This was originally a comment to Kid Oakland's diary
To Be a Fighting Democrat but it grew to long, and diverged too much into specifics to fit there, so I have made a diary of my own.
These are my own personal ideas about specific voting blocks we have lost, and issues that I believe are important to us. These groups USED to be the core of the democratic party, and if we want to be a functioning party again, we should take these groups and their issues seriously, and be willing to FIGHT for them. If we FIGHT for these groups long enough to be credible, and win them back, they will support the issues of other groups within the party, AS LONG AS THEY HAVE A REAL, ACTIVE SEAT AT THE TABLE.
Sorry guys, election issues aside, the republicans were even IN this race after the disgraces of the last 25 years, ONLY because we have such little credibility that they look no worse than we do. (Partisan bickering, corporate scandals, deregulation, especially the air lines and California energy, Whitewater, the savings and loan mess, The death of organized labor, the destruction of public education, the Clinton impeachments, Iran-contra, and the following disasters that CAUSED the growth of stateless international terrorism, ALL BELONG TO THE THUGS.) And every event since Jan 2001 is SQUARELY on the Bush man's shoulders.
We have abandoned our core supporters. They could be ours again IF we bring them back. But we sold them out throughout countless votes where legislators withered before attacks of being too "liberal" or soft on what ever, or promises of reciprocal votes that always seemed to yield less and give away more than they were supposed to.
We can not EXPECT them to come back, we must include them in our agenda, and fight for THEIR issues.
Right now a well known fact among us is that for a member of ANY minority to vote republican is at the very least financial suicide.
One of the fairnesses we LET GO of was ending the gap between whites and minorities. Wages, job classifications, lending, collage admissions, criminal prosecutions and all the other ways the deck is stacked against minorities.
Yet we folded our tent in the face of the SILLIEST attacks in the history of politics against affirmative action. Driving while black, black voter disenfranchisement, the DOCUMENTED inequity in sentencing, especially the death penalty, immigration, and a great host of other issues, that SHOULD BE THE VERY CORE of what we fight for, we don't even DISCUSS.
Gee, I wonder WHY a fair fraction of Latinos, and even A MEASURABLE portion of black, and large portion of the Asian communities all voted AGAINST US.
And HIGH on the list of items in this field is the bridge to the second thing listed in the previous post. JUST WHY DO YOU SUPPOSE a majority of Black children go to "failing" schools? Because we have NEVER supported a fair and equitable education system. We allow individual school districts to be funded locally. Since IT HAS BEEN DOCUMENTED to death that the ONE ABSOLUTELY SURE CURE to poverty is QUALITY SCHOOLING, WHY IN THE HELL ARE WE NOT FIGHTING TO END local funding. Rich districts, (which seldom happen to be minority) can afford staffs and teachers, that are at the leading edge of their profession. They can afford Staffs that have the time, skills, and motivation to innovate, study, and learn new methods, and even, heaven forbid, EXPERIMENT to find new ways to be more effective.
Poorer, (often more minority districts, but even poor white districts need help) have facilities so run down that children are demoralized coming in the door. Even if the district can get top staff at barging basement wages, (teachers are a particularly idealistic lot after all.) they are plagued by overcrowding, lack of even basic supplies, time, or resources to get through the day, let alone figure out how to IMPROVE the situation. Yet when some school beats the odds and actually manages to shine, it is not held up as a miracle of dedicated people doing a superhuman job, it is an example that supposedly any school should be achieving the same results, and the other poor school are beat up for not achieving MIRACLES as well. That is why we have lost the teachers.
Lets not EVEN TALK ABOUT THE WAY WE +++BUTT FUCKED+++ the unions. Minimum wages, weakening the collective bargaining laws, OSHA, the Patco strike, ergonomic rules, all other ruels inside and outside of OSHA, and a whole list. IT USED TO BE THAT VIRTUALLY EVERY UNION MEMBER VOTED, and they could ALMOST be guaranteed to vote for US. Now with union membership falling, NOT BECAUSE THEY ARE NO LONGER NEEDED, but because the laws make it pathetically simple to prevent union activity, UNION PEOPLE ACTUALLY VOTED AGAINST US.
