With slime like Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller glad-handing Hannity and boosting the GOP candidate, you'd think the DNC would realize they have a near revolt on their hands not from the "centrist" dems but from the rest of us. Apparently not, and I am seriously considering bailing out on the Democratic Party - here's why.
1. Primaries 2004 -
I think most people here came to realize that having a relatively conservative farm state bless the nominee for the rest of the party was a really, really bad idea no matter how you slice it. If you were for Kerry back then that's fine, but truth is the early states should represent an accurate cross-section of the party as a whole and it currently fails to do so. A small rural state chose the milk-toast "safety" candidate, and those of us who fretted over a kerry nomination back then won't mind saying it,
we told you so.
Now the party uppers are fighting tooth and nail to give us, well, to quote John Kerry, "four more years of the same." We now have some wimpy minority leader, Pelosi going "corporate party shill" in record time, and a vilsack-led DNC will surely mean four more years of defeat and frustration for a party with some of the right ideas and less than a handful of the right leaders.
2. Bad hair, Bad candidate -
John Kerry could have won, and in a lot of ways really earned my respect as his campaign rolled on. But the very idea of nominating a guy who voted for everything the president wanted is instant defeat. You simply cannot make a case against an incumbent when you voted for just about everything he did. His tough talk of "I will personally hunt down and kill every terrorist" rang completely hollow and desperate, completely failed to " play in peoria" and probably shed tens of thousands of disgusted left wing Dems. And now they promised to ensure every vote counted, but instead ran off with all the money you and I sent in for their GELAC fund, saying nothing of the $17 million of our hard earned cash Kerry sacked away.
My point is not that Kerry was a bad candidate, but rather this disturbing trend in our party of cowering to the Republicans then trying to put some bass into your voice during election season - it just will not get us to a win. Lieberman did it, Kerry did it, Gephardt did it. And once someone outside the Democratic machine stepped up to the mic with truth and conviction in their voice, and gained enormously in the polls for it, the "old guard" finally found a voice. It was faked (can you say "miserable failure" more times in one debate?), without conviction (I voted for it, but it was
wrong) or just plain sissy ("the war was the right thing to do, but I would have done it slightly differently") The courage you heard from so many of the candidates, taking Bush to task over and over again, came not from the party machine but from outside of it. To me this means we can build a better party with the right people on our side.
Issues, stupid -
The more I read this board (every hour or so lately) and compare it to what I hear on the street, the more I believe that we are a true microcosm of what most Dems feel out there. Burnt on trying to save a sinking ship, hopeful, full of pride knowing that our ideas and values are right for this country and the world, and ultimately frustrated with a sold-out party of hacks and has-beens fighting for their political lives, not their constituents. They are running scared just as the rest of us are finding our voices and rolling up our sleeves. Our values are right, let's not bicker any further about the merits of going anti-gay for the votes, or whether we are christian enough to win. The problem is our party. The Democratic Party has gained a very bad name for itself in many parts of the country, instantly associated with baby killing hollywood elitists. We know our party is radically more diverse than that, but the perception is older than I am, and is unlikely to be shed any time soon. I envision a new party built on the better ideas of the Democrats, but that also openly embraces any intelligent idea regardless of which side of the aisle it came from, a party not blinded by childish partisanship. I'm not talking about centrism, because I associate hawkishness and mushy values with that term. I heard a story about an environmental group in northern California who, sick of bashing heads with the timber industry to no avail, decided to get smart and work out a mutually beneficial solution. They actively helped these companies to develop renewable practices that kept this local stand of forest healthy, but also improved efficiency and the bottom line for those mills. No one out there would call you a tree hugging communist for such an approach, nor would they fight it since it is a win-win situation, and to me it is a good lesson in how to run an effective political party that gets the job done. I rarely see this kind of thoughtful approach in Washington, because they are all too busy with political calculus and maneuvering to think outside the box. Obama and Dean are my current party heros, and I fear they will not be greeted warmly in a party of scared insiders. The values issue keeps getting tossed around to avoid the real issue at hand - the people we expect to lead our party to the promised land are failing us.