Scattered thoughts from an outsider who may be coming in from the cold.
First off, though: yeah, I was here early enough that I bagged the user name "joseph" so neener to all you other josephs.
But more importantly, I haven't been to this site much in the past three years, maybe once or twice. But I clicked on it in the runup to the Iowa caucus (I'm in California and still don't know who I'm supporting) and I have to say---I wish I could say it without sounding caustic, but I probably can't---it appears to me that the site has matured a great deal since I've been here. I'm glad for that. Be caustic back to me if you like.
Lots of diarists of every kind of profile looked a little spenitive to me in 2003 and 2004, and I think the site fed off of that for good and for bad. There were a lot of soap operas---I haven't seen too many in the past few days. So were a lot of we ancillary diarists; we were filled with drama and splenitive too. That doesn't be the case so much here anymore, and yeah, I'll be returning fairly habitually as the early primary season unfolds.
(And anyway, the prospect of the GOP not having an outright nominee by the time of their convention would make for the best soap-opera of all! I think that's a real possibility.)
2004 was particularly troublesome, because so many readers were working for Kerry, a campaign that really badly mismanaged people, and so did the DNC in its limited way. As a blogger, a print writer, and a campaign aide too, I especially didn't cotton to the generally insouciant tone. But I think everyone's mostly over that now, most readers too. How to organize, how to help has superceded how to rant.
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I work a lot of local-to-LA issues, and I think both parties, but particularly we Dems, are not making politics local enough. I think we won 2006 not because we were so great but because the GOP was stuck selling national issues for way past their sell-by date. I worry that immigration, which cuts both ways, as local and national issue alike, will be the big GOP issue and steal a lot of Demo thunder in later 2008.
I think the great mistake of 2004 was that everyone was so angry about the war that they never had the opportunity to make politics local. The old O'Neill axiom "all politics is local" hasn't held true at all since 9/11/01, and both parties have missed big opportunities to make it true again. Housing issues, transit issues, education, immigration---these are things voters care about in 2008. I hope they get good airing by the time the candidates get to California.