Wednesday, September 08, 2010

New York City: Going "Republican Red" ???

OK, well, it's as close to being a red state as the New York Mets are to winning the National League East, but they're still closer than the Washington Nationals are. And sometimes you have to take your solace in increments.

Michael Goodwin from the New York Post surveys the landscape:

In political and some cultural ways, New Yorkers are starting to act like their fellow Americans instead of aliens from a liberal planet. Hallelujah.

City and state voters increasingly express more centrist, even conservative views on hot-button issues. If you really want to get into an argument on the Upper West Side, go ahead and call these views the urban twin of heartland values.

On the Ground Zero mosque, as many as 70 percent of New Yorkers think it should be moved away from that hallowed ground. That is almost identical to the national view, a rebuke to both Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama, who support building the mosque on the provocative site the developers picked.

City voters also are shedding their liberal skins on term limits, with nearly 75 percent telling The New York Times they want the mayor and members of the City Council to be limited to eight years. Anger at the way Bloomberg and the supine council overturned two public referendums setting the limits so they could stay in office is clearly part of the current mood.

That's precisely the point. Just as voters across the nation are rebelling against the Big Government elite that rewards itself and its friends, New Yorkers are mad as hell for the same reasons.

Their ever-rising tax bills for declining services, even as their incomes stagnate, are Exhibit A of the failure of government to really represent the majority
. The kowtowing to selfish interests, especially public unions, is bankrupting the state and making the city unaffordable....


Unfortunately, the New York Republican organization is a limp, flaccid, lifeless party, unable to stand even when it should be aroused by the exciting possibilities all around it. Otherwise Kristen Gillibrand's Senate seat would be in the process of being pulled out from under her...


Still, nature abhors a vacuum. Let the big-city Republican revolution begin!

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