Why won't we ever learn?

[Savannahmann]

I am a blue collar guy in Georgia. According to the DOL, my job qualifies as "skilled labor". So how is it that I saw what was happening in this election months ago, while nobody in the Democratic Party filled to overflowing with people who have earned advanced degrees did?

I started off this morning reading the news, as usual. I glance at and read articles from Huffington, The Hill, ABC's the Note, and several others. Then I looked at the polling information from yesterday. Republicans winning the Senate still. Who would have seen that coming right?

Then I saw a link, and I read the story. I know, the WSJ is Right wing, and it's all about protecting business. But if you don't know what your opponent is doing, how can you defeat him? So I read the article, and if I didn't know better, I'd have sworn I had collaborated on it.

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall has been called a lot of things, but the nickname highlighted during his Tuesday debate with Republican Cory Gardner deserves some meditation. “Mr. Udall,” said the female debate moderator, “your campaign has been so focused on women’s issues that you’ve been dubbed ‘Mark Uterus’ . . . Have you gone too far?”

Don’t tell Harry Reid , but the “war on women” theme is losing political altitude. Don’t tell the entire Democratic Party, in fact, which this year chose to elevate this attack—that Republicans are hostile to women—to the top of its political strategy. Mr. Reid spent most of the past year holding Senate show votes (on “equal” pay or the Violence Against Women Act) designed to give his candidates further political ammunition. Democrats by some estimates have already devoted as much as 60% of their $120 million in midterm TV advertising to the “war on women”—claiming Republican candidates are anti-birth-control, anti-women’s-health, anti-reproductive rights, anti-equal pay. Even Republicans at the height of anti-ObamaCare fervor were never so monomaniacal.

This was posted last night at about 8:30. An hour before I posted this. I merely reiterated the arguments I've been making all year long. That we Democrats have to bust our asses, and we have to earn the votes. We can't count on people just leaving the Republicans over some worn out slogan. I specifically highlighted the War on Women.

With less than thirty days to the election, the Democratic Party is finally waking up and realizing that this is a tough fight. Well at least the party is finally waking up although I suspect that it's too late to matter at this point.

We skated through this election. We took it for granted. We started out with the idea that the Republicans would be so unpopular after the Government shut down and sequester that we could coast to a sweeping victory. We had all the niche issues. I call them niche not because they are unimportant, but because a handful of a percentage of the public considers them to be the most important issue.

"It's the economy stupid" was the money quote from President Clinton's defeat of Bush 41. In April, I said the same thing. It's the economy. So what did the Democrats campaign on? Well, the economy is awesome, so we don't need to worry about that. Only, the economy isn't awesome, not for the average folks. Not with more than 92 million people not in the workforce, a record. The Republicans tied their party to the economy by labeling every opposition as opposing the "job killing" (insert issue here).

We had the Republicans on record on universal background checks. We thought we'd won the election then. We were sure we'd won it here, there, and everywhere. With every issue that polled as barely important to people, we were sure we had won the Senate. We scream GOTV, and ignore the fact that those folks will get out and vote, Republican, because the Republicans are talking about the issues that matter.

No, it's not Benghazi. They use Benghazi to placate the base and to tweak us on the left. The difference is they have one or two people talking about that, while everyone on the Democratic side is talking about the War on Women, and only the war on women. An issue more than one person posted here as the game changing election winning issue for the Democratic Party.

No, I am not saying that Republicans are great on womens issues. But those issues seem pretty petty when you're living in a Homeless camp called the Jungle in the heart of Silicone Valley. When your issue is finding clean water and food that isn't rancid GOP attitudes towards women is pretty much the least of your worries. Hearing that the economy is doing great doesn't do anything but cement the idea in the minds of the poor, the desperate living paycheck to paycheck that you've been forgotten.

It's past time we learned. The Republicans are not going to roll over and die just because we hate them. We are going to have to defeat them and win elections. We're going to have to embrace principles and ideals and worst of all, actually push to get them done. We are going to have to go out and earn every single vote, we can't take anything for granted ever again. And if we actually manage to save the Senate this year, a possibility, although slim, we are going to have to bust our asses and show that we care about the people so we can win in 2016. Slogans and meme's only go so far, and that distance drops dramatically every time it's used, and then overused. It's the economy stupid was used once, and carried by the press and the pundits through the election to show how out of touch that Bush 41 was. It wasn't toted out by every politician running for every office from President down to dog catcher.

We have to learn, and we have to realize our opponents are not mouth breathing idiots. They're smart, and they're working hard to beat us. We had better start working harder to win, because we have to earn it, they're not going to give victory on election day to us on a silver platter just because we hate them. We laugh and giggle when one of them hates us, what makes us think they view us any differently.

We're losing, because we haven't been fighting to win. We're losing because we haven't done a damn thing to win. Oh, and GOTV, the Republicans will appreciate more people in the booths voting for them. Because more people voted in 2010 when we lost the House, than voted in 2006 when we won it.