Well another week has come and gone and we appear to be making no headway towards winning elections. We lost another one. This time it was in the deep red state of Montana but it was against an anger management challenged opponent, Greg Gianforte. Two days before the election, on May 24, in Bozeman Montana, Republican candidate, Gianforte was charged with misdemeanor assault for attacking The Guardain reporter, Ben Jacobs, during a press conference. Jacobs had his glasses broken and went to the hospital for x rays and Gianforte who was charged with misdemeanor assault, lost his newspaper endorsements and was publicly reprimanded by House Leader Paul Ryan. In spite of all this, we still lost the election by a large margin.
So how could this ever happen? Actually it happens a lot. Many conservatives have a low threshold for understanding complexity and an impossibly high threshold for questioning authority. A large segment of the electorate has enough visceral hatred for the Democratic party and contempt for the Federal government to support Republican candidates who openly display hatred, anger and contempt for law and decency. I suspect that many Republicans support these candidates because they actually do display hatred, anger and contempt for law and decency. Look at the last presidential election where Trump was recorded laughing about assaulting women prior to the election and women still voted for him. I question how any man could have voted for him. All of us have a mother and many of us have wives, sisters and daughters. It makes me shudder to think that the women I love will be affected by this pig of a president.
You can go back a little further to 2014 when Michael Grimm was elected in spite (or because?) of being under indictment on 20 felony counts. He later resigned and served eight months in prison on a plea deal. Democrats lost the special election to replace Grimm. They lost to Staten Island DA Dan Donovan. Donovan is the DA who decided to refer charging Daniel Pantaleo to a grand jury in the Eric Garner case. There was little chance the grand jury would indict Pantaleo and it provided cover for Donovan.
There are other examples of outrageous Republican candidates getting elected over responsible, well funded Democrats. Matt Taibbi has a good piece on this in Rolling Stone. Matt brings up a point I have tried to bring up in my weekly stories for over a month now:
The lesson in almost all of these instances seems to be that enormous numbers of voters would rather elect an openly corrupt or mentally deranged Republican than vote for a Democrat. But nobody in the Democratic Party seems terribly worried about this.
I think nobody in the Democratic Party leadership is worried about this. I know I am very worried about it. And I think nobody in the party leadership is worried because they believe such loathsome enemies as these will surely divert our attention away from the practice of giving large amounts of party money to consultants who in turn keep losing these elections. After the loss they will predictably tell us we need to be more conservative. Lather, rinse, repeat for 40 years now. Many of the DNC delegates are openly tied to consulting and lobbying firms. These are the people who decided to keep Donna Brazile in office after she had been fired by CNN for passing the debate questions to the Clinton campaign during the primaries. These are the people who decided to pay lawyers who declared in open court that the DNC is under no obligation whatsoever to conduct fair primaries.
The only way that I see for us to combat this outrageous Republican onslaught is by winning elections. I don’t think we will suddenly start winning elections with the party leaders we now have in place. This kind of talk is scary for many of my fellow Kossaks who have expressed open contempt towards me for saying this. I reviewed some of my diaries and admit to displaying a pompous tone. I am trying to tone down my pompousness because I want to convince not offend. Anyway, I can shrug these insults aside and am willing to risk getting booted from the site because I would like to hear any counter arguments as to why our current leadership should remain in power.
We all need hope and we need to believe that we can work towards a brighter future. My best prospect for that hope is to work towards changing the party leadership. Given their performance and actions during the last 14 years, I see nothing wrong or immoral with wanting to do this. Others feel that staying with our current leadership will give them a better sense of hope and even questioning our leadership in a time of crisis is wrong. Please tell me why.