At Open Left there is a blog post tonight that says just what I was thinking all week.
Party of Ideas? Not so much..."A) Democrats are reality-based when it comes to policies, and totally out to lunch when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
(B) But Republicans are totally out to lunch when it comes to policies, and as reality-based as it gets when it comes to winning elections, and politicking in general.
The Democrats' success in the last two electoral cycles would seem to negate the second half of "A", and I'm hoping to be proven wrong sometime soon, but given how badly the GOP screwed things up it's hard to see how Democratic leadership can claim any sort of extraordinary credit for their success in these elections.
More to the point right now, they've been strikingly inept at capitalizing on the transparent howling-at-the-moon insanity of the GOP. The GOP is holding a totally garbage hand, the Dems are holding four aces, and the GOP has still been controlling the play.
That's because, no matter how discredited their ideas may be, they still work as weapons so long as the Democrats are afraid of them. That's the only idea that the so-called "party of ideas" has left. And the Democrats? Can they think their way past that one?
Yes, the GOP has a garbage hand. They have been on TV touting it and tearing down our good ideas. We have let them do it.
I can not turn on the TV this week without seeing the Republicans who have absolutely no ideas spouting nonsense about the good ideas our side has. And I see very few people countering them on their BS and getting out in front of them.
At the winter meeting before Howard Dean stepped down as chairman, he gave a warning.
For his part,
Dean relinquished the party reins he held for four years with a few cautionary words to the several hundred Democrats attending the party's winter meeting.
"We have together built our party into a national powerhouse but we have a lot of work to do because we have to keep it going," Dean said. "We can't appear complacent."Indeed, complacency is an inherent risk for any party that has such a depth of power. Democrats now have control of the White House, expanded majorities in Congress and advantages in governor's mansions and state legislatures across the country.
Obama puts stamp on DNCI unapologetically post Dean's words about that very thing.
From page 100 of "You Have the Power"
"It has of course been in the interest of Republicans to stress self-reliance and individualism. That's the Frank Luntz way of packaging their economic plans to starve support for the needy.
But leaving people on their own to flounder and drown doesn't really reflect the values of most America. The policies based on this philosophy of social Darwinism haven't made American strong: they've made middle-class America weaker by draining resources away from families. By taking our own money away from civic life and community activism. By encouraging selfishness. By making people feel alone."
And why you are not hearing that much on the above topic from our Democrats....they are not willing to pay the price for the candor that will be needed to speak the truth.
I have seen only a couple of Democrats in Congress go on TV and really say what needs to be said right now. One of them was Pete DeFazio on Rachel Maddow's show. Not many others at all. In fact I can not even remember their names.
We have a chance now to change this country. With the idiotic mindset in the Senate it won't be easy. But guess what, we won. We won, folks. We do control both Houses. We have got to act like it.
Dean is out of national party leadership apparently now, and the very ones who encourage the catering to the right are the ones who have Obama's ear. That worries me.
More from Dean:
From page 124 of "You Have the Power"
"For Democrats to offer voters a significant change over the long term, we need to say what we mean and not be afraid of the consequences. But there is a price to be paid for candor, and I and others inclined to speak our minds have discovered the hard way. There is no reward now in politics for saying what you think. On the contrary, in the get-along-go-along world of Washington, politicians are penalized for saying what they believe, and insincerity is the currency of our culture. (After I finished my campaign, I fully understood what Harry Truman had meant when he said, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.")
America's politicians attack one another by day and slap one another on the back by evening. They can play this game because they know that their fighting words have no real meaning. And the media play right along, reporting on the game as though it were a story of substance. Indeed, the game becomes the story, and discussions of substance are relegated to a newspaper's inside pages if they are covered at all."
"What passes for news are stories of little lasting importance. My candor--like John McCain's in a previous election--was covered as a personality trait. We both endured "temperament" stories--and the issues we were candid about took a backseat. Candor ended up being a vulnerability for us as much as it was a virtue."
In the preface to the 2006 edition of his book he told about a speech he gave at GWU just before his decision to run for party chairman.
"On December 8, I went to George Washington University to give a speech about the future of the Democratic Party. I wanted to answer what had become the two prevailing schools of thought on our electoral losses: that we would need to move to the center, and that we would need to retake the issue of values. I told the assembled crowd, "There's only one thing Republican power brokers want more than for us to lurch to the left, and that's for us to lurch to the right. What they fear most is that we may really begin fighting for what we believe -- the fiscally responsible, socially progressive values for which Democrats have always stood and fought."
That is just exactly correct. If we lurch to the right, we will not hold the WH and Congress we worked so hard to win.
The Republicans are fearless, and they never give up. They never do.
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