Kansas City Star (AP): Poll: 4 out of 5 Americans don't trust Washington
I thought the last two paragraphs of this article were keepers:
… But Matthew Dowd, a top strategist on Bush's re-election campaign who now shuns the GOP label, says both Republicans and Democrats are missing the mark.
"What the country wants is a community solution to the problems but not necessarily a federal government solution," Dowd said. Democrats are emphasizing the federal government, while Republicans are saying it's about the individual; neither is emphasizing the right combination to satisfy Americans, he said.
And this is precisely what partisans on both sides don't seem to get. For liberals, whenever someone says, for instance, "Society needs to care for the poor," the word society is merely a synonym for "federal government." Government plays the dominant, not supportive, role. And when conservatives talk about freedom and rights, there is a frequent absence of rhetoric about what it means to be civic-minded people concerned about the least of these. In my book, the first party that determines the agenda needs to be about the intermediate and intermediary institutions bigger than the individual and smaller than the federal government wins the people's hearts for the next generation or two.
Leave a Reply to PamBGCancel reply