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Friedman reminds us war is also psychological.
Jane Fonda gave hope to the Vietnamese and sent a signal that America's appetite, for continuing the fight, was ebbing. Then the respected Cronkite said we would never win and that was the icing on Fonda's cake.
The facts on the ground were otherwise. We were within a few more months of winning. However, we had justifiably lost faith in our government leaders, our generals were crippled by the demands of the politicians and we eventually lost our own nerve because we focused on body count and the mounting cost of the war because politicians were not willing to do what it took to win.
Are we ready to repeat these mistakes? Probably, because we do not read, even teach and thus, understand history. We have an untrustworthy and feckless leader in Obama and the news and media play on our psychology with their negativity.
Consequently, it is little wonder that we have become our own worst enemies! (See 1 and 1a below.)
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My friend and fellow memo reader, John Fund, is offering you sound advice. Go see "America" which opens this week nationwide!
This may be the last hope for most Americans to learn about the history of their country.
More than half now believe America is a cow with endless udders!
This is why I am discouraged about our future. (See 2 below.)
More than half now believe America is a cow with endless udders!
This is why I am discouraged about our future. (See 2 below.)
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Netanyahu - how many cheeks must Israel turn before you get it?
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More legal cases are on the horizon threatening Obamacare. (See 3 below.)
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The incoherent center. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) The Sunni Ramadan Offensive and the Lessons of Tet
In February 1968, the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong launched a general offensive in Vietnam during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. From mid-1966 onward, the North Vietnamese had found themselves under increasing pressure from American and South Vietnamese forces. They were far from defeated, but they were weakening and the likelihood of their military victory was receding. The North Vietnamese decided to reverse the course of the war militarily and politically by marshaling available forces, retaining only limited reserves and going on the offensive throughout South Vietnam.
The attack had three strategic purposes. First, the North Vietnamese wanted to trigger a general uprising against the Americans and the South Vietnamese government. Second, they wanted to move the insurgency to the next stage by seizing and holding significant territory and resisting counterattack. And third, they wanted to destabilize their enemy psychologically by demonstrating that intelligence reports indicating their increasing weakness were wrong. They also wanted to impose casualties on the Americans at an unprecedented rate. The American metric in the war was the body count; increasing the body count dramatically would therefore create a crisis of confidence in the U.S. public and within the military and intelligence community.
General Offensives and Crises of Confidence
From a military standpoint, the offensive was a failure. The North Vietnamese military was crippled by its losses. While seizing Hue and other locations, the North Vietnamese were unable to hold them. But they succeeded psychologically and politically by raising doubts about U.S. intelligence and by creating a political crisis in the United States. In war, perception of the enemy's strength and will, and confidence in your own evaluation of those things, shifts the manner in which one fights. The U.S. intelligence estimate before Tet was more right than wrong, but by marshaling all forces for a general offensive, the North caused U.S. trust in that evaluation to collapse. Even though the North Vietnamese were militarily far weaker after the offensive, the military failure proved less relevant than this creation of a crisis of confidence.
The use of a general offensive to reverse military decline is not unique to Tet. The Germans did the same in their offensive in 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge. While the Germans also had a military intent, their psychological intent was as important. Before the battle, the Allies thought the Germans were finished. They were, and so the Germans had to show they still had power. They accordingly threw their reserves into a battle to break the Allies' nerve.
When launched at a time when it is assumed it could not be launched, the general offensive is a powerful weapon. Such an offensive is now underway in Iraq. When we step back, we see a broad offensive by Sunni jihadists underway in a range of countries. In Afghanistan, a massive summer offensive is underway in parts of the country once regarded as secure. To the south, the Pakistani Taliban launched a major offensive a few weeks ago that sparked a Pakistani counteroffensive, putting the Pakistani Taliban on the defensive. In Syria, while the Islamic State (formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) has not surged, it also has not declined. Southern Jordan has meanwhile seen clashes between jihadists and government forces. In the Palestinian territories, Hamas has announced, though not launched, a third intifada. To the west, Egypt is experiencing terrorism, while in Libya jihadists have asserted themselves in various ways.
The Question of Coordination
Like the Vietnamese and Germans, the jihadists have, broadly speaking, been on the defensive in recent years, and in many cases they had been dismissed as broken. They differ from the Vietnamese and Germans in the sense that they do not constitute a single force. The question remains, however, whether there has been coordination between these offensives. Clearly, the Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi offensives are linked. Not so clear is whether they are operationally linked to events in Afghanistan and Pakistan or North Africa. To the extent there was coordination, it would have come from Saudi Arabia. As one might imagine, Saudi actions are deliberately murky, so it is difficult to establish anything definitive here. But the Saudis are most threatened by the prospect of a U.S.-Iranian entente. The Saudis also find the jihadists useful for domestic political purposes and as a lever to maximize regional Saudi influence.
