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Jindal did badly. I don't know anything about Steele to know if he earned his post. Obama did so it's possible Steele did too.



Steele's a moderate who's always been highly critical of the party. He may turn out to be just what the party needed, but his choice was blatant tokenism. The only thing he has in common with Obama is a year-round tan.

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Obama is writing the Republican platform for the next several elections via deficient spending and removing Bush's fiscal record as a talking point for the Democrats: Obama is already planning on a 2009 deficit 4x larger than any ever before, *before* dealing with the financial system problems. His 2009 budget deficit could easy top $2.5T, with only a third of that related to dealing with the recession.

Likewise he's created a severe tax-increase problem that will likely force back-tracking during his re-election bid. There isn't nearly enough money to pay for his programs unless tax rates are raised to 100%, right down to the $75k income bracket. Since that won't happen a lot of promises will have to be dropped.

The biggest advantage the Democrats have is that the Republicans haven't figured out how to muzzle their I'm-Stupid-And-Proud-Of-It part of the party. It took the Democrats a decade to get their idiot half to shut up long enough to win an election, and the Republicans may find theirs no quicker to muzzle.

The best news fro the Republicans is that Obama's win wasn't that big, especially when you look at the circumstances (the Bush factor, economic meltdown). Republicans can turn that around by merely recapturing Republican voters who crossed parties. Moreover, most of the job losses are already on Obama and it will get worse unless he does something.



All that's true and a pefect example of why the GOP is foundering. Obama inherited a world of intractable shit, and it'll be a near impossibility for him to solve the economic and security problems to any considerable degree within his first term. So yes, there'll be every opportunity for the Republicans to exploit his failure and ressurect themselves. But it's precisely their preoccupation with solving this problem, rather than the problems of the country that's got them in a nose-dive. If they weren't so damn terrified of Obama succeeding, were willing to put politics on the back burner, and concede that the Bush program was a complete and utter failure, the voters would ultimately give them credit for it. But the tragic character flaws of each party are, respectively, that the Republicans always take the low road, and so will always look petty and small-minded, and that Dems consistently take the high road, leave themselves vulnerable to Republican attacks, and look weak. There are plenty of brilliant minds in the Republican party, but it's disheartening to think that the wingnuts that are setting their agenda lately would actually like to see the new president fail.

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. THEN, picking Bobby "Slumdog" Jindal to deliver the mother of all humbug responses to Obama's address to congress.




But remember folks...it's the right-wingers who are racist.




Everyone's a racist. I don't fault the right for that. But I do fault them for the boneheaded presumption that female voters will vote for a woman just because she's a woman... and that putting a few brown faces on television can erase the memory of decades of indifference to minority issues.
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"We had part of a Slinky - but I straightened it."