Attention Democrats!
February 15th, 2003 | impolite company
If the Democratic Party had any sense at all, they would immediately offer this woman a job as a campaign consultant. There is room for two parties in our political system, but, as it currently stands, the Democrats — so fearful of possibly offending anyone, or of being labeled with “The L Word” — have become indistinguishable from the Republicans in everything except their access to money.
In two short articles, she lays out rules for the new political reality. First, she addresses the candidates, saying:
Let me spell it out for you. The Republican party–the grand old party of Lincoln–has allied himself with the craziest fundamentalist segments in our society. Their multibillionaire backers fund pseudo-intellectual think tanks whose job is to sugar coat the poison pills they are bent on feeding our society. They own the voting machines their candidates win on; they own the media that reports the news to the American people. The airwaves are full of their shock troops: obscene, tasteless, small-minded bigots whose role is to keep the faithful riled up. They do not care about truth and justice. They care about winning, about instituting their Christian version of Sharia on the country, and keep the “rest of us” in our place.
Wow! She advocates directness, unity against personal attacks on the other Democratic candidates, realizing that the national media are not the friends of the Democrats and the necessity of focusing on the local media and local voters in the manner of the late Paul Wellstone.
Then she turns to the Democratic Party itself — what she calls, “The Circular Firing Squad”:
In their flight from “being associated with Clinton”, they have turned the Democratic party into “republican lite”, neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. They have alienated the core faithful and given independents and undecideds no reason to vote for Democratic candidates. The message from the DNC is either “me too!” or “not me!”. The ongoing scramble for position by those who would be president augurs another season of the merry slimeball fight the party engages in every four years; by the time the survivor gets to the actual election he looks like he’s been trampled by slugs. And the poor bastard gets there just in time to be eaten alive by the Republican attack machine, while his own party squeals in fright and runs in the other direction
I wish I’d said that. And I hope someone is paying attention. She’s not just ranting and ripping things apart. She’s got some very fine observations. Unfortunately, I have no great hope that anyone’s paying attention to anything but the pollsters.
