Something very interesting is going on out there. About a month before election day, Barack Obama is surging in the polls. Atlantic writer Marc Ambinder puts it this way:You sort of need a ticker to follow it all.... CNN/ORC Florida: Obama at 54% among registered voters (really)...Obama up by four among likely voters in Nevada...up by double digits in Minnesota...tied in Missouri...nine points ahead among likely voters in Virginia...polls from Time...NBC News/WSJ/MySpace......the AP...
Some of Ambinder's readers are getting way ahead of themselves. "I'm getting lots of e-mails speculating about the 2012 frontrunner for Republicans," he writes. He thinks it'll be Huckabee. At this point, I could care less. Predicting the way the hell and gone future is for fools and psychics -- which may be redundant.
Over at Slate, Timothy Noah wonders, "GOP, RIP?" -- asking whether the Republican party is over, at least for the short term. The ideology of the GOP, as retooled by Reagan, looks like a big fat failure at this moment in history, with the recent market crash (or rather crashes) actually being the other shoe dropping.
"It should be remembered that a fundamentalist belief in untrammeled capitalism is not the first but, rather, the second pillar of Reagan-style Republicanism to fall," Noah tells us. "The first was the belief that the United States should extend military power wherever enemies lurk, regardless of what our allies do." It's not the market that's the Republican problem, but a bullheaded foreign policy combined with the market. The failure of deregulation isn't the beginning of the end, the end began the day the first American boot left a footprint in Iraqi sand in 2003. The failure of laissez faire economics was just the final straw...
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