You don't have to tell me why the Democrats need to take back the House.
I'm a leftist. I know most Democrats aren't; they are centrists. But the Republicans are, almost to a man or woman, extreme rightists. They follow an ideology that can best be summed up in the words "I've got mine; screw you." There's simply no way that any American who can't say those words -- the millions who are underemployed, who owe more than they are due, whose children cannot aspire to do as well as their parents did -- should ever vote for a Republican, because once you filter out the noise Republicans make about guns and God and people who don't look or talk like you and me, it becomes crystal clear that the G.O.P. believes in a world where a few rich people get ever richer at everyone else's expense.
Why would working Americans -- and if we work for a living, we are working Americans -- want to give up their right to bargain collectively? Why would they want to reward a party that sends their jobs overseas, strips people of their life savings, starves their children's schools, and shrinks the value of a college degree while steadily inflating the price?
What makes people vote for more poisons and germs in their food, water, and air? What makes them vote for the farce that passes for health care in this country? For a military juggernaut so big that it is more a temptation to mischief than a protector of the peace? For an internal security apparatus rivalling the KGB?
The real question is this: why don't Democrats tell the truth about the Republican party and its agenda? Why isn't it all over the radio and TV airwaves? Why aren't there full-page ads in every newspaper?
Al Gore, running for president in 2000, never once described to the American people the essential difference between the two parties. He allowed the election to become a personal popularity contest in which George W. Bush, the nth generation Yale man with more blue blood in his veins than Mr. Spock, could cast himself as Joe Sixpack running against Al Bore the Ivy League wonk?
What is wrong with this party? Why does it not trumpet its message to the skies? Why does it let its fortunes hang on one man's poll numbers? We are more than Barack Obama, after all; and in a few years when he is sitting at home writing his memoirs, we will still be here, and the stakes will be no less high.
Politics is not a game; it is a life and death struggle. Working America cannot afford to sit idly in front of its television sets watching the count go full as Barack Obama throws pitch after pitch to the slugger du jour the Koch brothers send to the plate. "THUH-uh-UH-uh pitch... fastball down the middle; it is high, it is far, it is...gone! THUH-uh-UH-uh-UH-uh Republicans WIN!" Turn off your sets and wait another couple of years.
Aren't you tired of it?