There are small hints here and there of coordination, such as this video. But mysteries always have small hints that one can pretend combine to prove something. So far, we see nothing definitive indicating overall coordination. But in a certain sense, it doesn't matter. These uprisings have occurred close enough to each other that they have had the same effect regardless of whether they were coordinated -- giving rise to a sense that the situation in the region is destabilizing dramatically and that jihadist strength has been underestimated.
In a sense, there was no need for coordination because in each theater jihadists were responding to the same three processes. First, there was the increasing evidence that the United States is drawing down its forces such that the door is open to broader jihadist military action. Second, American negotiations with Iran have created a fear among Sunnis, including in Saudi Arabia, that the entire political structure of the region is about to tilt massively against them. And third, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt and even Syria all saw recent elections intended to create lasting regimes unfriendly to the jihadists. Within the past few months, these factors combined to force action by the jihadists with or without overt coordination.
Redefining Politics
Jihadists in particular -- and many Sunni populations in mixed countries like Iraq -- either individually, regionally or in coordination launched an offensive designed to make their military power appear as large as possible and thereby redefine politics in areas where their political influence has declined in recent years. Iraq is the most obvious example of this.
The country is divided into three regions. The Shia, the largest group, control the Baghdad government and massive oil reserves in the south. In the north, the Kurds are well-organized and well-defended and also control oil supplies. The Sunnis have little access to oil, are smaller in numbers than the Shia and have become increasingly marginalized since the creation of the post-Saddam Iraqi government. Given that a new government was being formed after recent elections with the same structure as before, the Sunnis had to throw their reserves into the battle. If taken seriously, the threat of a Sunni military force that can seize the country gives the Sunnis a seat at the table, both politically and economically.
From news reports, it would appear that a massive Sunni army is marching in the country -- exactly the image the Islamic State wants to portray. The reality is more modest. This is less an invasion of Shiite or Kurdish territory than an uprising within the Sunni regions in favor of the Islamic State, which is limiting itself to consolidating power within the Sunni region. It is not clear how the group will cope if the Shia reorganize their military and strike north and west or if the Kurds were to attack. Still, the Sunni offensive has hit Iraqi Shiite self-confidence hard. Shiite self-confidence could shatter, or the Shia could draw together and counterattack. If the latter, the Islamic State might fight poorly or well against the Shia. The Islamic State hopes Shiite confidence collapses in the face of all this uncertainty.
This uncertainty has had the same effect on the Americans and Iranians that it has had on the Shia. Neither the United States nor Iran seems to have expected an attack of this magnitude. Both seemed to be operating on intelligence evaluations that made it appear that Iraq was stabilizing under a Shiite-dominated government and that the real issue was how to manage Kurdish oil sales. The Islamic State wants to make the United States and Iran wary of their respective intelligence estimates, and therefore wary of taking any political or military action in Iraq. So far, the Islamic State has succeeded in creating panic in Iraq and wariness in outside countries.
Gauging an Offensive's Success
We will soon start to learn if the general offensive has worked, destroying old assumptions and creating uncertainty. This will be measured differently in each country. Will the fighting in Jordan spread? Can the Afghan Taliban seize and hold territory as the United States draws down to limited forces? If the Pakistani military puts the Pakistani Taliban on the run but they survive, does their mere survival threaten the regime?
The general offensive from a position of weakness can work, but it takes a combination of fragmentation, indifference and misunderstanding. The Tet offensive is the classic success. The Bulge is the classic failure. The North Vietnamese made the American media vastly overestimate northern military strength. At the Battle of the Bulge, Patton was not impressed by the German offensive and urged that the Germans be allowed to roll on to Paris so as to burn up all their fuel. As with both earlier general offensives, first reports of jihadist military success should be taken with a grain of salt.
Evaluating the offensive will give us a better sense of Iraq as the Iraqi army tries to mount a counteroffensive. But we must not focus on Iraq: This is a broader general offensive from Pakistan to the Mediterranean, whether coordinated or not. Some theaters will see failure, others success as Tet did. And though Tet serves as an imperfect historical comparison, there is a powerful parallel: At a time when reasonable people thought that the fighting had been contained in Iraq and elsewhere in the region, they have discovered that there was no basis for that assumption. And that reminds us of Tet.
