Hey Democratic “leaders”, Liberal Street Fighter calls your bluff.
David Mamet sums up exactly why the current “leadership” of the Democratic Party falls to defeat over and over again:
The military axiom is “he who imposes the terms of the battle imposes the terms of the peace.” The gambling equivalent is: “Don’t call unless you could raise”; that is, to merely match one’s opponent’s bet is effective only if it makes the opponent question the caller’s motives. And that can only occur if the caller has acted aggressively enough in the past to cause his opponents to wonder if the mere call is a ruse de guerre.
If you are branded as passive, the table will roll right over you — your opponents will steal antes without fear. Why? Because the addicted caller has never exhibited what, in the wider world, is known as courage.
Courage, as we all know through rueful experience, is something that the supposed party of the left hasn’t had in decades. Instead, after rising to the occasion and passing vital civil rights and voting rights legislation, the Party has since become the handmaiden of the Corporations and the wealthy. It never fights for its base, but only for a seat at the table, the high stakes table with the hyper-wealthy and the Republican Party:
For example, take a player who has never acted with initiative — he has never raised, merely called. Now, at the end of the evening, he is dealt a royal flush. The hand, per se, is unbeatable, but the passive player has never acted aggressively; his current bet (on the sure thing) will signal to the other players that his hand is unbeatable, and they will fold.
His patient, passive quest for certainty has won nothing.
The Democrats, similarly, in their quest for a strategy that would alienate no voters, have given away the store, and they have given away the country.
Committed Democrats watched while Al Gore frittered away the sure-thing election of 2000. They watched, passively, while the Bush administration concocted a phony war; they, in the main, voted for the war knowing it was purposeless, out of fear of being thought weak. They then ran a candidate who refused to stand up to accusations of lack of patriotism.
The Republicans, like the perpetual raiser at the poker table, became increasingly bold as the Democrats signaled their absolute reluctance to seize the initiative.
The party has left us to watch from the stands, increasingly unwilling to fight. Unwilling to get up from the table and make way for someone who will play the game with real initiative, real courage … with the kind of commitment required in a game where the stakes are so high:
Control of the initiative is control of the battle. In the alley, at the poker table or in politics. One must raise. The American public chose Bush over Kerry in 2004. How, the undecided electorate rightly wondered, could one believe that Kerry would stand up for America when he could not stand up to Bush? A possible response to the Swift boat veterans would have been: “I served. He didn’t. I didn’t bring up the subject, but, if all George Bush has to show for his time in the Guard is a scrap of paper with some doodling on it, I say the man was a deserter.”
This would have been a raise. Here the initiative has been seized, and the opponent must now fume and bluster and scream unfair. In combat, in politics, in poker, there is no certainty; there is only likelihood, and the likelihood is that aggression will prevail.
The press, quiescent during five years of aggressive behavior by the White House, has, perhaps, begun to recover its pride. In speaking of Karl Rove, Scott McClellan and the White House’s Valerie Plame disgrace, they have begun to use words such as “other than true,” “fabricated.” The word that they circle, still, is “lie.” The word the Democratic constituency, heartsick over the behavior of its party leaders, has been forced to consider applying to them is “coward.”
One may sit at the poker table all night and never bet and still go home broke, having anted away one’s stake.
The Democrats are anteing away their time at the table. They may be bold and risk defeat, or be passive and ensure it.
comic from Cleft