I just saw a clip of Dean on Fox. {I know I know} it was an example of his ridculous partisian statements. It seems incredibly counter productive to do that. There are many republicans who don’t like Bush as well as independents. There are many republicans who are tremendoous hard working people and patriots. When Dean makes inaccurate and insulting blanket statenments such as “republicans have never done an honest days work in there lives” it just turns people off. It sure does me. It seems stupid! stupid! stupid! He’s a smart guy and has been a professional politician. How can he be so blind as to not see how wrong that tactic is? He’s only giveing them ammo. He’s also turning people off to politics in general by employing the same nasty tactics as the opposition. That means those running the GOP right now will continue to do so and probably find a new puppet for 2008.
A lot of you just don’t get it. For some of us, winning isn’t everything. We want to be right.
When I saw that the Republican machine had hurriedly gotten the same sex marriage ban initiatives on the ballots of some key states, I knew there was trouble. While the Republican’s seem to actually take pleasure in denying gay people their rights, there is a reasonably large subset of my party that quietly does the same. While I want to change their minds, I’d rather lose them than allow them to change our platform to reflect their view.
The Republicans had the same choice with the “Southern strategy.” Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on if winning or being right are more important, they didn’t take the high road. They repeated their support of bigotry with the recent gay marriage initiatives, including proposals at the federal level. The purpose of this can only be to keep their anti-gay religious factions happy, hopefully stealing some votes from the anti-gay religious factions of the Democratic party. It was successful, too. If that’s what it takes to win, put a big fat “L” on my forehead, please.
I’m not passionate about politics because it’s some sort of game in which winning is the whole point. I’m passionate because politics actually have an affect on people’s lives. Would you rather tell your grandchildren “Well, yes, we did treat black people like shit, including weakly prosecuting people who murdered them, but damn, we sure did win a lot of elections” or would you rather have been on the side of good, even if you lost? If you see this as some sort of competitive sport, go play basketball. You won’t negatively affect nearly as many people by winning then.
If Howard Dean’s message is right, I don’t care if he yodels it while wearing a straight-jacket. If he’s wrong, I don’t care how quietly and well mannered he is about propogating his message. My party needs balls, not ideas. Our way is the right one, even if it’s going to take a while to convince 51% of the population of that fact. One day, we’ll return to the state where the only areas in which the parties disagree are perfectly defensible on both sides. When that happens, the country will be a better place, no matter which party is in power at any given time. We’re not there yet.
I agree thay we’re nowhere near an unbreakable lock on power for the GOP.
But I am going to argue that what needs to change is Democratic strategy. In other words, what you’ve outlined… waiting for the public to see it your way… is not the right answer. I think it’s inevitable that the Democrats will respon to continued losses with the requisite change; it just isn’t happening yet.
And note that “requisite change” does NOT necessarily mean adopting a “Republican lite” approach…
And I appreciate your willingness to do so.
Sure, I’ll press - how about we say $200?
I saw some of the clips last night. Holy cow, the guy is nuts! He doesn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between lambasting Republican politicians (OK) and lambasting Republican voters (very much not OK). He’s giving some great campaign footage to whoever runs for the Republicans.
So let’s put another question out there. Will Dean be the head of the DNC two years from today? My guess is a big fat “no”.
I’ll go you one better. $100 for each seat (net increase in both Houses). If it’s a push, I’ll still pay the original $100.
What changed your mind?
May I respectfully suggest that you make a stipulation that gerrymandered seats (see GA) don’t count?
May I respectfully request that they do? A seat is a seat, you know.
And who do you think will be drawing the lines in a state like California, where both houses are held by Democrats?
Well, I guess that’s how the Republicans won most of the congressional seats they did the last time around. Perhaps you guys need to count on them.
Damn! He caught us! And here I thought it was a majority of the people in a majority of the districts voting Republican.
No, it was Karl Rove. Didn’t you get the memo?
Regards,
Shodan
True, a worthy correction lof lazy language: but it WAS something one can actually point to in regards to his actually policy choices on guns that affected actual people in more than a hyped up, politicized way. And he was certainly involved in the program and an advocate for it as the mayor, as well as working with groups on both sides of the debate to aruge for it.
The real issue is that in a 4 term after which any further political aspirations would rely on Virginian voters being as happy with him as with Warner, Kaine is not going to ruin his political career by taking guns out of people’s hands even if he was a screaming liberal. It’s a dead-in-the-water idea in the State legislature, and worth no political capital.
But that’s not what you hear from an orgazation like the NRA or the Republican party, who act as if he’s just Brady in disguise. The fact that he makes actual gun control liberals squirm to defend his stance on “punish gun criminals, not gun owners” or supporting pro-hunting amendments is worth nothing to the Republican Party or the NRA. The rhetoric is just as high no matter who or what the candidate is. Warner was a pretty darn special case in terms of lobby influence, and even he got it between the eyes in terms of the rhetoric:
Whoops! Talking with the enemy = sheeps in wolf’s clothing!
Here’s the story now:
http://www.nraila.org/CurrentLegislation/Read.aspx?ID=1489
smoooooooch!
I guess he really couldn’t be trusted, right?
That did come out very wrong, didn’t it!
