The “center-right” myth lives on, though the major players no longer bother reciting it, so threadbare and unpersuasive has it become. Now it’s left to the sub-pundits, the “strategists” and “advisers” who make their careers pretending that politics is no different, fundamentally, than pro hockey:
The second organization founded this past week chose the name Resurgent Republic, and has as its leaders two veteran Republican campaign strategists and advisers: Ed Gillespie, who most recently was a Bush White House counselor, and Whit Ayres, a pollster and strategist for an array of GOP candidates in recent years.
In its launch, the organization stressed its view that conservative positions were not as out of favor as Obama’s successes might make it appear. “America remains a center-right country,” Ayres argues. “They perceive Barack Obama as a liberal, and they perceive themselves as center-right. They voted for him not to support liberal policies but because he represented change.“
What electorate is this, that believes in “center-right” values and deliberately votes for a candidate who opposes those values because they want “change” from what they actually want? No wonder Mencken called democracy “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Tags: center-right, democracy, H.L. Mencken
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