Others have dealt with the King allegations. My point was that the Democratics need a charismatic figure who will not be ashamed to praise free enterprise and liberty.
I haven’t said a thing about Mill. His view was a bastard child of liberal philosophy. And rationalism is a type of epistemology — e.g., as versus empiricism — and may be used to derive any arbitrary political philosophy. Perhaps the greatest rationalist (next to Plato) was Descartes, and surely no one would consider Descartes to be the philosophical ancestor of Karl Marx.
I suppose you could look at it that way. Do you actually think that a more left leaning or socialist agenda is ever going to be in the cards in the US? If not then what you could ‘win’ is a compromise…more moderation (and more fiscal responsibility) to what the Republicans are currently serving up. Once in power you may be able to push through SOME of your agenda in a watered down (or perhaps realistic/responsible) form. Half a loaf is better than no loaf at all.
Or I suppose you could hold the line, not compromise and hope the Republicans screw up so spectacularly that you are given another Carter type presidency…most likely followed by another string of Republican wins. Maybe its time to start looking at the country you actually live in instead of the one you wish you lived in and begin the process of compromise to make yourself more appealing to the majority of American’s…instead of trying to appeal to the right in Europe.
Because it’s the only thing you’re ever going to get?
As others have said- dude, wake up and read the poll charts. Self-defined “liberals” are the smallest group out there. I realize that you (and many other liberals) believe that if somehow the voters were educated enough, or if they were just told in the right terms, or the massive numbers of non-voting leftists were roused, then liberal domination of politics would be the norm.
But that hasn’t happened. At the very least since Nixon took office over Humphrey; maybe even since FDR passed away, depending upon whether you’re willing to argue that Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson were liberals (a position I would disagree with; all three were conservative Democrats, in my opinion).
Pardon me if I’m a foreigner stating the obvious, but it seems that US states are so predictable in their voting that every election essentially comes down to a few thousand voters in key counties. Is the overriding factor in turning a couple of those red states blue (all that is required for victory) not to do with policy at all but, like Clinton, simply where the candidate is from?
It’s not so much where he’s from geographically, but where he’s from ideologically. The South used to have a vary large number (in fact, the majority) of Democrats called Conservative Democrats (like Harry Truman). Then the party began shifting left, and started appealing to practically any special interest group, from environmentalists to feminists, that could frame its perceived plight in terms of rights. Soon, rights became a specialized commodity. There were now human rights, civil rights, animal rights, rights of snail darters, rights of Mother Earth, and property rights. The latter became evil because certain wealthy politicians (a la Lyndon Johnson) discovered that it was expedient to appoint themselves as representatives of the poor. Rights became, rather than something intrinsic to an American’s birth, a cause of conflict because it had to be figured out when the rights of a tree clashed with the rights of a boy scout. Conservative Democrats in the South switched en masse to voting Republican (often switching party affiliation) some time around Reagan. The South had been strongly Democratic for a very long time.
States aren’t that predictable. As recently as 1998, Dukakis only carried 11 states for the Democrats. In the very next election Clinton carried all but 18 states and beat George Bush the first.
Maybe where they are from has something to do with it, but it’s certainly not all of it. Who is running, and what platform they are running on is obviously a huge factor in how many votes they get.
In a real answer to SentientMeat’s question, I’d say it’s possible- the South tends to be conservative, but has shown in the past a willingness to vote for a more liberal candidate who happens to be from the South.
This isn’t unique to the South: note that Kerry won New Hampshire in 2004, which has only gone Democratic twice otherwise since 1964; the last Republican to win California happened to be from California; and when Mondale got shellacked in 1984, the one state he carried was his home state.
According to the Third Way paper John Mace linked to (and I re-linked to), fewer and fewer states are voting within 5% of the national average, meaning that those ‘swing’ states play a greater and greater role. Most of those swing states are in the Midwest (Minnesota, Ohio, Iowa, etc.)… but history shows that a Southern Democrat can throw several southern states into play if he isn’t running against a Southern Republican.
Clinton is an anomaly because of the Hillary baggage. He was conservative enough, but he married Karlita Marx. It was really she whom the South disliked.
I’ve often read* that people vote for a president differently than they vote for other officeholders-- the personality of the candidate plays a much bigger role. Certainly the issues matter, but you need to combine the right issues with the right candidate. Presidential hopefuls like Dole, Dukakis, and Kerry just weren’t very personable. Dole, though from the midwest seems to have lived too long in DC and turned into an empty suit. Dukakis and Kerry were so stiff that a lot of people couldn’t relate to them.
So, if the candidate is from your state, or from your region, it might be easier for you to relate to him (and vice versa), and in the swing states that can make a difference. Seeing as how most of the swing states tend to be in the midwest or the south, having a condidate from that region is a plus. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but it is a plus.
*I’m not offering proof, but rather the opinion of so-called experts
As for Evil Captor’s throwaway line about controling the ballot machines, he might want to remember that the contested counties in FL duing the 2000 election were mainly run by Democrats. Of course, remembering facts like that tends to invalidate the kind of analysis he gives us, so perhaps he finds cognitive dissonance to be more comforting.
That dismissal only works if you assume the Democrats running those machines were as immoral and unscrupulous as the Republicans were. Giving a crooked machine to a good man is no guarantee he’ll use it.
The presidency is separate from congress. It seems to me that the agenda of this thread isn’t about getting a democrat as president in 2008, but rather getting democratic control of congress in 2006. There’s no real way to analyze the 2008 presidential race yet, and besides the presidential race will ultimately come down to a contest between two individuals rather than a contest between the parties.
So lets concentrate on the congressional races. Look, if the contention is that electing moderate or conservative democrats is a waste of time then you might as well forget about the Democratic party as a vehicle to achieve political change. The Democratic party isn’t able to ram a left-wing agenda down the unwilling throats of the American people, no matter how sick they are of the Republicans. You aren’t going to exchange extreme left-wing Democrats for extreme right-wing Republicans, you’re going to exchange moderate right-wing Democrats for extreme right-wing Republicans.
Bill Clinton was the most successful Democrat in a generation, and you’re saying that from your perspective his presidency was a failure? Because he didn’t turn the country into France? You’re not going to elect a congress on a platform of turning the US into France, any more than you could elect a congress on a platform of turning the US into an Islamic republic. Not gonna happen. Sometimes you have to go to an election with the citizenry you have, not the citizenry you wish you had.
If you want to change the citizenry, electoral politics isn’t going to help you. Forget the Democratic party and concentrate on advocacy groups. But…what exactly are you trying to accomplish? Educate the workers about their false consciousness? That is, explain to them that they aren’t really happy, they just THINK they’re happy, and if they were smart they’d be miserable?
The cause for the switch of the South in presidential politics wasn’t due to a shift to the left, or to appealing to special interest groups…it was largely because of black civil rights. Truman, who you mentioned, integrated the army and supported federal lynching laws and black civil rights laws, and faced a loss of southern support (not by southern votes going Republican, but by the Thurmond independent presidential run. Thurmond won South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and got large minority votes in other southern states).
The first Republican candidate for which the South voted overwhelmingly wasn’t Reagan, but Nixon. In 1968, Wallace, running as the segregation candidate, won Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Humphrey, the Democrat, won Texas. Every other southern state went to Nixon. You can say this is because of Democratic leftism, but it’s a lot simpler to see it as a response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (because, on every issue other than civil rights for blacks, Wallace wasn’t really to the right of Humphrey, and in fact, to the left of Humphrey on some matters, and in the 1948 election, other than their attitudes on black civil rights, Truman’s and Thurmond’s stances were virtually identical.)
That qualification is only relevant if you assume that Democrats are inhernetly more moral than Republicans. History has shown us that both parties can be either moral or immoral, depending on the circumstances. Partisan loyalty for the sake of loyalty alone is the real problem.
Civil rights was one of the special interests that I mentioned specifically by name. The way it was (ab)used, it implied that there existed a set of rights apart from the rights intrinsic to our humanity. It quickly came to mean, for all practical purposes, rights for blacks. The term “civil rights” seldom if ever was applied to mean rights for a white Anglo-Saxon male. The perception of the regular Southern Joe was that other people were getting more rights than he. Thus, the exodus.
