Progressive and Democratic political theorists, full of ideas for how the Democratic party can recapture the votes they need to become once again the dominant party, should really take a pause right now and look around the blogosphere and the mainstream media at the general response to the Yankees being eliminated from the baseball playoffs. Except from die-hard Yankee fans like myself, what they'll see is an awful lot of outright
hatred for the Yankees, some of which can be explained by the team's exemplary past winning record, and some by the people's natural inclination to root against the overdog, but a good portion of which is simply
raw unchecked emotion.
And
that is exactly the kind of mindset that the Democrats are up against in trying to turn the party's fortunes around. There are people in this country who
hate Democrats and liberals in precisely the same way that people
hate the Yankees, and no amount of pandering or re-framing or appealing to religion is going to undo that in numbers sufficient to make any difference. Those people are probably beyond our ability to influence, and every dollar spent on trying to shift their attitudes is a dollar that's not being spent elsewhere where it might do more good.
The best that can be hoped of these Democrat-haters is that something happens which causes them to be discouraged and decide not to participate at all, and that is precisely why the Foley/Hastert scandal is such a danger to the fortunes of the Republican party, because it will suppress GOP voter turnout and neutralize their get out the vote efforts.
Although it happened naturally, without specific planning by the Dems, and is a consequence of the very nature of the corrupt, incompetent and ideologically outrageous Republican party, Foley/Hastert will turn out to prove that Lee Atwater and Karl Rove were correct all along, just as we feared they were, and all the Democratic and progressive efforts to find a positive pathway toward regeneration are as nothing before the power of a good scandal (and a sex scandal at that).
So, in their way, Markos and Dean have also been right, since their focus has been on putting in place the infrastructure which can take advantage of something like the public's response to Predatorgate. Without that, we can't leverage what the Republicans have handed us and turn it into victory -- but without the scandal itself, the infrastructure would not have been enough (at least for this election).
[Cross-posted to unfutz]