NightFox
Wildling
Agreed, I think the citizenry made a HUGE mistaken when they allowed politician to become a profession, the country didnāt start that way and we were better for it. A farmer would STAND (not run) for office, go do a few years of public service representing his/her constituents and then go back to his/her profession of farming, never lost touch because he/she never became something other than he/she was, a common citizen farmer.Then how do these dickweeds keep getting elected using completely focused grouped, empty arguments? Apparently those D.C. focus groups are pretty good at telling politicians what the people outside of D.C. want to hear.Thatās a great point, it does seem that our Congress Critters in the aggregate are WAY out of touch with the average Americans sense of priorities, which seems odd in our highly focused grouped political system.I donāt disagree, but isnāt a āmoderateā determined by the middle ground of public opinion at any given point in time (aka āThe Overton Windowā) ? Where do Democrats and Republicans fall with respect to that?Ray, You donāt believe that there are many āmoderateā Democrats?You will quickly find 80 percent of the lefties all claim to be moderates.
You see them all over this forum. They claim they are moderates, who just happen to side with the Democrats over 90% of the time.
Honestly as a libertarian, itās hard to tell what āmoderateā means anymore, itās become a pretty murky term to nail down, however I suspect that most partisans from either party consider themselves āmoderateā in one way or another. The Overton Window has moved so much from where it was just a decade ago, that what we once believed as āconservativeā core principles or āliberalā core principles rarely seem to apply anymore.
The Democrats "official" platform has moved WAY further to the left over the past decade than the GOP has moved in any direction. Any Democrat who has views similar to a Joe Lieberman-type moderate is radically out of sync with the current Democrat platform, which is on a trajectory to move even further left based on its young leadership.
Is Donald Trump āfar rightā with respect to the center of public opinion today?
Is Joe Biden āfar leftā with respect to the center of public opinion today?
Opinion polls seem to indicate that weāre by in large a ācenter rightā country, but itās relative, the ācenterā seems to have moved to the left in the last few decades.
Without question the center has moved left in some respects. The way I'm looking at left and right is based on the definitions in political theory, applied to the policies being advanced by each party's elected leaders. That said, if you look at any poll on the approval rating of Congress, it's pretty clear there's a big disparity between the center of public opinion and the things our elected leaders are prioritizing
Bound to happen when your pool of potential focus group participants consists of the Washington D.C. area.
I don't know if they're actually doing that, or it's just that the candidates for federal political offices are generally piss poor and seem to be getting worse, attracting people with a predilection for dishonesty and motivation to become wealthy...a bad combination for that type of work...and basically leaving us with a bunch of clones that differ only by who is less shitty.
In all seriousness, money from special interest groups and lobbyists is the primary reason the priorities of our elected representatives are so out of touch with the priorities of their constituents. And that needs to be reigned in and ended if things are ever going to get better. If holding congressional office stops becoming a ticket to the millionaires club, we're more likely to end up with people who have a genuine interest in representing the interests of their constituents and the betterment of the country overall.
Nowadays, we have people in elected office that have never really been anything Else but a politician (yes Obama Iām looking at YOU), they have no frame of reference for what the average citizen really needs.
The current system SUCKS, it takes perfectly reasonable citizens and turns them in professional, power and money grubbing liars.