The insiders were right - the media destruction of Dean shows that any small deviation from the script is met with harsh punishment. Dean got Gored, as a centrist governor of Vermont was given poses that would have stricken fear into the Kingfisher.
The outsiders were right - the insiders are completely incapable of governing, so paralyzed by fear and addicted to the lies they have to tell. Kerry is talking tax cuts. Anyone who can count knows that tax increases are coming.
Power is its own policy.
First and foremost, what is possible within the channels of power, must be followed. However stupid, poor policy or even criminally unconstitutional it is - if it holds power it will be done, because it must be done.
Which is why great empires fall - that which cannot go on, will not. When that which elites must do to hold power becomes fatal to the system which they rule, that system falls. I am saying nothing new, its all in Aristotle.
Right now the means to power is the mobilization election. This kind of election suited another age - when power was held by rapidly mobilizing a large body of the people. Hence an election, which is a means of finding those who can generate the political will to govern, became an exersize in mobilizing in a short period.
But governing the modern republic is trench warfare - the gap between what wins power, and what can use power, is now so large, that the Democratic and Republican Parties are incapable of governing. George Dubya Bush Jr. who, a year ago, was a man who had had unbroken triumph as a political figure, is now reduced to million dollar a minute borrow to bankruptcy to hold power.
And the victors of that trench warfare are, increasingly, those who can live in the political cycle. Kerry may win, but to wield power, he will find that the people here on the internet will be holding a daily primary. Without them, the long weeks and months between elections will be filled with pelting from instapundit, sully and the freep.
If the new politics wants to win, it must learn to deliver. This is why Dean soldiers on, because each state he is in gives his followers a chance to run and win for Democratic state committees and other offices. He is building a strcture for change. The party might nominate Kerry, but it will put Dean's people into place if he can stay at it.
And there is where institutional power lies. Kerry's support is as soft as it gets - it is about someone who the voters think cannot be Gored. Dean has been Gored, and is out of the running. It is now between stolid and unexciting, and Edwards "Two Americas" message.
There are two Americas - the America which is alive and awake in politics, and the America which is political for roughly one month out of every twelve.
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To win, the mobilization election must be, piece by piece, replaced. Turned into an election of long consent, and voting by mail. The longer the frame of an election, the less last minute bounces will mean. The more an election is held in words, rather than in fragments, the more people will side with candidates of belief and action, rather than image.
This project - the unifying of winning and governing, is the great change which must take place in American politics. Because the budget deficit, Iraq, and Bush himself, are all signs of the failure of political will at the highest levels. But for elected officials to be there fore us, we must be there for them.
The Democratic Party can, and should, lead on this issue, first and foremost, by making participation in the Democratic Party electronic and continuous, open sourced rather than closed meeting.
Or we will have the best government that is tolerable to those who can fund special interest campaign ads.
Yours to think about Senators and other elites. In order to have the mandate to wield power, you must give up the control and the sense that your ideas are better than everyone elses - because, they haven't been.
Yours to think about outsiders and writers and others who want "real change". In order to have influence, you have to learn where the out of boundaries markers are, and give up illusions of purity.