What happens when conservatives actually think ?

Respected political analyst/blogger Dan Froomkin has an interesting article on Huffington Post, titled "An Example of How Civil Political Discouse Threatens Modern Conservatism."

Conventional wisdom says that, if liberals and conservatives would just sit down together in civil discourse, they would find common ground for solving the nation's problems. The implication is that this common ground would be somewhere in the middle of the divisive public posturing of our politicians.

And that is the rhetoric put out by AmericaSpeaks to describe what happened last June when this supposedly non-partisan, non-political foundation organized 57 local meetings across the nation, involving some 3,500 ordinary Americans, to discuss ways of handling the federal deficit.

The foundation is organized and funded by conservative deficit hawk Pete Peterson, and the framing of the questions had a definite hawkish slant (i.e., initially participants were asked to discuss options for controlling health care costs, but single payer was not one of the options.) A press release yesterday, along with the foundation's report from the meetings, declares "Liberals and Conservatives Find Common Ground About How to Resolve National Debt."

According to Froomkin, however, the common ground was not in the middle but definitely toward the liberal/progressive position. Participants rebelled against the hawkish, conservative framing and came up with their own solutions. Citing numerous statistics on individual issues, Froomkin shows, for example, that 39% of conservatives became more supportive of cutting defense spending, with only 12% less supportive; and 24% became more supportive of raising taxes on the wealthy, with 12% less supportive.

On the other hand, examples of liberals shifting to a more conservative position were statistically negligible.

Froomkin concludes, despite the final report from the foundation that blurred all this and tried to paint a picture of "finding common ground" that implied "meeting in the middle:"

So the real lesson there would appear to be that if liberals and conservatives actually sat down and listened to each other, the result would be widespread agreement on what are traditionally called liberal positions on the issues -- but which perhaps should be renamed simply common sense.

That, I guess, is what happens when one side of the political debate has departed so far from reality that its arguments don't easily survive genuine contact with the enemy.

Hear !! Hear !! So that's what the Republican noise machine and the blustering are all about: Don't let your base have a chance to really think about the issues. Flood them with distortions, slogans, smears, and trivia. Because actual contemplation of the truth means they lose.

And winning is everything, isn't it?

Ralph