Right on time, from VOX- (
source article on Bernie's tweets)
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If you don't keep the center, you can't win.[/QUOTE]
This speaks more of how 'liberal' is treated as a bad word despite most Americans actually favoring liberal ideas.[URL="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/liberal-is-good/283617/"] I linked to an Atlantic article just earlier today in that OT thread about the subject[/URL] and it linked that Gallup poll. Here's the paragraph that puts this chart in more context:
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But theres reason to believe that today, many Americans eschew the term not because they associate it with any particular unpopular attitudes or issue positions, but merely because theyve only heard it discussed negatively. In a thought-provoking 2013 paper, Christopher Claassen, Patrick Tucker, and Steven S. Smith of Washington University in St. Louis note that although most Americans prefer the term conservative, those same Americans are remarkably consistent in telling researchers that they prefer liberal policies. How come? One reason may be that conservative has positive extra-political associations. To many Americans, it connotes caution, restraint and respect for traditional values, positive attributes irrespective of ones views on specific policies.
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But even more important, Claassen, Tucker, and Smith suggest, may be the negative way in which liberal is publicly discussed. When certain labels are emphasized or favored by political and media elites, they write, the public is more likely to identify with them than others. [B]Public framing often promotes the term conservative, while the term liberal is used with much less frequency and has long had a more negative connotation. Part of the reason Americans consider liberal an epithet, in other words, is because they mostly hear it used as an epithet.
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[B]When Obama disavows the term, he perpetuates that dynamic and allows conservatives like OReilly to continue tarring Democrats with a label most Americans consider negative, even if theyre no longer entirely sure why. It might be wiser, at least in the long-term, to explain why the specific policies many Americans support are liberal. And thus begin to reclaim the term.[/B]
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I highly suggest reading the paper this article discusses [URL="http://polisci.wustl.edu/files/polisci/imce/claasen_tucker_smith_spsa.pdf"]here[/URL]. In other words, Democrats largely have a messaging problem and an enthusiasm gap; it's not so much the issues themselves.
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