The Raging Right

Here in Coatesville we have intimate experience with the Extreme Far Right. They have been a part of Coatesville’s politics for decades. They hide their most extreme agendas in public. You have to do some research to find meetings they organized or articles they published. They are opportunists that switch political parties as it suits their purpose.

Their political tactics are the easiest way to identify them. Intimidation is always a part of their politics.

I could be wrong but just from speaking with former Republican Committeepersons; I have gathered that the Chester County Republican Party leadership has taken a turn to the Right; not the Extreme Far Right but to the Right that some call the Republican Party “base”. I believe it is partly responsible for the dramatic shift from Republican Party to Democratic Party in Chester County. I believe that the moderate Republicans that have historically been a dormant part of Chester County politics cannot stomach the more Right Wing Chester County Republicans. If I am correct, then the future of Republican politics in Chester County could become even more concentrated to the Far Right.
Jim

The Washington Post
McCain and the Raging Right
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008;
Are we witnessing the reemergence of the far right as a power in American politics? Has John McCain, inadvertently perhaps, become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism and anger?

McCain has clearly become uneasy with some of the forces that have gathered around him. He has begun to insist, against the sometimes loud protests from his crowds, that Barack Obama is, among things, a "decent person."

Yet McCain's own campaign is playing with powerful extremist themes to denigrate Obama. When his running mate, Sarah Palin, first brought up Obama's association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, who has become a centerpiece of McCain's attacks, she accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists." What other "terrorists" was she thinking about?

Since Obama was a child when Ayers was part of the Weather Underground, and since even Republicans have served on boards with Ayers, this is classic guilt by association.

Ayers has been dragged into this campaign because there is a deep frustration on the right with Obama's enthusiasm for shutting down the culture wars of the 1960s.

Precisely because Obama is not a baby boomer, he carries none of that generation's scars. Most Americans (including most boomers) are weary of living in the past and reprising the 1960s every four years.

Yet culture war politics is relatively mild compared with the far-right appeals that are emerging this year. It is as if McCain's loyalists overshot the '60s and went back to the '50s or even the '30s.

What we are witnessing is the mainstreaming of the far right, a phenomenon that began to take shape with some of the earliest attacks on Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
MORE AT:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/13/AR2008101302173_pf.html