Several weeks ago I made the statement the that a greater proportion of corporate money goes to the Democratic treasure chest than goes to its Republican equivalent.
Nobody picked it up which surprised me. Further, nobody even asked how that could be true. Well, the reason it is true is because the Republican Party has an incredibly effective grass-roots program. The Democrats have nothing like it. Large amounts of money come from the Republican grass-roots. So much so that we have this curious statistic that the proportion of corporate money which goes to the Republicans is less than that which goes to the Democrats.
The enormous advantage of grass-roots program is that it's it remains effective all the time including between elections.
I suspect the Democratic "grass-roots" reaches a fever pitch at election time then disappears until the next big event. However that didn't work this time. The Democrats just simply stayed away from the polls. I suspect this was because they had nothing to vote for.
In California, our crooked and marvelously incompetent Democrat governor won with barely 48% of the vote. Running against a political novice who wasn't really supported by his own party, he spent some $50 million to beat his inadequate opponent by 300,000 votes.
(The reason he had an inadequate opponent was because he spent lots of money during the Republican primary slamming a much better candidate. The Republicans took the bait, threw the good candidate into the discard, and chose the candidate who could not possibly win -- but who then surprised everyone.)
This is what the latest Economist said about the Bush win. Even the London Guardian has bemusedly woken up. All I can say is (again) I warned you all about Bush.
Harry
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(Full article on the Economist web page.)
The mid-term elections
By George!
Nov 7th 2002
From The Economist print edition
A great result for the president. Now to build on it
THE mid-term elections are seldom a cause for celebration in the White House. Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton all saw their parties take a hammering in the congressional elections half-way through their first terms. Not George Bush. That much-dismissed "accidental president" of a "50-50 nation" has pulled off the best result for a first-term president since FDR. Against the odds, not only did the Republicans strengthen their grip on the House; they also retook the Senate and seem to have restricted the Democrats to gathering a few new governorships.
This is a considerable achievement. Senate and gubernatorial races tend to revolve around local issues and personalities. All the same, the president worked his jeans off for his party, campaigning in 15 states in six days. Despite a dithering economy and a plunging stockmarket, his own approval ratings remain extremely high and they seem to have made all the difference in several tight races. Nor was the result just an inevitable act of loyalty to the chief in the wake of September 11th. Mr Bush has cannily out-manoeuvred his opponents, leaving the Democrats in a muddle over the economy and Iraq. The White House even unusually intervened to help select several of the winning Republican candidates: if the California Republicans had bothered to listen, they might even have won back the governorship of the Golden State.
And he can't even talk right
At the very least, Mr Bush's critics abroad, especially in Europe, need to reappraise that clueless cowboy who stole an election and is driving the world to hell in a stetson. (True to form, the London Guardian seems suddenly to have decided that the idiot might, secretly of course, actually be rather shrewd: "Goddamn, he's good," it breezed this week.)
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Harry Pollard
Henry George School of LA
Box 655
Tujunga CA 91042
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tel: (818) 352-4141
Fax: (818) 353-2242
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