I'm a Texan. I'm in Ted Poe's District. The one so badly gerrymandered that it extends all the way from Beaumont to the suburbs of Houston. Where I live. It's nicknamed, "The District that Ate Houston."
We got this vile bit of district manipulation because Tom DeLay could raise money from out of state, and crush Democrats in Texas state legislature races. There are so many races down-ticket that have to do with redistricting, and guess what? This is the year for it, with the Census numbers coming in.
Some will stay Home or vote Republican to make a statement. The statement they want to make is that the Democrats are a big disappointment. The statement they will make is that they need a reminder of just how bad things were under Republicans.
My statement, which I will make Tuesday morning, is very damn simple: I want Democrats to win and win and win until they're worried about what people like me think rather than what somebody on the right thinks. Again and again, the message seems to be, We're going to lose because people are going to stay home. If they showed up, we would win.
Damn what a sorry state of affairs. It took just two years for you to quit, or buy the Republican line?
If history has shown us anything, it's that if you want something done, you've got to do it yourself. If you leave the job of change this country's political system to the politicians, you will only see instincts of self preservation kick in, and the status quo get reinforced.
We have to force this to happen, not simply voting out of inspiration, or out of a great love for all of the candidate, but to bring about the shift in the political alignment we're looking to have happen.
I believe that we must, as voters, directly address our interests, because voting, in and of itself, is not a form of communication that allows for nuance. Primaries are about it. But even they are about two things: who you vote for, and who you don't.
And really, it's a contest between two sides, and the only people who get to participate in this contest, are those who show up. Those who don't show up have forfeited their game. And let me tell you, after years of watching the media give that same old damn "overreach" narrative, despite all the information that tells us people want more liberalism where it counts, I don't trust the media to peddle a narrative of the Democrats losing because they didn't serve the needs of their constituents. I don't trust the message that those people need to be more liberal or to be prouder progressives will be conveyed by the media or the pollsters according to our wishes. I think they will fall back on pre-existing narratives and blame the fall of this Congress on Liberal and Progressive elements in the party pushing the policy too far, too fast.
See, we could get some other narrative through, if folks actually thought of our politics as the default. But we're not the default, we're the insurgents, both in our own party and in politics in general. And so, even though the centrist elements and the conservative elements are more to blame for our unpopularity, we'll still get hit with the blame.
But in a way, if we don't show up, if we can't get others to show up as they once did, we will be to blame. It will be because we thought in terms of holding not the whole system accountable, but only our own candidates. We failed to realize that our Republican counterparts still hadn't gotten the voters message, and that the party in question wasn't beaten. We got complacent, we got convinced that nobody would elect Republicans dogcatcher now. Everybody thought something like that.
Little did we realize how cynical things could still get, that even a discredited party with incredibly bad policies could get back in, if it simply stirred up a backlash against the party in power, using obstruction to prevent the Democrats from easing the condition of Americans, and emotionally charged politics to pre-empt people's critical thinking.
But you know what? I will not take self-pity or cynical disgust to be my response to this huge failure of ours. Why? Because, as the Democratic party declined during my lifetime, I saw people take precisely that path, again and again, with the same kind of results.
Don't take that path. Be a stubborn son of a bitch or a woman of cast-iron will. Don't confront a fanatical bunch like the Tea Party Republicans with equivocations and excuses and absence from the polls. Don't show up to the political gunfight with the knife of apathy and despair. Show up with the biggest vulcan cannon you can rip off an A-10 and do your best to blow away the competition. Don't make it a fair fight, make it like one of those Kung-Fu fights where a hundred guys rush the same man and all get their ass kicked. Have them screaming ACORN, ACORN, ACORN in the streets with lamentation while Glenn Beck wails like a little baby on the floor, re-enacting his terrible twos. If we're going out in defeat, we're going out as flaming wreckage that still carries enough momentum to plow through their house and blow it to pieces.
And if, God help us, we lose on Tuesday, despite everything we do?
Remember 2004, ladies and Gentlemen. Remember how low we've been. Remember what we fought up from in just the space of two years. Yes, we're going to take a sharp hit in this election. But you know what? We've seen worse. We've lived through worse. We know how to chase the Republicans around, dig up the dirt, expose them for that they really are. We know how to cultivate the candidates, fund them with people power, and push them to victory. We are not the Democrats who hadn't had one real election day victory concerning the majorities in Congress since 1994. Even if we lost, we'd still have the majority in the house for two out of three of the last elections, and we'll still have the Senate.
What is November 3rd,2010? The first day of the rest of the 2012 campaign, where we re-elect Obama, restore or preserve our majorities in the House and Senate, and teach the Republicans in Congress who's boss.
It is not the day we will mope, or engage in in-fighting, or GBCW. It's not the day we decide to give up and just let the Republicans have their fun. It is not the day we decide this country's no longer ours, or that this is a corpocracy, or any such stupidity that's guaranteed to sap our will or increase our pessimism.
On November 2nd, though, you do your best to be at the polls, and be there with plenty of company. Regardless of what happens in this election, it will be a hit to our political power, and our expectations of what can be done should scale accordingly. However, the better we do tomorrow, the better we perform, the less ground we have to make up for, the less chance we have of facing a Republican majority, however brief, as a reality for the next two years.
If you feel it's absolutely necessary to get a reminder as to why Democrats had to be elected majority in 2006, I feel letting the Republicans win in 2010 will set the stage for the cruelest, harshest possible reminder of why we kicked those bastards out in the first place. If you feel that's necessary, if you weren't already concerned enough by the behavior your've seen or the stunningly low quality of the people who might actually get elected, then I promise you that by 2012, you will remember.
But do we have to go through that bullshit again? I had enough of the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress long before the end of the last decade. Haven't you had enough? It won't end, folks, unless you, and everybody else you know and can call up go to the polls and say it must.