More to the point – Has the Conservative moment arrived?

Has the liberal moment come and gone?

By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
09/30/09 7:16 AM EDT

A new Gallup poll shows a sharp increase in the number of people who say they want the government to promote “traditional values.”

Gallup’s question was simple: “Some people think the government should promote traditional values in our society. Others think the government should not favor any particular set of values. Which comes closer to your own view?” In the new poll, taken in the first days of September, 53 percent of respondents say they want the government to promote traditional values, while 42 percent say they do not want the government to favor any particular set of values. Five percent do not have an opinion.

The results are a significant change from recent years. For most of the last two decades, a majority of people have been in favor of the government promoting traditional values. But that number began to decline in 2005, and the number of people who believe the government should not favor any particular set of values began to rise. Last September, when Gallup asked the same question, the public was split down the middle on the issue, 48 percent to 48 percent. Now, opinion has rather abruptly gone back to the old position, and there’s an 11-point gap between the two, in favor of traditional values.

By the way, the Gallup pollsters did not define “traditional values” when asking the question. “Thus, respondents answer in light of their understanding of the term,” Gallup writes. But Gallup adds that “the results by party and ideology…suggest that respondents understand traditional values to be those generally favored by the Republican party.”

The recent change in favor of traditional values has been most pronounced among independents, among whom Gallup says there has been a “dramatic turnaround.” Last year, independents were overwhelmingly in favor, by 55 percent to 37 percent, of the government not favoring any set of values. In the new survey, those numbers are almost reversed, with 54 percent saying the government should promote traditional values and 40 percent saying it should not. Gallup did not find similarly striking changes among Democrats and Republicans, although Democrats have also moved a little bit in the direction of wanting the government to promote traditional values.

But it is the turnaround among independents — Gallup also found similar numbers among people who called themselves moderates — that put a screeching halt to the shift that had been taking place in the last few years. “Americans’ views of the proper government role in promoting traditional values had moved in a more liberal direction since 2005, to the point that last year, as many said the government should not promote traditional values as said it should,” Gallup writes. “If that trend had continued, 2009 would have marked the first time Gallup found more Americans preferring that the government refrain from actively promoting traditional values. Instead, Americans’ attitudes reverted to a more conservative point of view on the matter. Now, Americans favor the government’s promoting traditional values by an 11-point margin, similar to the double-digit margins favoring that view through much of the prior two decades.”

There’s no way to know precisely what this means. But here’s one theory. In the last few years, public opinion on the role of government was driven by the intense unpopularity of George W. Bush and the Republican Party. Unhappy with Bush and the GOP, voters recoiled from the image of Republicans as the party of traditional values — even though they basically held to those traditional values in their own lives. Now, however, with a government completely controlled by Democrats, that is, by the anti-traditional values party — in last year’s poll, Democrats were 60-37 against the government promoting traditional values — the public has abruptly returned to its basic pro-traditional values position.

But that period of revulsion at Bush and Republicans from 2005 to 2008 left a legacy: a Democrat in the White House and large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, at least until 2010. That is why you see Democrats racing to enact their agenda, even as they see the political conditions around them changing. They have the majorities, based on the public’s very temporary mood of 2005-2008, and they are determined to put their preferred policies in place no matter what the public thinks now.

The Gallup numbers also suggest that Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate have fundamentally misread their own victories. Did voters elect Democrats because they desperately wanted national health care? Sprawling and expensive environmental regulation? Federal deficits triple the size of just a few years ago? No. The voters elected Democrats because they were sick of Bush and Republicans. Now Bush and the GOP are gone and out of power. Democrats are doing what they thought the voters wanted. And it turns out the voters didn’t want that at all.

Just Superb!

David Kahane.

Quotes of the Day – Gore Vidal

a much younger Gore Vidal

… America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

“Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

“Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.”

from the London TimesOnline.

-11 Approval index

If you check the trends, Americans are alnost evenly split on total approval/disapproval numbers and have been for a long time. This is really not a good thing. It indicates how polarizing and devisive this administration is to the American people.

From Rasmussen today

These people are disgusting! (how’s that for a dull headline? it’s the best I could do, I’m tired.)

I love going to the movies. I especially love the NACHOS!

I used to have this routine on Monday mornings: I’d get off work (I work night shift), go home and change clothes, do some stuff around the house so that I could stay awake and then at 11 am I’d take off for the movies. First thing I bought was a Dr.Pepper and nachos. After the movie, I’d go next door to Cold Stone Creamery for ice cream and then go home to bed.

I loved that routine. But I can no longer in good conscience spend money supporting the immoral and unethical Hollywood elite. I have no respect for them and they have none for most of America. Granted, there’s a handful (Jon Voight, for instance) who I would and will continue to go see, but there are way too many like this:

Rape-rape? Rape-rape? What the hell is that? Whoopi is a moron. End of that story.

She was 13. She was drugged and liquored up. It was rape. There’s no other way to slice it. She could not consent because she was 13. What part of this is not understandable to these Hollywood dummies?

Where is their humanity? She was a CHILD!

So, I will turn my family room into my very own movie theater and watch movies that I really like: Hitchcock and Capra and Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and movies that I already own. I want to watch movie stars that were MOVIE STARS and not political activists whose views and morals are contrary to mine or in Whoopi’s case, totally absent.

There was a time when movie stars appreciated their fame and their fans. Not so anymore. These entertainers now feel entitled to adoration. They are the other end – the rich end – of the entitlement mentality in this country. They belong to their own exclusive club and the rest of us are the unwashed. Screw them! When you subtract their wealth, they are no different from me. They suffer and mourn and laugh, just like I do. But I have something they don’t: morals, ethics and values.

Although I know that my personal boycott won’t effect any of them, I feel better for it.

America is a nation rooted in values and laws. As President Obama would say–and should say to his Hollywood supporters–these issues are not red or blue, but American. Hollywood does America a great disservice when they demand we trade our economy in for global warming bills from their G5 jet; when they demand we push millions of Americans onto an inferior health care plan; when they attack capitalism from their exclusive country clubs; when they demand that we hug dictators like Chavez or excuse rape because a debatably good movie or two was directed by the aggressor. The hypocrisy must end. The Heritage Foundation

I can make better nachos at home and I don’t need the added ice cream calories, anyway.

Malkin on Obama bringing home the gold

My first thought when I read that Obama was going to Denmark to do his Billy Mays pitchman routine was who in Obama’s circle will this benefit and how will it benefit them? I knew that it would just be a matter of time until someone with the right connections and information would be able to put it in perspective.

An illustrated guide: All the president’s Olympic cronies