You know what positively fricking annoys me about such posts? It's a whole bunch of label-throwing by people who really just want to divide people up, in advance of our task to re-elect a Democrat President of the United States. People have turned to calling Obama whatever it takes to get people quickly on their sides.
Is that what we need? Is that really what we ought to be doing? Dividing our own party against the candidate likely to be the default, likely to be the winner? More pie fights about the Blue Dogs, who are now mostly the dead dogs? More DLC pie fights?
Question: is the rest of the world even going to care? The pattern of behavior here at this site always seems to be the same to me, before our political defeats. A bunch of people, in the normal tradition of the internet, start waging these divisive flamewars, but then a month or two weeks before the election realize that the political damage from the Democrats position is going to thwack their agenda as well, so all of a sudden it's GOTV and we must unite and everything like that. Meanwhile, everybody else just looks at us and sees Liberals, and even socialists.
We're employing against ourselves the same tactics the Republican employ against us to destroy our ability to both govern and win elections. That seems to me to be a suicidally stupid way of going about things. We can't win our own particular debates and win as a party, if we use the same vilification and anger we used against George Bush against our own people. We can afford to offend the hard right supporters of Bush. Hell, our very presence offends them. But can we really afford to alienate huge segments of the party from one another?
If you are a Blue Dog Democrat, consider that the sacrifices the party had to make on your faction's behalf most often worked against the party's ability to be popular, and therefore your own. Did winning your battles make you winners in turn? No. Your faction suffered the most, because in the end, the Republican voters would not be the friends that the other Democrats no longer wanted to be.
If you are a DLC Democrat, consider the difficulty of getting people like the current crop of Republicans to the bargaining table. Moderate's no longer in their vocabulary. The time has come to find a fourth way, a way to appeal to America's spirit of moderation and compromise without doing so from the weak position of trying to get the most obstructive and radical Republican Party ever to make nice with you.
If you are a Progressive, understand this: without a majority, you cannot govern. If you thought the last two years were painful, the next two will be banned by the Geneva convention. Obama not move fast enough for you? Try the Republican alternative. We cannot afford to sit around, indulging in the typical pie fights, and expect to win. We must learn the sometimes painful art of coalition building.
EVERYBODY. Moderate and conservative Democrats on this site, do realize something: Progressives want to do what's best for the country, and very often, they're taking the positions that the facts and the realities of our situation demand that we take. You might want to consider coming to their aid. But they in return must realize that progress is slow sometimes, especially when you have the weight of the White Elephant that is the Republican Party on your back.
Republicans, this election, saw past their differences, and put together a working coalition of voters. Next election, to take things back, we have to do the same. The time to get motivated to do this is now. We will have to fight back against the forces that have scored the victories they have in this election. We will have to fight back against a now emboldened Republican Party, instead of a thrice defeated one.
I personally think we got complacent, thought at the beginning that we couldn't lose, and that the Republicans couldn't win, and that it was safe now to simply rest on our laurels, and fight for control of the party. But the Republicans weren't done yet, and really didn't want to be done.
We made the mistake of thinking that the wisdom of our policies was self-evident, when it was really only self-evident to ourselves. We should have realized that many people were only tenuously on board, and that things were not going to be as easy as we thought. The conservatives and centrists should have realized that in order for the party to remain popular, we had to serve the needs of the people. We could not be seen as variations of the Republicans. We should have acted, every one of us, like a distinct party.
We should also have been focusing on what we should focus now: making what is self-evident to us, self-evident to others. See, not everybody knows what we know, understands things according to the same paradigms. We must teach voters to understand things our way, perform the "indoctrination" that Republicans are so scared of. Republicans opposed us the way they opposed us, blocking us in the Senate and excoriating us in the public sphere, so we couldn't settle down and establish a new way of doing things in Washington.
If we want to return to our former numbers, and increase our power past that, we must realize that not everything's going to get done at once, and that we have to prepare the foundations of our new majorities, our new paradigm, before we can argue with any sense, about who's going to lead that new majority. We have to have power, and be able to consolidate it before we can let such discussions take priority.
Our priority right now is, and should be to unite to defeat the Republicans, and this time not fall down on the job of uniting to consolidate Democratic Power for the long term. This time the Blue Dogs and DLC people should know better than to hinder getting help to the American people. This time the Progressives should realize that they need other political arms working with them to move their agenda forward.
All sides should realize that they cannot win a divided party. The time has come for more constructive arguments, for arguments about how we sell the Democratic Party in terms of policy. We should have news items on a consistent basis documenting the Republican outrages and figuring out how we are going to frame them for maximum emotional and dramatic effect.
We should not be figuring out how to win an internal war, because that's not going to be a war anybody wins.
Obama's not a Blue Dog, not a Liberal, not a DLCer, not a Progressive.
He's our President, and if we know what's good for us, we're going to help get him re-elected.