1a) Patrick Snow, Author, Creating Your Own Destiny
Subject: Fwd: Saudi Arabia and Bossy The Cow
1a) Patrick Snow, Author, Creating Your Own Destiny
Subject: Fwd: Saudi Arabia and Bossy The Cow
Whoever really runs things these days for the semi-mummified royal administration down in Saudi Arabia must be leaving skid-marks in his small-clothes thinking about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his ISIS army of psychopathic killers sweeping hither and thither through what is again being quaintly called “the Levant.” ISIS just concluded an orgy of crucifixions up in Syria over the weekend, the victims being other Islamic militants who were not radical enough, or who had dallied with US support.
Crucifixion sends an interesting and complex message to various parties around this systemically fracturing globe. It’s a step back from the disabling horror of video beheadings, but it still packs a punch. For the Christian West, it re-awakens a certain central cultural narrative that had gone somnolent there for a century or so. ISIS’s message: If you thought the Romans were bad…. Among the human race, you see, the memories linger.
ISIS has successfully shocked the world over the last two weeks by negating eight years, several trillion dollars, and 4,500 battle deaths in the USA’s endeavor to turn Iraq into an obedient oil dispensary. Now they have gone and announced that their conquests of the moment amount to a Caliphate, that is, an Islamic theocracy. In that sense, they are at least out-doing America’s Republican Party, which has been trying to do something similar here from sea to shining sea but finds itself thwarted by hostile blue states on both coasts.More to the point, the press (another quaint term, I suppose) is not paying any attention whatsoever to what goes down with ISIS and the other states besides Iraq and Syria in the region. I aver to Saudi Arabia especially because Americans seem to regard it as an impregnable bastion against the bloodthirsty craziness spreading over the rest of the Muslim world. Saudi Arabia is, of course, the keystone of OPEC. Saudi Arabia has had the distinction of remaining stable through all the escalating tumult of recent decades, reliably pumping out its roughly 10 million barrels a day like Bossy the cow in America’s oil import barn.Or seeming to remain stable, I should say, because the Saud family royal administration of mummified rulers and senile princes looks more and more like a Potemkin monarchy every month. 90-year-old King Abdullah has been rumored to be on life support lo these last two years, his successor brothers already dead and gone, and other powerful Arabian clans with leaders who can walk across a room and speak itching to kick this zombie Saud family off the throne. To make matters worse, the Sauds have also managed to sponsor much of the organized Sunni terrorism in the region (around the world, really) in their role as the chief enemy of the Shia — as represented by the politicized clergy of Iran.
Things are happening at lightning speed over in the region and beware of how the turmoil spreads from one flashpoint to another. This would be an opportunity for ISIS to put the Saud family on the spot regarding the just-announced Caliphate — as in the question: who really calls the shots for this new theocratic kingdom? (Answer: maybe not you, doddering, mummified, America suck-up Saudi Arabia). What’s more, what happens to the other kingdoms and rickety states in that corner of the world? For instance, Lebanon, which has been a sort of political demolition derby for three decades. The founder of the group al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), pre-cursor to ISIS, was the Lebanese Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi — blown up in a USA air strike some years ago. Lebanon has been under the sway of Hezbollah for a decade and Hezbollah is sponsored by Shi’ite Iran, making it an enemy of ISIS. Might ISIS roll westward over Hezbollah now to capture the pearl of the Mediterranean (or what’s left of it) Beirut? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Then there’s Jordan, and it’s youngish King Abdullah, another notorious USA ass-kisser. Those crucifixion photos coming out of Syria must be making him a little loose in the bowels. And, of course, Syria, where this whole thing started, is a smoldering rump-roast of a state. And finally, that bugbear in the bull’s-eye of the old Levant: Israel.
It is miraculous that Israel has managed so far to stay out of the way of this juggernaut. Of course, among its chief enemies are Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s foster father, Iran, which happen to be the enemy of ISIS and, of course, in that part of the world the enemy of my enemy is my ally — though, I’m sorry, it’s rather impossible to imagine Israel getting all chummy with the psychopaths of ISIS. One thing is a fact: all other things being equal, Israel has the capability of turning any other state or kingdom in the region into an ashtray, if push came to shove. Voila: World War Three
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2) D’Souza’s America
Dinesh D’Souza takes on Obama, Hillary, Saul Alinsky, and Howard Zinn in a single bold film.
