors.
3. Brian Castner says:

   June 25, 2009 at 3:02 pm

   Starbuck – you have a legitimate point. I do not hear much moralizing in the last month from McConnell or Boehner. I also didn’t hear it from McCain, a candidate I was happy to support, now or in the campaign. I did hear it from Palin, but all sorts of things came from her mouth.

   Unfortunately, though, a party is not defined by only what has happened in the last month. Its built a reputation over decades. And since Reagan, “Family Values” has been a mantra. That it was dropped by the presidential candidate in the last election is immaterial. There are still a myriad of think tanks with some variation of “American Family Values” in the name. You still have Christian Right leaders who claim to speak for the party, on a variety of “Family Values” platforms and issues. And most importantly, as the Republican Party gets smaller, more Southern, and more concentrated in the Bible Belt, these influences grow. One main reason to grow the party, IMHO, and get a bigger tent, is it marginalizes this talk, and puts us back to a party of issues and policies, and not “values.” Bush won on mobilizing “Values Voters” in 2004. That’s old news – we need to move on, because the country has moved on.