Old theme: "Democrats need to 'reach out' more to the 'heartland'"

[checks-n-balances]

Forget the "heartland"
A Kerry volunteer says Dems aren't latte-drinking snobs -- and they don't need to "reach out" to red state reactionaries.
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By Janet Sullivan
Nov. 4, 2004

<snip>

By the time I had gone to bed, the chorus of pundits had fixed on a single tune, as they always do, and remarkably quickly, too. (Do they watch one another's feeds in the green room?) They had dusted off the old theme that the Democrats need to "reach out" more to the "heartland." Reach out? How, exactly? Forget that these folks blindly ignored all objective reality -- and their own best economic and national-security interests -- and voted for Bush. Look what they did at the Senate level. In Kentucky, they refused to use even basic sanity as a litmus test, and reelected a guy with apparent late-stage dementia; in Oklahoma, they tapped a fellow who wants to execute doctors who perform abortions, who was sued for sterilizing a woman against her will, who pled guilty to Medicaid fraud, and who largely opposes federal subsidies, even for his own state; in Louisiana, they embraced a man who has made back-door deals with David Duke and who was revealed to have had a long-running affair with a prostitute; in South Carolina, they went with a guy who thinks all gay teachers should be fired; and in Alaska, they reelected a woman who was appointed by her father to the job after a spectacularly undistinguished career as an obscure state senator. And compared with the rest of the GOP Class of '04, she's the freaking prom queen. These are the stellar elected officials that the "heartland" has foisted on the rest of us.

<snip>

So what are their issues, anyway? They're "cultural and moral values," we keep hearing. Well, they voted in a president who ran up the largest deficits in history, saddling our children and grandchildren with mountains of debt to pay for a tax cut that largely skewed to the wealthiest Americans; underfunded his own education initiative by $9 billion; threw more than a million more families into poverty; lost more jobs than any president since Hoover; saw 5 million Americans lose their healthcare on his watch; demoted the office of counterterrorism and ignored months' worth of dire warnings about an attack in the months running up to 9/11, and after 9/11, fought the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, fought the formation of the 9/11 Commission, and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of troops away from the war on terror to fight a war of choice in Iraq, where we've lost more than 1,000 young Americans. Those soldiers who are lucky enough to make it home face cuts in their benefits and combat pay, as well as veterans' hospital closures.

<snip>

And how, exactly, are the Democrats supposed to counter this? Out-pander Karl Rove? Out-lie Dick Cheney? Out-fearmonger George Bush? Even if the Democrats were inclined to do all three -- and after this election, I'm betting they'd be willing to give it their best shot -- what are the odds, really, that they, or anybody, could succeed?

I'm not, by any means, saying that the Democrats made no mistakes in this race -- and some were huge. For one thing, the Swift Boat liars have been dogging Kerry since the Vietnam War was still underway -- John O'Neill was a protégé of Watergate felon Charles Colson -- and the Kerry campaign should have been ready to shoot down their smears from the moment they were launched. For another, they should have defined Kerry aggressively, with a huge media campaign, from the get-go -- the minute he nailed down the nomination in March -- and defined Bush on their terms at the same time. And they wasted way too much time on Florida, where the love is increasingly unrequited and the Bushes rule. <snip> But to pretend that the Democrats are a bunch of effete, latte-drinking elitists who don't know how to connect with the "heartland" is not only hooey, but mindless, lazy, recycled hooey.

More at:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/11/04/heartland/print.html

[DaveinMD]

1. you don't need to win those areas

you just need to reduce the margins of defeat.