ExTank, that’s just not so. There were way too many Southern Democrats in the Clinton coalition for anything like that to happen.
Besides which, we do have the Second Amendment, you know.
Except that according to Webb, that isn’t enough:
*That *is the central problem for the dems. Economic populism (alone) isn’t enough for the people he’s writing about. The dems would also have to broaden their tent on cultural matters. They did in this election, running people like Webb and Casey; the question is whether they can continue to do that without disaffecting the Harvard and Berkely crowds.
According to many Democrats, all that means is that you can join the National Guard.
In Maryland, every whack-job proposal for additional gun control laws, and we have some bad ones, has had strong Democratic support. It’s the death of a thousand cuts for gun owners.
Sweetie, broad-based political alignments are always going to involve some of us holding our noses to vote in our pragmatic political interests. In countries with parliamentary systems, they have lots of parties forming coalitions to achieve this end. Here we jam most of our varied political tendencies into only two parties. Where they have parliamentary coalitions, they don’t have to hold their noses as much since the choices are a little more fine-grained. Here the citizens have to accept getting along with very different fellow citizens if they want to have a competitive major party.
And frankly I feel perfectly delighted to see people like Webb deserting the Republican Party for the Democrats, it makes the Republicans look bad, they can’t keep principled people, driving them into the arms of the Democrats. Why do you suppose Webb switched parties? What if he really is smart and foresaw the way Virginia is going… i.e. the Democrats have a future in Virginia, which Salon has just called a new “bellwether” for America.
Oh dear, speaking of Senator-elect Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), I found this oddly ironic factoid: “Claire has received an F rating from the NRA for her stance on gun issues.” And she’s an Ozark gal born and bred. Hmm… Bill Moser’s article on AlterNet says about her win – from a Southern point of view, which includes the Ozarks –
Moser had nothing to say about guns, except that Democrat Harold Ford ran a pro-gun campaign in Tennessee and lost.
I rather doubt that changing philosophy on gun control is going to win the Democrats many more votes. Look at the Cuban exiles in Florida. Both Democrats and Republicans have been kissing their butts for a generation. Yet only the Republicans benefit from it. If the Democrats all of a sudden ignored the first half of the Second Amendment and pledged love everlasting for the Second Half of the Second Amendment, the NRA types still wouldn’t jump over in significant numbers. Sometimes facts don’t matter- like how one candidate volunteered, went to war, face enemy fire and got wounded while another used influence to get into the National Guard and then skipped out on even that obligation. Yet Bush is revered by some military types and Kerry despised because- well because they are that’s all. Kissing butts only makes sense if you get something out of it, so why should the Democrats change?
And then we can have articles like this running in our newspapers.
Farker, huh? This is an article from a small local paper, and it’s probably a bit more exciting than their usual fare of “Mrs Miggens loses purse”.
I think it would. I’m a Liberal, and I shoot. I think it’s more important to focus on National Health Care for every U.S. citizen, higher education for everyone who wants it, protection of women’s right to choose, development of alternative energies, emphasis on more efficient vehicles, expansion of telecommuting options, working toward becoming a good ‘world citizen’, and other things than trying to pass ‘do-nothing’ gun control legislation that primarily affects people who are not part of the problem anyway.
Granted, most Conservatives are opposed to many of the things that I favour; but gun control is one wedge issue the Democrats can do without.
Sweetie, not everyone in the Democratic party wants a “broad-based political alignment.”
We are only a few years removed from Nader supporters “costing” Gore the election. We are only a few months removed from seeing enormous amounts of support given to an effort to oust a sitting Senator. We are only days removed from some dems wanting Dean removed after the election.
furt, it depends on how you define “values.” You can have Christian “values” without spewing hatred.
In fact, spewing hatred is the very antithesis of Christian values, and bold Democrats in the South ought to start pointing that out.
It wouldn’t be a change for Southern Democrats and Western Democrats, who have tended to support gun rights all along.
:rolleyes:
And this boilerplate connects to anything I said, because … ?
:rolleyes: right back at you.
Your prior post mistinterprets (willfully?) what Webb is saying about “values.”
Republicans use “values” to mean abortion-outlawing and fag-hating. That’s not what Webb is talking about. Here’s what he said:
Webb is talking about the candidate’s personal character (and the voters’ sense of that), not about where the candidate stands on some artificial set of litmus tests of the type that Republicans use as electoral weapons.
Horseshit. Neither you nor I is completely sure what Web means by values in that passage, as he doesn’t say. I made no assumptions whatsoever about what those values are – only you have done that.
What he DOES say is that they do not vote based on their pocketbooks, and that they are values-based (whatever those values are), directly contradicting your assertions that “Democrats need to focus their emphasis on economic issues. Economic populism is the way to go.”
To repeat: According to Webb, economic populism, by itself, is not enough.
Are you suggesting that Webb wants Democrats to pander to Christian conservatives with an anti-abortion, anti-homosexual, let’s-get-evolution-out-of-textbooks platform? If not, what are you saying? Please spell it out. What would be “enough?”
Because I don’t think that’s what Webb is saying at all. My reading is that Webb is decrying that sort of politics. Webb says:
It doesn’t sound to me like he wants Democrats to emulate this strategy. Rather, it sounds to me like he (correctly) sees that Republicans are distracting voters from their true interests with these memes, and leading them to harm. (You do know what a siren is, yes?)
No. That’s purely your imagination.
So then, what are you saying when you say “economic populism, by itself, is not enough?”
What would be enough, do you suppose?
If the Republicans simultaneously turned wobbly on gun rights, I think they would.
The issue isn’t so much what I suppose, it’s what Webb supposes, and I don’t know.
If you’re asking me to interpret, I’d say that I’m pretty sure it’s NOT about being “right” on X number of issues, but about convincing them you are of a certain kind of person. (And, this being a political discussion, perception is what matters). To these people, Jim Webb (and Jon Tester, for another) look, sound and act like men you could look square in the eye and take at their word, while John Kerry looks like a snooty rich guy who thinks he’s better than you. Webb is a man who takes ideas like honor so seriously that he was writing angry op-eds about Carter’s pardoning of Vietnam vets twenty-five years after the fact. Even if people disagree on the specific issue at hand, the character counts.
Take that FWIW. My perception may well be colored by the fact that I would more-or-less identify as one of the people he’s talking about, that I like Webb (and Tester, and Casey, and Harold Ford, from what I know of them) and that I hope he and those like him come to be the heart of the Democratic party.
The main point I was making was that simply saying “you’ll get more money under us” is NOT the way to the hearts of the people he’s describing.