The Blue Wave: Is Rush Limbaugh Unpatriotic?

Poor Michael Steele. He criticized the titular leader of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh. Rush slapped him down. Steele waved the white flag of surrender. He apologized. Steele is so very sorry he offended the man who says he hopes the president fails. Which means he hopes the economy fails. Which raises the fair question of whether someone who hopes our president fails is patriotic or not. And it tells the story of why the Republican Party is in such very big trouble.

Realignment has arrived. The blue majority is now. A bold Democratic president with Teflon appeal and strong Democratic majorities in Congress will pass his program to reverse 30 years of Reagan economics. Democratic filibusters will block any attempt to change the Obama program for a decade. Here are five great realignments coming together:

1. Policy realignment. In recent decades there were three great policy waves. FDR brought the New Deal and a generation of Democratic realignment. Ronald Reagan swept aside the New Deal and brought an interim political realignment and a three-decade policy realignment.

Obama is the third wave. When President Clinton said, “The era of big government is over,” he conceded the triumph of Reagan’s premise. Clinton won, but the Reagan policy alignment remained intact. Obama, by contrast, is transforming.

2. Realignment of interests. Reaganism is discredited by epic scandals of financial corruption that are the great cause of our crisis. Obama was not elected to better manage a corrupted system. He was elected to dramatically change it.

Everything Obama is doing, he promised. What most Republicans advocate today, they promised in elections they lost by epic margins. When CNBC’s guru of greed, Rick Santelli, pointed to traders on the floor of the Chicago Exchange and said, “This is America,” he was wrong about America. It is anathema to Main Street to suggest that Wall Street traders, bankers and wealthy citizens should not help jobless workers, homeless veterans or health-ravaged families. It is Obama who speaks for the vast majority who pray for his success, while many Republicans bet on his failure.

When America’s most powerful Republican, Rush Limbaugh, humiliates their national chairman, and is proud of his hope that our president fails, he is pitting the Republican Party against the greatest prayer and aspiration of a nation that wants our president to succeed.

This is the stuff that Democratic landslides are made of. This is the stuff that realignments are built on. This is a suicide mission for a party that stakes its bet on our economy failing and humiliates its chairman for daring to speak for America’s success.

3. Demographic realignment. Women surge to a majority of voters and to the Democratic Party. The Hispanic wave turns increasingly blue. A generation of young voters is heavily Democratic. Black voting soars. Working-class voters see Obama championing jobs while many Republicans oppose more benefits for jobless workers, criticize building better schools and attack major healthcare reform. Democrats are riding and Republicans are resisting every major demographic and population wave, every major gender and age wave, and the wave of revulsion against financial abuses after 30 years of Reaganomics and the notion that government should not protect Americans from abuse.

4. Realignment in fundraising, grassroots and political technology. Obama is revolutionary. Business money joins mass money for Democrats. Grass roots fight for change. Business bets on winners. These popular, demographic, technological, fundraising, political and voting waves create an electoral majority for Democrats that will deepen and widen as Obama advances his program and politics.

5. Realignment in industry. Obama champions the business sectors that will create the jobs wave of the future. New energy. Advanced medical technology. Green business. Electric batteries. Fuel-efficient cars. Obama’s mission is to bring about creative, dynamic and fair capitalism. To lead a return to optimism. To promote the next great jobs wave that is surely coming. To work with Republicans, capitalists, inventors and workers who have already begun to make it happen.

America stands at a crossroads. The past is discredited. The future is being created. Reaganism is history. Obamism is now. The nation is realigned. I have laid out the reasons, one by one, very clearly. Let the great debate begin, as the great realignment unfolds.