Also from this same article in The Independent, is this comparison:

Ronald Reagan, 1980

"Are you doing better than you were four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment than there was four years ago? If you answer yes to all these questions, I think it is obvious who you will vote for."

Angela Merkel, 2005

"Is our country doing better than it was seven years ago? Is there higher growth? Is unemployment lower? If you answer all the questions with yes, I think it is obvious who you will be voting for."

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

I saw it in the news yesterday, but since I am in Britain, I cannot really tell, how it plays on the streets.

I personally think, it is quite telling, I think she has been modelling herself on Reagan rather than Thatcher anyway. (but that is just a hunch)

For me, it just strengthened the case of not at all wanting her in power. I hope the Greens can make something out of it. They were the major benefactors of his policies when they first came about.

The more I read about her, the more I don't want her. Grr. I voted already, but my little one voice....

Merkel says deficit cuts would be a priority

A conservative-led government would make replenishing Germany's depleted state coffers its priority, a close aide to Angela Merkel, the opposition leader and frontrunner in next week's general election, said yesterday

(...)

"The goal of a balanced budget is not reachable if you approach it only from the expenditure side. That was [Hans] Eichel's mistake," Mr Meister said, referring to Germany's four consecutive breaches of the European Union's fiscal rules under the outgoing finance minister.

"We have to boost the revenues of the state, not through tax increases, but through a broadening of the tax base," he said. "In other words, we do not need higher taxes but more taxpayers."

Part of that goal could be achieved by lowering the top and bottom rates of income tax - moves that the Merkel campaign has already outlined - while scrapping the many loopholes used by high earners legally to evade tax.

Not quite Reaganesque rhetoric, is it? (Although this is what Reagan did end up doing, increasing taxes several times between 1982 and 1986 and seriously cleaning up the tax code in 1986)

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Last night I made a jokey comment about this in the Breakfast thread, but I actually had a sickish feeling in the pit of my stomach that it would turn out to be this speech she copied.

Often here in the states, we ponder as people are prone to do when things have gone so horribly utterly wrong -- where did it all begin?  what was the moment, the incident, that set us on this path?  

We can trace threads of this bad thing back to the Nixon era or threads of another hideous trend back to the depression era, but where did it coalesce?  Very often, people point to this speech as the moment, the turning point, the articulation of "are you" rather than "are we."

Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. -Hobbes

1. In 1984 running against Walter Mondale (higher taxes, higher regulations, bigger welfare/socialist/nanny state, weak on defense, collectivism) Ronald Reagan (lower taxes, fewer regulations, strong national defese,individualism)

won a landslide - 49 out of 50 states!

That is spectacular!  Mondale carried only 1 state - his home state.  I doubt Mrs. Markel can carry 49 out of 50 states in Germany (or whatever the number and juridsiction is). I further doubt Herr Schroeder can carry such a victory.  

2.  Well, the "smartest man in the Senate" (as he is known, by the way, he is also modest) Sen. Biden (D-Delaware), the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, was a plagiarist.  

"Democratic presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr., a U.S. senator from Delaware, was driven from the nomination battle after delivering, without attribution, passages from a speech by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock. A barrage of subsidiary revelations by the press also contributed to Biden's withdrawal: a serious plagiarism incident involving Biden during his law school years; the senator's boastful exaggerations of his academic record at a New Hampshire campaign event; and the discovery of other quotations in Biden's speeches pilfered from past Democratic politicians"

It seems like politicians and plagiarism sometimes make strange bedfellows.

3.  Did Schroeder answer the questions? If so, what was his answer?
a.  Is Germany doing better than it was seven years ago?
b.  Is there higher growth?
c.  Is unemployment lower?

4.  Does Mrs. Markel's plagiarism make any of the aforementioned questions irrelevant?

5. 
   

Mr Schroeder came to power on a promise to cut the number of unemployed to as low as 3.5 million" From the BBC.  How much did he cut?

6.  
Mrs Merkel's conservatives lead the SPD by about 12% in the opinion polls.