The message of the Obama/HRC contest is this: The Day of the Beltway Dems is Over.

[Ken Burch]

The Obama campaign, whatever else you can say about it, is increasingly a grass-roots minded effort, driven by enthusiasm and passion. Not perfect, and with its message not yet fully realized, but massively successful and growing in strength nonetheless.

The other campaign is the campaign of the insiders, the "pros", the Ceo's, the fixers and the hacks. The folks who simply assumed the peasants would obey them.

The message is this: The Beltway No Longer Matters. If they wish to have a role in this party, from now on that role must be to listen to the activists and implement our wishes and values to the best of their ability. From now on, the party must be run from the bottom up, not the top down.

If this lesson can be learned, we're at the start of a progressive golden age.

[Hardrada]

1. I hope so!

[TexasObserver]

2. Inselt the Beltway is right. They really do lose touch with reality there.

The hubris of Democrats who don't leave Washington enough!!

The Obama campaign doesn't have some smarmy POS like James Carville, or Dick Morris, or Mark Penn creating one slimey theme after another.

[MADem]

3. Well, Dean had the same idea. So did Gene McCarthy. So did Jimmy Carter.

It's only if you're young and/or didn't study recent American history that you don't remember that stuff.

This isn't "new." It's just the latest iteration of something that comes up every so often.

Beltway BAD....outsiders GOOD.

Fact is, neither one is bad or good. Each has redeeming qualities. Outsiders have fresh perspectives, insiders know how the damned Hill actually works.

[Ken Burch]

4. So, as I said, the Beltway can implement our ideas there on The Hill.

But they need to so remembering that they are there to serve us as the party, not to expect us to obey them.

And I hope you'll agree that things would have been better for the party and the country and the world if Gene McCarthy and the others had got their way, rather than being stopped by the "pros".

[MADem]

5. Well, Gene McCarthy actually had a great deal of background. He wasn't a newcomer,

he just had "new ideas." He avoided that Beltway taint by being "anti-war." It just wasn't 'the' decisive argument, though--even with a draft and kids dying in droves. He was also a WW2 hero, a fact he downplayed.

Jimmy Carter was an 'outside the Beltway' candidate, but he had a longer resume that included executive experience, plus he was a former nuke officer. He got in, but he couldn't stay in.

So they were both "pros" -- one from within, one from without. One didn't make it to the show, the other couldn't hang on to the job.

While it is amusing to speculate, if we are to be honest, we really can't know how well they might have done--Nixon, for all of his domestic criminal hideousness, did open China and prosecute detente with the USSR. Would that have happened with McCarthy? We can "assume" but we really don't know. Reagan always takes credit for that "tear down these walls" bullshit, but in fact that wall would have fallen eventually because the USSR was broke. They might have hung on a year or two longer without Reagan rattling a sabre at them and forcing them to spend when they would have rather conserved---but we will never actually know if a second Carter term would have been a self-actualizing experience or an exercise in "How much can we goad, piss off and bully that gentle man from Georgia" exercise on the part of some of the shitheels who were flexing their muscles during that rather tumultuous era?

[Hardrada]

6. It would have been during the latter Carter term

that all the Politburo members began dying off. That would have happened anyway so he could have had perhaps an advance start on glasnost etc. I lost track of the premiers. No sooner were they in office then there was a lengthy funeral parade for them. The paths of glory lead but to the Novodevichy.

[K Gardner]

7. Oh hell yes, that's the message. Its being sounded from sea to shining sea.. Tweety and

racist Pat Buchanan and the rest of the "beltway boys" are SHAKING in their proverbial boots. Screw them..

GOBAMA ! :bounce: :woohoo: