Time to abandon the Dems?
posted by Dumplingeater @ 3/02/2006
3 comments
Liberal Malcontents
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Thursday, March 02, 2006
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3 Comments:
"Why is it that you can't find a Dem saying this?"
By "this" do you mean calling for public ownership of the ports? I agree, they should be calling for that.
The article itself does point to Democratic Senator Carl Levin
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=252183
It's not fear mongering or racism if the fear has some basis in reality.
I don't agree about abandoning the Dems. There is no such possiblity. If you want democrats to be more progressive you can work toward that, but any national party has to be somewhat representative of national opinion. In many ways the national view is very far from the progressive view. That's a problem for progressives more than democrats.
What about piercing people's misperceptions of Bush as strong on national security. Won't they be more open to hearing the publicization argument after that?
Whether there are really security implications from the ports deal is far from certain. Yet Dems tried to outflank Bush on national security by using this issue as a weapon -- Why? because there is a clear nexus here between xenophobia, racism, and misplaced concerns about national security.
In the very least, clearly, the lack of inspections of containers at ports has much greater implications to national security. Yes, Dems have talked about that issue also to try to gain credibility on national security in the past, but they jumped on this issue because it has a "value-added," i.e., appeal to bigots.
The DLC has abandoned its base in order to appeal to swing voters, and it is high time that its base fights back. First of all, such strategies as those revealed on the ports issue leads to Dems in office who don't stand for anything different than the Repubs. And on top of that, more recently, as in the last 10 years of so, that methodology doesn't even work to get Dems elected anyway.
The issue of privatization is another example of the fraudulent nature of the Dems. In general, they roll right over for privatization - if not lead the charge in promoting it. The Clinton administration was certainly a prime example of that phenonomon. Yet all of a sudden, when they can say that we shouldn't be privitizing to ARAB companies, privatization becomes an issue?
Swing voters aren't that stupid. They can see through such hypocritical platforms - and certainly frightwing talk radio hammers the Dems hard on exactly that kind of hypocracy.
Bush has been doing a pretty good job of piercing misperceptions about his concern for national security on his own lately. Katrina and the increased political power of fundamentalist Islam have made the national security implications of Bush's policies quite clear to most voters. And that's why his numbers have dropped. Look at the polling numbers. The change isn't because the opinion of Dems, or even swing voters have changed that much. It is because the opinions of Republicans have changed. But when Dems try to pile on in a poorly conceived manner, they only help Bush dig himself out. Republicans reflexively move to support the folks they voted for when they are attacked in a highly partisan, rather than in a reasoned, manner.
Yeah well, we may have to tolerate some distasteful short cuts while we wait for the grassroots transformation of the dems, due to arrive in 2025, if ever. What's the model for this revolution again? Is it the progressives of the early 20th c or the civil rights movement?
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