Truth to tell. It needed to go down like this.

[Liberal Veteran]

Don't get me wrong. It certainly could have gone down a whole lot better, but the fact is, the Clinton/DLC wing of the party needed to be put into place.

The DLC threw us crumbs, but the costs were way too high in the long run. We lost congress. We got NAFTA. We got WTO. We got media consolidation. We got health care off the table. We got a war.

All this capitulation came at a price. It made us look weak and ineffectual as a party. The entire DLC strategy is basically: The party base is ours and really, we only need a few disaffected conservatives to vote for us and we win.

As long as we let them set the agenda for the party, we were somewhere between out of power and completely impotent to do anything worth a damn!

That wing of the party is MUCH MUCH less important to us than the people that really believe in progressive change. When we appeal to our base and energize the disaffected to vote at all, we don't have to be beholden to the center right who seems to get their way 80% of the time, even when supposedly are in power.

Ugly? Oh hell yes! But I've seen surgery, and surgery is ugly as hell too. Sometimes, fixing something that broken is a nasty kind of job, but in the end, we come out better for it.

The DLC is a malignant growth on our party and they compromise our ideals, so it had to be set back.

We need a REAL democratic party that isn't already corrupted by the beltway establishment.

Welcome to the 21st century, Democrats.

Let's kick some ass and set things right!

[Pale Blue Dot]

1. You said, in a nicer and more hopeful way, the same thing I said here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x6204669

[lligrd]

2. Well Said, We Just Took Our Party Back

It was a painful process but necessary.

[99th_Monkey]

3. Democracy in action is indeed sometimes messy, especially with Hillary screamers in audience.

But I like your analysis and your points are well made. Thank you for posting it.

[MissWaverly]

4. I decided tonite that is why they're so pissed

they would rather destroy the party than let the base rule the party, well, it was never
their party to begin with. I wonder what the FDR dems would have thought of corporations
and their toadies running the democratic party.