What I meant to say was that gerrymandering was how Republicans got most of the seats that they gained in 2004. The Republicans picked up 6 seats in the House, five of them coming from Tom Delay’s gerrymandered Texas.
Justice DeLay’ed is justice denied.
Just don’t lose sight of how you made many of the gains you did in 2004 during all your crowing about how the Democrats are losing touch with the people and there will be Republican elected officials as far as the eye can see until Revelation Day comes.
Hentor, I appreciate your good humor. I really don’t want to turn our political disagreement into personal animosity. It’s hard not to sometimes when the words start flying back and forth.
You might recall that the Supreme Court struck down congressional districts specifically drawn to ensure a minority winner. That, coupled with the general demographics of Texes and the the redistricting resulted in more Republicans being elected.
As I’m sure you are aware, Americans have been moving south and west from the north and east for at least twenty years. This has reshaped the makeup of the House of Representatives as the states gaining population tend to vote Republican.
This trend, coupled with the fact that I think general liberal principles are not something the majority of people will buy anymore, has led to the decline in power for the Democrats.
What they can do to change that has been the topic of numerous threads here. I have said numerous times that a move away from special interests on the far left and staking out fiscal responsibility would be the smart thing for the Democrats to do. The other impediment they face is the “soft on defense” label. Pre-9/11, the Defense Department was not the favorite institution of the left. Now that we are in a different world, the Democrats must face the fact that Americans want to feel safe and they will vote for the party that they think will keep them that way. I love the analogy about the “mommy party” and the “daddy party”. Right now, it seems like the country wants daddy.
Then I would say it is you who doesn’t get it. I agree that we don’t want to sell out soul for the sake of winning but if you think in the vast sea of opinion only those that agree with you are right , then you don’t understand the process.
I agree with you on the subject of gay rights. However, if you want to be effective you must be patient as well as persistant. Choose small battles you can win and put the issue out their to the public and let it sink in. It may take a long time. There are a multitude of issues to deal with. You must be smart and flexable to actaully get things accomplished.
If you’re not smart and patient in chooseing which battles to fight and how to fight them then you deserve a big L. You may have the satisfaction of believing you’re** right** but you have let down a bunch pf people who have been looking to you for wise and effective leadership.
I’d rather tell grandma that we actually accomplished something positive rather than “I stuck to my guns and accomplished nothing, but hey, I was right!!”
Politics is about communication skills and compromise. You don’t want to compromise so much that you feel like a traitor to your principles but you have to be realistic and wiegh the compromise with what you can accomplish that is positive. It’s real life.
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Then Dean will be a yodeling fool who was right but did nothing. I think having balls is a great thing, but without some smart tactics and good timing it may all be for naught.
And here we have what may be a big part of the problem. Reality check amigo. **Nobody ** has all the right answers. Not the GOP or the Dems. It’s this society working together and exchanging ideas and coming together with a respect and reverence for the process that makes us great and moves us forward. Right now the people in power do not have respect for the process. They have successfully manipulated the system to serve their own purposes. They have a lot of reasons to believe they can continue to do that. Thats why it’s importent to be smart with what tactics and language we choose to prove they are wrong. If Dean yodels from the rooftops and only serves to help them win again then he has let a a lot of good people down. We need to find allies in the independents and even among the republicans to get these assholes out of office. If that means realxing on certain issues to accomplish that then thats the smart thing to do.
The problem I see is that Dean isn’t right. When his rhetoric is just as nasty as theirs and causes just as much division as theirs then he’s wrong. He’s giveing them ammo instread of disarming them.
Look, the idea that Dean is going to do anything one way or the other to the Republicans is not relevant, and probably nonsense. Do you think they need Dean or anyone else to “give them ammo?” Look at the Swift Boat stuff - they have no problem making it up on their own.
The relevant question with Dean’s rhetoric is the balance between energizing Democrats versus alienating them. I strongly suspect that anyone who is particularly alienated by anything Dean would say probably wouldn’t be pulling out their checkbook for the Democrats anytime soon anyway. Obviously, this is just speculation, but we’ve tried the quiet and meek and Republican-lite path for a while now. I’ve said it before: people want a champion, and they want their party to be strong in their stances. I think, for example, more Democrats and undecideds were turned off by some of Kerry’s admittedly winding explanations of his positions than would be by firey rhetoric.
Um…when were you thinking that you (i.e. the party) tried ‘quiet and meek’ ‘Republican-lite’ stuff? Only time I can think of (and this wasn’t the whole party mind you), quite honestly, was the last time you guys actually managed to put a president in office…and twice too boot. And if the REST of the party had played along with ole Bubba, I think you’d still have a majority in the house and senate too. Just idle speculation here. What time period were you thinking of exactly?
-XT
I’m willing, but I believe it would be prudent to discuss some sort of escrow procedure before agreeing to this. E-mail me, and let’s see if we can’t come up with some acceptable procedure…
I was thinking specifically of Terry McAuliffe. I was thinking of the Democrats who didn’t have the balls to stand up and vote against the war or Bush’s tax cuts, or even more recently the bankruptcy bill. Bill Clinton may have been more toward the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, but he sure as hell didn’t pull punches. When the Republicans brought shit, the Ragin Cajun didn’t back down, and actually had a rapid response team. Remember “It’s the economy, stupid”?