My two cents about winning in 2006. We have to seriously reach

[Cleita]

out to labor. Besides independent monitoring of the elections as they take place, we really should have 75% of the electorate, not 51% and I'm being conservative.

Our leadership has dropped the ball on labor in the past decades. Yet most of the red states have poor working class people in the majority. Yet our leaders allow themselves to be distracted with gun issues, abortion issues and other wedge issued designed to divide and conquer.

I want my next presidential candidate to reach out to the working poor with a platform of health care issues, wages, pensions and Social Security. I want to see them campaigning in union halls, outside unemployment offices and anywhere else workers are bound to gather.

Never again should we allow the Republicans to define the issues for us, even on this message board. It happens all the time on DU, that the wedge issues get the long flaming threads and the real issues sink in to the archives.

[NMDemDist2]

1. first we have to get the unions going again. they are losing membership

like crazy. Unions are the only way to fight the Corporations.

[Vincardog]

2. We have to stand for JOB Security, Retirement Security and a Rising

Standard of Living for everybody. Paid for by rolling back the Tax cuts for the rich and refunds for the corrupt criminals crony's of the BFEE.

[Ragnar]

3. I thinka move needs to be made on the silent majority too.

Those hard-working and decent people Nixon talked about in 1972...you remember them? They still exist. They have been wholly duped by the administration, and they won't take it lying down should the democratic party reach out with some properly worded attacks on the administration and the GOP as a whole.

[LightningFlash]

13. You won't get that from the soft ballers.....

You will get that from Howard Dean and the new DNC, flood them with ideas.

[e-mail]

[H2O Man]

4. Unions are a key.

I agree with you 100%. Until I retired, I was active in unions most of my adult life. It was always at the lowest level: in the factory, and then at the county level. The working class is getting screwed by this administration.

[Cleita]

6. I think this is why Republicans have set sbout trying to

destroy the unions in our country starting with Reagan and the air traffic controllers. Unions need to take back their base.

[H2O Man]

9. Sure.

A large part of Reaganomics was the destruction of union strength. The extreme right considers true union efforts to be a form of socialism. They do not want the working class to enjoy "comforts." They want them to be consumers, but always in debt to an extent that the worker has to say, "Yes, sir!" to any management demand.

[Warpy]

5. Good luck on doing an end run around the DLC

which has dictated the issues for the past dozen election cycles. They have reached out to corporations and yuppies, but have totally ignored the bread and butter issues faced by most people who work for a living across the country.

Yes, you've got the right idea. Campaigning as a economic populist got Clinton two terms, even if he did govern like a DLC corporatist. If this party ever wants to be anything but a bad joke, they're going to have to scrap the New Democrat/Old GOP platform and devise one that speaks to most of the people in this country, instead of the overpaid urban few.

[Octafish]

7. Unions - YES!

And non-Union, too.

Really haven't fathomed why the DEMs don't play the class warfare card. The rich can cry all they want, but the facts are they're winning.

Great post, Cleita!

PS: I like your ideas about the space program being a worthy government program (on another post) that could lead to full-employment and many, many technological benefits and societal returns for We the People.

[Cleita]

8. Thanks Octafish!

You and I are pretty much on the same page most of the time.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. Totally--if the Republicans whine and scream about something the

Democrats do, that means it's effective.

If they scream "class warfare!" that's because they know it's their weak point.

Think about it. Why would they care if Democrats point out their favoritism to the rich if they didn't think such assertions damaged them?

I'm going to provide a Clue to the scaredy-cats and sellouts who think that the Democrats' first duty is not to offend the Republicans. When did the Republicanites ever worry about offending us?

Clue No. 2: Why should the working class vote for Dems, when so many Dems went along with allowing permanent replacements for strikers (which means there is no real right to strike), letting farms be lost to usurous interest rates, NAFTA, the bankruptcy bill, and tax cuts for the rich and when Clinton's healthcare "plan" was so full of goodies for the insurance companies and was too complicated to explain briefly?

All these need to be reversed, so that working people have a fighting chance.

[radwriter0555]

11. Oh yeah? Buy DIEBOLD, then you stand a chance. We democrats didn't LOSE

the elections.

The GOP OWNS the elections. They own diebold.

[Cleita]

12. Oh I agree. There are grass roots efforts to

get these electronic machines out of the polls. My point is that it was the appeal to labor both organized and not that gave us Democratic victories in the past. We need to get back to that and not let them divide and conquer with their strange views of what is life and need for machine guns in every American's garage.

Even the most wacked out evangelical understands the need to feed his/her family and that comes from decent jobs.

[corbett]

14. I Couldn't Agree More

The Iowa primary in January of 2004 should have been a huge wake-up call to all of us. The other replies in this thread are correct but we really need to fire up labor. It seems to me that helping put initiatives on state ballots to raise the minimum wage is an excellent step we all can take right now.

http://www.oneamericacommittee.com/acorn

We also need to fight WalMart everywhere we can. They are staunchly anti-union.

http://www.wakeupwalmart.com/feature/health-care.html

and

http://www.aflcio.org/corporateamerica/walmart