This is my message to you all to WAKE UP.
Time for some much needed truth in this hyperbolic, ultra-paranoid echo chamber, where your hyperpartisan, corporate-backed media punditry lie to you with misinformation and outright fabricated data.
Democrats are losing.
Sure, the polls show that the majority of Americans support same-sex marriage, abortion rights, climate change, universal background checks, perhaps even generally stricter gun control laws, changing how the military handles sexual assault, cutting military spending in general, raising the minimum wage, prosecuting and regulating Wall Street, immigration reform, and stimulating job growth. And sure, these all happen to broadly agree with the Democratic platform.
But you'd have to be ridiculously shameless to base policy solely on polls rather than evidence.
So where's the evidence that shows that Democrats are not just on the right side of public opinion, but on the right side of reality? Other than studies that show same-sex parents are not serial killers, that abortions are safe and sometimes medically necessary and do not cause breast cancer, that 97% of scientists agree on climate change caused by humans, that more guns lead to more gun violence, that raising the minimum wage would stimulate the economy and especially help women.
But you know I'm just cherry-picking. There's apparently this and this and this and this that say the complete opposite of some of the other sources. So what if some of these studies are majorly flawed, some of these sources are clearly biased, and one of them is a crazy Ted Nugent which might be redundant way of saying crazy, and all of them have clearly questionable financial or political biases that likely affects their overall judgement.
And besides, even if you can say the Democratic Party has it mostly right on policy and substance, it hasn't translated into any sort of political success.
Well, not unless you want to get all nitpicky and count the 10 states that have legalized same-sex marriage in the last 3 years, the deal to end the government shutdown without capitulating, the use of the "Nuclear Option" to end the filibuster spurred by grassroots efforts, the NYC mayor who ran on a platform of taxing the rich, the AG who won on gun control, the minimum wage increases in municipalities in Washington and Pennsylvania and the entire state of New Jersey, and all the damn potheads. But I don't know if you really want to go there. Did I forget anything? Oh yeah, the rest of the Virginia statewide ballot. Like I said, so what.
Face it, other than having facts on your side, and the majority of Americans on your side, and having won many recent political battles:
The Democratic Party is getting its ass kicked.
And finally, we get to the piece de resistance:
Obamacare.
Nobody is really saying what needs to be said about Obamacare. This is it.
The fact of the matter is, Obamacare is not going to be the political winner that everyone's making it out to be.
Sure, you could argue that Affordable Care Act, aka OBAMACARE, is already delivering on some of its promises, such as denting the supposedly inexorable rise in health costs, cutting the deficit, and already getting health insurance to over a million Americans, mostly the people who need it the most, the poor and the sick with pre-existing conditions who would otherwise be rejected by the insurance companies.
And sure, you could argue that opposing Obamacare has done nothing but hurt the Republican Party, from the failure to extract concessions during the government shutdown, including even putting their own Congressional staffers in the crosshairs, and the complete inability to subvert it in court, and attack after Republican attack on Obamacare actually ends up showing us more of the many great things about Obamacare people might not otherwise know about.
But that's hardly proof that the Democrats will enjoy any political success due to Obamacare, translating into wins at the polls.
You could argue that the 2008 Presidential election was won in large part due to Obama campaigning on the types of health care reforms now included in Obamacare, or maybe you are one of the 86% of Americans who considered health care one of the most important issue leading up to the 2008 elections.
You could even argue that a lot of the same trends affected the 2012 outcome. And what better way to really appreciate how much political success Obama owes to Obamacare than to look at 2012? After all, Obama was facing Mitt Romney. Who better to provide a political challenge on Obamacare than the guy whose greatest political accomplishment was Obamacare's prototype, Romneycare? We were calling it Romneycare before Obamacare, but Romney couldn't even take credit for it during the campaign. Romney had to survive the primaries by distancing himself from the plan that was named after him and was now being attributed to President Obama. So once we got to the general election, not only could Obama win support based on his health care reform plan, Romney had no way of winning support based on essentially the same plan. So without healthcare, what could Romney possibly campaign on? His jobs record? How healthy Massachusetts had become? But then he'd be forced to talk about Romneycare, and he couldn't do that. If Romney could have successfully taken Obama's mojo on this one issue, who knows how much closer the general would have been?
But really, when it comes down to it, how do two presidential elections compare to a few months of a botched website rollout and months of impassioned demonization, impotent though it may be?
Besides, what kind of politician wraps their campaign around a policy that successfully saves money and lives and helps the neediest among us and enjoys public support and has already been constitutionally upheld and represents ideological compromise? Losers, that's who.
So finally, I've reached the end of this love letter to the Democratic Party.
You can be right about public opinion, right about politics, right about facts, and even right about predicting the future, but that doesn't make you a winner.
You can do all the deficit-shrinking, job-creating, rabble-rousing, health-improving, life-saving, prison-emptying, union-building, obstruction-ending, and all the equality-making you want, but that doesn't make you a winner either.
You can also stoop way down to the level of the Republican Party and the Tea Party and even the Corporate wing of the Democratic Party, by inundating with misinformation, conflating the negative and burying the positive, exploiting xenophobia and ignorance, and saturating with campaign funds, but even that won't make you a winner.
No, what makes you a winner, what really cements the Democratic Party in as America's party, what will finally make the people sitting at home around the dinner table talk about what the Democrats are doing, both right and wrong, is this:
Keep doing what you've been doing.
Because if this is what the Democratic Party is like when they're losing, then we are all already winning.
And America will back you up.
2:45 PM PT: Wow. Thanks for the Rescue.
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." -Yogi Berra
3:21 PM PT: To all the readers/commenters so far: thank you for proving that the vast majority of readers here at Dailykos will actually read past the title and first few lines before leaving a comment. Imagine if I did the same thing on a Repub blogsite!