By John Fund
- The Fourth of July weekend is coming up, and this year you can do something other than fireworks and a barbecue to celebrate our nation’s freedom.
- Dinesh D’Souza, the controversial social commentator who shook up Hollywood with the $33 million earned by the theatrical release of his Obama 2016, is back with a more polished and more powerful message.
- At one level, his message in America: Imagine a World Without Her is deeply pessimistic: “The American dream is shrinking because some of our leaders want it to shrink. Decline, in other words, has become a policy objective. And if this decline continues at the current pace, America as we know it will cease to exist. In effect, we will have committed national suicide.”
- But most people will leave the theater with a more optimistic conclusion: Much of the criticism of America taught in the nation’s schools is easily refuted, America is worth saving, and we have the tools to do so in our DNA, just waiting to be harnessed.
- In an interview at a preview ofAmerica, D’Souza acknowledged that critics will try to discredit his message by attacking the messenger. A few months ago, he pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations that could conceivably land him in prison when he is sentenced in September. D’Souza includes in the film a brief section on his legal troubles; in this, he clearly conveys his view that he was selectively prosecuted. But viewers should take the film on its own merits, he says, regardless of what they think of him.
- "I intend to turn the progressive critique on its head,” he says in the film’s accompanying book, of the same name. “[Progressives] are not on the side of the ordinary citizen, because their policies lead to stagnation, impoverishment, indebtedness, and decline — all in evidence today. It is progressives who rely on government seizure and bureaucratic conquest to achieve their goals and increase their power. . . . I intend to blow the whistle on these people, starting with Obama and continuing with Hillary Clinton and the whole progressive menagerie.”
- The current bitter partisanship we now see is a result of America’s division into two groups, D’Souza says: one that is a product of the 1960s cultural revolution, and another that never quite embraced the values of the 1960s. He notes that economist Joseph Schumpeter warned that capitalism produces “creative destruction” that topples traditional institutions and traditional mores. The material abundance created by capitalism erodes the qualities of hard work, self-discipline, and deferred gratification that produced that abundance in the first place.
- Just how much those old values have been undermined is at the heart of the most controversial part of America. D’Souza points out that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were acolytes of the great left-wing “community organizer” Saul Alinsky. D’Souza is the first filmmaker to mine the rich material showing the radicalism of Alinksy, who was personally tutored by Al Capone’s deputies in the tactics of the mob and who even dedicated his most famous book, Rules for Radicals, to a master Machiavellian: the Devil himself.
- In America, an actress portrays a young Hillary Rodham as she’s led from her roots as a “Goldwater Girl” into campus radicalism through meetings with Alinsky. Later, she would use her senior thesis at Wellesley to paint an admiring portrait of Alinsky. “If Hillary Clinton is elected in 2016, the baton will have passed from one America to another,” D’Souza warns.
- For young people, and young adults who were taught spongy “social studies” rather than true American history, the most valuable parts of the movie might be those in which D’Souza tackles America’s greatest sins: its treatment of Native Americans, slavery, the transfer of half of Mexico to the U.S. after the Mexican War of 1848, and its supposed colonialist behavior. Consider his treatment of those subjects as his direct rebuttal to the works of radical historian Howard Zinn, whose textbooks treating America’s history as one of ceaseless oppression dominate many American high schools and colleges.
- "The Indians have gotten a bad deal,” he notes in his book. “At the same time, we should be clear about what the alternatives are. . . . You say, ‘Give us back the Black Hills,’ You point out that there is uranium and other minerals in those hills, and now that land is worth a fortune. Once again, no Indian tribe knew how to mine uranium and no Indian tribe knew what to do with uranium if they had it. Other Americans have added value to the Black Hills by figuring out how to tap its resources, and now the Indians want the land back so they can take advantage of what others have figured out how to do.”
- He takes a similarly hard line with the demands of some Latinos to return land that once belonged to Mexico: “After the war, the United States immediately recognized as valid the property rights of Mexicans who were now part of U.S. territory. The change was not in any individual’s land ownership but in the fact that people who were once Mexicans now became Americans. . . . While progressives deplore American aggression . . . what we do know is that the vast majority of Mexicans who ended up on the American side of the border, following the Mexican War, never attempted to return to Mexico. And neither have their descendants.”
