"Not one dime! Not until Democrats pass healthcare."
That is what DNC fundraisers who call our house are going to hear from now on.
The hacks and jackasses in Washington who took over the Democratic National Committee from Howard Dean have taken us right back to their old election-losing "centrist" techniques. Under Dean's leadership, we witnessed the landslide election of Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate. All that advantage has been nearly frittered away.
Obama has spent the past year trying to engage Republicans in bipartisan governance. It's been like a year of watching Charlie Brown trying to kick a football with Lucy's "assistance."
And when Massachusetts voters, one year after Obama's landslide victory, re-fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat with a Republican? Surely something is very, very wrong. What is that something? See below the fold.
Let me here quote an excellent DailyKos diary on that debacle, called "Why We Should be Listening to Howard Dean":
If you want to win, you actually can't sort of move to the middle and become a Republican. You've got to stand up and stand for the things that you got elected on and that the Democratic Party believes in and we haven't seen that in the healthcare bill and I think that's part of the problem.
The smartest thing Obama could do now, in my unhumble opinion, would be to beg Howard Dean to come back and run the DNC.
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Will I still be donating to and working for individual progressive candidates? Yes!! And I encourage others to do the same.
In my opinion, the Democratic National Committee is not working to support my political goals, and I am not going to send them money in the hope that some of it will trickle down to stuff I care about.
///A super idea was put forth in the comments by "Ezekial 23 20": "Keep a list of the candidates you're willing to support (and preferably who have ActBlue pages) and whenever you get a DNC call or mailing, donate. To the next person on your list, not to the DNC."