If old white men feel maligned, they should take their own advice to minorities.

[Armstead]

83. I guess this gets down to a matter of individual style....

" I have read too many times here that we need to try to reach out to... Drumroll please...... WHITE MEN! Not our base, and our voters, but we need to reach out to old white males and not say stuff that might make them anxious. Why? Because the board is full of them and some of them think that the nation is not paying attention to their problems."

I am sorry if you feel that me and others overreacted to that. Personally, I reacted because I have a fundamental disagreement with it for a variety of reasons. It gets very,very complicated and the weather is too sunny outside today for me to go into all of it now.

I will just say that as a White Man, I reacted strongly because it hit a fundamental chord that goes back through my years of experience as a progressive/liberal since the 70's. I believe that statement is both tactically wrong, does not represent history and I found it personally insulting to hear white men are irrelevant to efforts to revitalize the Democratic Party as a politically effective force to represent the poor, working and middle class of all gender and races -- i.e. the majority of the population.

It also runs contrary to a fundamental belief -- that I have professionally worked on with reasonable success in my own tiny little sphere -- that the best way to foster positive change is to accept all people on their terms as a starting point, rather than putting them on the defensive about where tey are in life at the time. It also requires addressing the reasons people develop stereotypes or fallacious briefs.

As for the post you cited from another thread....Well, I happened to just hear a debate a little while ago on MSNBC (Melissa Harris Perry) in which President Obama was being criticized for saying some things tat were some what similar to that post.

As I said it all gets very complicated.