CHURCH PEOPLE voted against us. With the exception of some true radicals in the militia movement, and the moral major, (NEVER MORE THAT A FEW MILLION STRONG, NO church member should have voted republican. The Republican party has ALWAYS promoted wealth and privilege as being above any moral or legal standard, and the churches used to understand that and vote accordingly. (The Catholic Church and protestant churches were HUGE bastions of democratic support. This year, the thugs were bold and PROUD of being squarely for wealth and privilege and opposed to ANY legal or moral restriction on their behavior, and we STILL lost on VALUES.
By the way Those union people and church people WE ABANDONED are a LARGE MAJORITY of the red state folks.
Now, add one more group. FAMILY FARMERS. They used to be democrats, because we supported fair prices for farm goods, a transportation system to help them reach markets, and a foreign trade system that supported them.
NOW, you cannot sell sugar in this country unless it is through Author Daniels Midland, ADM. They simply ARE the domestic sugar market. They do not CONTROL it, THEY ARE IT. And they pay prices that arew only practical for huge, government subsidized farms to produce. You are not one of their corporate farm operations, YOU SIMPLY CANNOT SELL A CROP OF SUGAR BEETS, or SUGAR CANE, which used to be primary crops. Tobacco farmers have also been an unintended casualty of anti-smoking campaigns. The thugs moved in and offered subsidy programs to leave field fallow, without ANY long term solutions even suggested. Our response at BEST has been to feed the thug pork barrel projects, but those are THE ONLY HELP OFFERED, we don't even have family farm issues on the table. NOT meaningful reforms, we are not even discussing the ISSUE, let alone making suggestions about how to fix anything.
Study the issue of lending practices to farmers. In the 80's and 90's something fundimental changed. It became very difficult for family farmers to get loans, and more than 90% of black farmers cannot get a farm loan at ANY PRICE, no matter WHAT their credit is, their finaces or any other issue. I have heard that in most places if you are black, it is made abundantly clear you simply are not going to be eligable for a farm loan.
Even white farmers found that after years of way too easy credit, when they have hocked the next years crops to get this years in th ground, suddenly farm credit dried up. MILLIONS of families lost their farms, either to huge comercial farms, or industrial or residential developement.
Between these groups, I have just listed WINNING issues for about 80% of the voters IN THE RED STATES, and the RED COUNTIES. Actually fight for these issues, and you just won about a 400 hundred plus majority in the house, a 75% plus majority in the senate, and 350 plus Electoral votes for as long as we stay true to these groups.
Ignore these issues as we have for the last 50 years and we continue to lose. If one side acknowledges your issues, EVEN IF THEY HAVE A TERRIBLE policy, they trump the other side that pretends they don't know the issue exists, or support the same policy the other side leads with.
We MUST JETTISON anyone from our party that is not willing to take a stand. We have abandoned ALL OF THE CORE DEMOCRATIC VALUES, and the core constituencies that those values are dear to for 50 years and more, and AFTER 50 YEARS of losing support we STILL cannot understand why.
Now to govern is to compromise, but it is not compromise if you NEVER stand firm, and the OTHER SIDE never compromises, IT IS CAPITULATION. AND NO ONE ANYWHERE is going to vote for a moral coward. THERE are places where compromise is ESSENTIAL. There are also issues that MUST BE a fight to the death. Take social security. That has been a winning issue for us for years. Yet the system is about to be dismantled, because we did not have the stones to deal with it, so the other side snuck plans in to make the system so unstable people are willing to accept plans that are in the guise of attempts to fix it, but in reality are intended to KILL it outright.
These are ALL issues of the little guy against the BIG guy. These are ALL issues of fairness, inclusiveness, and JUSTICE, and are all DEEPLY MORAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES worthy of making a stand. For all our FEARS of political fallout for making an unpopular stand, or a tough political choice, the REAL DAMAGE is done when we stand for NOTHING. A joke in the press, even among cartoonists that SUPPORT us, was that NO ONE knows what we stand for. Each vote we lost, because we though it was politically to hot, we actually lost twice. We lost on the issue, but more importantly, EVERY TIME WE CAVED IN ON AN ISSUE, we LOST VOTERS.
Americans are DEEPLY understanding that if you passionately defend your beliefs, EVEN IF THEY DISAGREE WITH YOU, they RESPECT YOU. We have lost ALL RESPECT because EVERY TIME WE GOT ATTACKED we fell back, and sacrificed another issue, and another core part of our soul.
THESE GROUPS WERE THE HEART AND SOUL OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. And we sold them out, both physically and spiritually.
We must do better for our core, and our nation as a whole.