Even as we speak, Democrat leaders are most likely meeting in emergency session to try to figure out what to do about the latest bad news: everybody hates the Pubs and their policies.
Voters' opinions of the Republican Party are now at an all-time low. According to a new WSJ/NBC poll (PDF), Americans' esteem for the Republican Party is at the lowest level ever found in the 21 years they have asked the question. When asked to rate their feelings about the Republican Party the results were:
WSJ/NBC (PDF) (8/5-9)
Opinion about Republican Party
Very Positive 6
Somewhat Positive 18
Neutral 28
Somewhat Negative 24
Very Negative 22The American people have a significantly lower opinion of the Republican Party now than they did at the height of the the 2006 or 2008 elections in which Democrats made large gains. Fortunately for Democrats, while popular opinion about the party has taken a beating, voters still view it more positively than they do the Republican Party. The Democratic Party rated total positive 33 percent to total negative 44 percent, while the Republican Party had total positive 24 percent to total negative 46 percent.
This sort of thing is, of course, extremely worrying to Obama, Axelrod, Rahm, Reid, Pelosi, et al. It suggests that they can't lose, despite all their best efforts to make the doom-and-gloom, pro-Pug prognostications of the corporate media come true. They've continued Bush's most unpopular policies, both his unpopular wars, and given the store away to Wall Street. Jeez, what's a party gotta do to give away an election these days?
But they needn't fret. Obama isn't the leader of the Confederate Democrats for nothin'. As David Sirota has discovered, the O-man is way ahead of them. (Via Avedon)
In recent months, President Obama reversed his campaign promises on trade issues - first by dropping his pledge to renegotiate NAFTA and then by pushing to pass NAFTA-style trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. Now, with the unemployment crisis persisting, the key jobs question is once again front a center in American politics. Specifically: How do we create jobs here at home and build our most valuable 21st century industries?
The first and foremost answer is that our government should stop doing stuff like the program described in this stunning new report from Information Week:
U.S. To Train 3,000 Offshore IT Workers
Despite President Obama's pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $22 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia.
Following their training, the tech workers will be placed with outsourcing vendors in the region that provide offshore IT and business services to American companies looking to take advantage of the Asian subcontinent's low labor costs...
The outsourcing program (is) sure to draw the most fire from critics. While Obama acknowledged that occupations such as garment making don't add much value to the U.S. economy, he argued relentlessly during his presidential run that lawmakers needed to do more to keep hi-tech jobs in IT, biological sciences, and green energy in the country.
Now look, I'm all for a robust foreign aid budget - we don't do nearly enough to help the developing world. However, using foreign aid money to specifically help private corporations "take advantage of low labor costs" in the developing world - that's not "aid," that's rank taxpayer subsidization of for-profit exploitation.
(emphasis in the original)
It's this sort of backward-looking, inside-the-corporate-envelope thinking that could once again lose the day for the Dems. What genius! While people are screaming for help because they need jobs and will vote for anyone who provides them, the Democrat leader has gone out of his way to help greedy corporations move even more of our jobs overseas so they can pocket even higher profits plundering Asia and exploiting the workers in other countries, too.
This kind of initiative is bound to reverse that frightening pro-Democrat trend, making even more voters stay away from the polls on election day because, after all, what difference is there between the parties anyway? Less and less every day. Vote for the GOP and you get terrifying, ludicrous, insane, anti-everything-but-corporations-and-war policies. Vote for the Dems and you get the same pigs dressed up with new hairdos and a fresh shade of lipstick. Why bother?
Robert Gibbs and his ilk will keep the Dem base home and copying the Pubs will keep everybody else away. Result? The only ones who will show up on election day with be the knuckle-dragging, foaming-at-the-mouth, rabid-as-a-skunk-with-rabies wingnut Right, and the Dems will once again have avoided an obvious and easy victory.
Personally, I am filled with admiration for their ingenuity.
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