The Definition Of "Behind The Curve"

By Carl

 

Meet Richard Florida (pronounced "Flo-rid-DUH," unlike the hip hop artist).

Even with the president’s approval rating showing signs of life and the Republicans busily bashing themselves over the head — “one is a practicing polygamist and he’s not even the Mormon,” retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently quipped about her party’s two frontrunners — America continues to track right, according to polling data released by the Gallup Organization last week.

Polling on things like political bent is usually inaccurate, wildly so. It is unspecific, and subject to an awful lot of interpretations, particularly if the questions are designed to be clever.

Indeed, this is likely a lagging poll. As was made clear by the Komen debacle, America is starting to realize that the fruits of the progressive movement are in danger of being taken away, and are starting to fight back.

Indeed, all one has to do is to look at the bounce in support, so easily poo-poohed by Floriduh, that Barack Obama has received after starting to stand firm on his ground. And of course, the positive view most Americans have about the Occupy Wall Street movement and its goal of income equality (I'm sure some idiot will troll me with a Rasmussen poll showing high negatives. That happens when you take a poll at the local bierhallen.)

If anything, Americans are starting to wake up to the fact that for thirty years, they've let their lifestyles be dictated by a monster worse than Big Government: Big Business. Every year, the anti-spending protests on Black Friday grow larger. The local food movements increase volume. Local shopping, a way to make the community stronger, is a far more attractive option for people who see the big box stores, both bricks and mortar and in cyberspace, as a metaphor for isolationism.

This will continue, I think. It's an election year, and already the Occupy Movement has made splashes in DC at the CPAC convention, where Andrew Breitbart has his lunch stolen by protestors, similar to his drunken rant out a restaurant window in Santa Monica a few years back: incoherent and irrelevant.

They've followed the primary season around, making small splashes in states and getting on the local news, something they desperately needed in order to put a human face on the protest movement, which had been limited out of necessity to mostly large urban marches and camp-ins.

The conventions will be prime turf for them to make their very non-violent and polite message heard. Indeed, both sides of the aisle have begun to incorporate the OWS message into their rhetoric. When Newt Gingrich...Gingrich!...can attack Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch billionaire corporatist tool, you know you've had an impact!

So while to say America is a conservative country is not totally inaccurate, to say its becoming more conservative is idiotic. About the only "proof" Floriduh provides is a chart that shows America is getting stupider, and as we all know, stupid = conservative.

We smarten up real quick, though.

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)