- “Did America owe something to the slaves whose labor had been stolen?” he asks in the book. Yes, he says, but “that debt . . . is best discharged through memory, because the slaves are dead and their descendants are better off as a consequence of their ancestors being hauled from Africa to America.” He notes that when the great boxer Muhammad Ali won one of his most famous fights (the “rumble in the jungle” against George Foreman in Zaire in the 1970s), he was asked by a reporter, “Champ, what did you think of Africa?” Ali replied, “Thank God my grandaddy got on that boat!” Ali recognized, D’Souza boldly claims, “that for all the horror of slavery, it was the transmission belt that brought Africans into the orbit of Western freedom.” He quotes the black writer Zora Neale Hurston: “I have no personal memory of those times, and no responsibility for them. Neither has the grandson of the man who held my folks. . . . I have no intention of wasting my time beating on old graves. . . . Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and that is worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.” D’Souza also notes that slavery has been a worldwide phenomenon throughout most of human history, and that whites were often enslaved — it’s hardly a sin unique to America, which fought a civil war to free its slaves.
- As you can divine, D’Souza’s film and his accompanying book are a no-holds-barred assault on the contemporary doctrine of political correctness. While he has an advantage on some of the topics he tackles — he is a dark-skinned immigrant from India — one must give him credit for wielding his sword at so many PC dragons in one sitting.
- John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for NRO.
At its heart, America is a celebration of its title subject, and nothing so exemplifies this than the closing credits over which a band moored on a barge near the Statue of Liberty belts out the most unusual and yet stirring rendition of our national anthem you are likely ever to have heard. Like its subject, America isn’t perfect and its arguments sometimes aren’t sophisticated. But it’s the perfect film to take the family to on a Fourth of July. I wager that when it opens on 1,000 screens on July 2, it will double or triple the box-office take of D’Souza’s first film. Here’s hoping it begins a long-overdue national conversation about the true meaning of America.
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- 3)Get ready for an even bigger threat to Obamacare
- By JONATHAN TURLEY
TheHalbig case challenges the massive federal subsidies in the form of tax credits made available to people with financial need who enroll in the program. In crafting the act, Congress created incentives for states to set up health insurance exchanges and disincentives for them to opt out. The law, for example, made the subsidies available only to those enrolled in insurance plans through exchanges "established by the state."
But despite that carrot — and to the great surprise of the administration — some 34 states opted not to establish their own exchanges, leaving it to the federal government to do so. This left the White House with a dilemma: If only those enrollees in states that created exchanges were eligible for subsidies, a huge pool of people would be unable to afford coverage, and the entire program would be in danger of collapse.
Indeed, the Halbig plaintiffs — individuals and small businesses in six states that didn't establish state exchanges — objected that, without the tax credits, they could have claimed exemption from the individual mandate penalty because they would be deemed unable to pay for the coverage. If the courts agree with them, the costs would go up in all 34 states that didn't establish state exchanges, and the resulting exemptions could lead to a mass exodus from Obamacare.
But the D.C. Circuit Court may see things quite differently, especially in light of recent Supreme Court opinions holding that the Obama administration has exceeded its authority and violated separation of powers.The administration attempted to solve the problem by simply declaring that even residents of states without their own exchanges were eligible for subsidies, even though the law seemed to specifically say they were not. The administration argues that although the statute's language does limit subsidies to residents of places with exchanges "established by the state," that wording actually referred to any exchange, including those established by the federal government. In January, a district court judge upheld that interpretation, allowing the subsidies to continue.
In Michigan vs. Bay Mills Indian Community, for example, Justice Elena Kagan noted that "this court does not revise legislation … just because the text as written creates an apparent anomaly as to some subject it does not address." In Utility Air Regulatory Group vs. EPA, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, stressed that "an agency has no power to tailor legislation to bureaucratic policy goals by rewriting unambiguous statutory terms." And a third strike came last week in National Labor Relations Board vs. Canning, when the Supreme Court unanimously found that President Obama had violated the Constitution in circumventing Congress through his use of recess appointments.
If the ruling goes against the White House, it's hard to overstate the impact. Without subsidies, consumers in 34 states would face huge additional costs and, because of those costs, potential exemptions from the law. And voters — a substantial percentage of whom have never liked Obamacare — would be further alienated from the Democratic Party just in time for midterm elections.The D.C. Circuit Court is expected to rule any day now on the Halbig case, and supporters of the Affordable Care Act are growing nervous. In January, an Obamacare advocate described the Halbig case to a reporter for the Hill as "probably the most significant existential threat to the Affordable Care Act. All the other lawsuits that have been filed really don't go to the heart of the ACA, and this one would have." And in a fraught oral argument before the D.C. Circuit Court, the administration seemed to struggle to defend its interpretation.
