The age of apathy: (Not a dime’s worth of difference?)

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download666At the national level, Republicans have surrendered on taxes, debt, gays in the military, ObamaCare and amnesty.  On the state level, the NCGOP is in the midst of surrendering on ObamaCare, taxes, and amnesty.

A new poll by the Associated Press reveals that nearly half of voters could care less about who controls Congress after the November elections:

Who cares which party controls Congress? Only about half of Americans. The other 46 percent, not so much, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll.

Ask people whom they would rather see in charge on Capitol Hill, and Republicans finish in a dead heat with “doesn’t matter.”[…]

“I’ve never really noticed any difference in my life depending on which party is in,” said Bob Augusto, 39, an oil refinery worker in Woodstown, New Jersey. He doesn’t expect to vote in this fall’s midterm election.[…]

With Republicans making a strong push to seize control of the Senate, only a slim majority of Americans, 53 percent, say they care a good deal about which party wins.

A vast majority appear united around one thing: They’re fed up. Nearly 9 out of 10 disapprove of Congress. Two-thirds want their current representative voted out, the AP-GfK poll shows.

[…]Nick Crider, a Princeton, New Jersey, chemist who co-founded his own biotechnology company, says he’s lost faith in the major parties and doesn’t care which wins.

“I feel like rhetorically it makes a difference, but in actual politics and policy? Not really,” said Crider, 25, whose politics run libertarian.

“If I don’t know much about the people running in a race, I just always vote against the incumbent,” he said. “I assume change is good.”RINO123

I also ran across a really thought-provoking piece from Craig Shirley, the renowned campaign consultant and conservative icon whose involvement stretches back to the 1964 Goldwater campaign and the 1976 and 1980 Reagan campaigns:

[…] What has altered the storyline in the past several years is not the emergence of the Tea Party but rather the permanent entrenchment of Big Government Republicans, aka Obama Republicans. President Obama has had that much effect on the national debate, which has had a direct effect on the national Republicans.

The last gasp of principled conservatism may have come in 2010 with the rise of the Tea Party, but this also gave rise to the countervailing force of the Obama Republicans, resulting in the nomination of Mitt Romney in 2012.

In spite of losing five of the previous six presidential contests, it is the Obama Republicans who now rule the party apparatus of the GOP. Obama Republicans have also spread out among the state bureaucracies, the academies, Wall Street, Detroit, and nearly all of corporate America.

They have bought into Obama’s Oligarchy of big business and big government doing business together, at the expense of the little guy.

Obama supported TARP. Bush supported TARP. The ruling classes supported TARP. Wall Street supported TARP. Therefore, $750 billion–initially–was taken from the rest of the country to “rescue” the corrupt elites of Wall Street.

And never one prosecution or investigation. The greatest wealth transfer in American history and the elites of both parties were in on the score. The Republicans pulled of the heist and the Democrats drove the getaway car.

Other examples abound.

The new Obama Republicans are members of the bureaucratic classes, are pro-government, pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, pro-NSA, and pro-amnesty. They are sophisticated, urban, and have utterly nothing in common with the Tea Party Reaganites. Indeed, they are culturally closer to Obama’s and Romney’s view of the world than Reagan’s.

Power is everything. Power vindicates all. The shady forces of the national GOP party committees supported a pro-abortion, pro-Obamacare stalker in Oregon’s senate primary because she is a) a woman and b)…? The national GOP plays the very same identity politics that Obama and the Democrats have played for years by embracing one victim group after another. (Shirley & Banister assisted Jason Conger in Oregon’s GOP primary because he was the ethical conservative candidate.)

The Obama Republicans are fueled in part by old Bush speechwriters and neocons and High Tories who sometimes make a pass at talking about conservatism but that is mainly to keep the yokels at the grass roots guessing. Mostly though, they spend their time bashing the Tea Party Reaganites.

There is a dialectic to American presidential politics which occurs every generation or two. From Jefferson’s “New American Revolution” to Jackson’s “Democratic Populism” to Lincoln and the rise of the Republican reformers to Teddy Roosevelt and then to FDR’s “New Deal” and two generations later to Reagan’s “New Federalism,” and now to Obama, 28 years after Reagan–right on schedule–we may be witnessing a paradigm shift again in American politics.

It should be no surprise that the Republicans on Capitol Hill offer nothing of opposition to Obama. They can best be labeled the “Rollover Caucus.” Oh, they will run commercials and mouth platitudes to fool conservative voters to get their money and their votes for this fall, but everybody knows they’ve signed on to Obamacare because their corporate masters in the insurance companies and pharmaceutical industries told them to do so. They have always supported immigration reform because, again, their corporate masters told them to do so.

The Administrative state is here to stay, as long as the status quo holds. The only question now is how long the Tea Party Reaganites stay with a party which is fundamentally opposed to them and despises them.

One of the foremost principles in sales and marketing is the idea of differentiation — making a true distinction between what you offer and what the alternative offers.   To get consumers (or voters) to make a change, you have to convince the voters you are offering something so much better than what they have that they’d be crazy not to make a switch.

A little more than 15 percent of eligible voters turned out for the May primary in North Carolina. A little more than 20 percent turned out for the primary in Kentucky that saw Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell renominated for a sixth six-year term.

In North Carolina, the number of registered voters identifying as Unaffiliated is creeping closer to the total number of registered Republicans. Here in conservative Moore County, the number of Unaffiliated voters has surpassed the total number of Democrats and is creeping closer to the total number of Republicans.

What does all this mean? It appears to say that people are looking at the two major parties and are not being inspired or motivated. Low turnout and watered-down platforms and agendas are great for protecting incumbents and preserving perks for the political establishment.  But it’s all bad for the future of our state and our country.