Moreover, a ruling against the administration would mean that Obama has been responsible for ordering what could amount to billions of dollars to be paid from the federal Treasury without authority. And it would mean the administration has committed yet another violation of the separation of powers.
The administration's loss in the Hobby Lobby case is a bitter pill to swallow, but it is not a lethal threat to Obamacare. For critics of the law, Halbig is everything that Hobby Lobby is not. Where Hobby Lobby exempts only closely held corporations from a portion of the ACA rules, Halbig could allow an mass exodus from the program. And like all insurance programs, it only works if large numbers are insured so that the risks are widely spread. Halbig could leave Obamacare on life support — and lead to another showdown in the Supreme Court.
Jonathan Turley is a professor of law at George Washington University and has testified in Congress on the executive orders under the Affordable Care Act.
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Here's another: Groups broadly sympathetic to the Democratic Party significantly outnumber those sympathetic to the Republican Party. But in the smaller but influential universe of the ideologically committed, conservative Republicans outnumber liberal Democrats. The larger Democratic coalition has mixed convictions while the smaller Republican core is filled with passionate intensity.
Every decade or so, the Pew Research Center sorts the American electorate into discrete groupings with interesting names. Pioneered by the legendary pollster Andrew Kohut in 1987, the political typology helps clarify reality by making the complexity of public opinion understandable. Voters aren't "inconsistent." They just don't conform to a pre-fabricated left-center-right world.
Pew's latest map of public opinion finds the electorate divided into eight groups. One of them, "Bystanders," consists of Americans simply disconnected from politics. Three groups are the "anchors" of partisanship: "Steadfast Conservatives" and "Business Conservatives" are the bedrock of the Republican Party, while "Solid Liberals" are staunch Democrats.
The Republican "anchors" reflect the fundamental split in the GOP. The Steadfast group is conservative across the board, while the Business group is more pro-immigration and pro-Wall Street. This split does not overlap with the conflict over the tea party, since both groups are about equally partial to the movement. At the other end, Solid Liberals are, as their name suggests, "liberal across the board" on major issues.
The two conservative groups constitute 22 percent of the general public (12 percent in the Steadfast category, 10 percent in the Business camp) while Solid Liberals account for 15 percent. The conservative lead widens (27 percent versus 17 percent) among registered voters, and it's wider still among politically engaged Americans -- 36 percent of them belong to the conservative groups, only 21 percent to the liberal one.
So if you wonder why Republicans have a hard time being moderate or conciliatory, the answer is clear enough: The bulk of their support comes from tuned-in, ideological conservatives. In the Democratic coalition, liberals are important but not dominant.
So why aren't Republicans sweeping the country? The explanation can be found in the political center, and Pew has bad news for those searching for a vital middle-ground politics. The center, the report finds, is "fragmented" because "there are many distinct voices in the center, often with as little in common with each other as with those who are on the left and the right."
And it's in the center where Democrats enjoy a major advantage. Of the four "less partisan, less predictable" groups, three lean Democratic.
The "Faith and Family Left" (15 percent of the electorate) is racially diverse, religious, pro-government and tilts socially conservative. The "Hard-Pressed Skeptics" (13 percent) are financially stressed pessimists who believe in government programs, preferred President Obama by a 40-point margin in 2012, but now lean Democratic in this fall's congressional races by only 14 points. The "Next Generation Left" (12 percent) is made up of younger social liberals who support an activist government but worry about the cost of social programs.
The "Young Outsiders," the sole Republican-leaning center group, have conservative views on government and economics but not on social issues and constitute 14 percent of the public.
Combining all of Pew's categories, the pro-Republican groups add up to only 36 percent of the public, the pro-Democratic groups to 55 percent. (The rest are Bystanders.) Among registered voters, the Democratic-leaning groups have an edge of about 3-to-2 over the Republicans.
So why don't Democrats win every election? We are back to intensity and to the fact that middle-ground Democratic groups have qualms about the party they lean toward. For 2014, the GOP groups are mobilized and largely united. Democrats, the survey found, are suffering a fall-off from their 2012 margins, particularly among the Hard-Pressed Skeptics and the Faith and Family crowd.
These numbers suggest that the outcome in November will depend in large part on the Democrats' ability to strengthen themselves among voters still hurting economically -- one reason Obama is having so many town halls in the heartland this summer -- and to boost both turnout and support among the Faith and Family voters.
The bottom line: Republicans are prisoners of an older, deeply conservative base. The Democrats are hostage to a politically diverse but easily splintered coalition. And good luck to those trying to find a viable center.
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