(cross-posted at Deny My Freedom)
I’ve been a Democrat for as long as I can remember. Granted, that’s not a long time (I was born during the second term of Ronald Reagan’s presidency), but even when I considered myself a moderate-to-conservative Democrat during the Clinton days, there’s never been a day where I really liked the Republicans. The only one I ever took a liking to was John McCain in 2000, but as his hypocrisy has been exposed over the years, my intense dislike for him, along with his neoconservative colleagues has swelled.
The fact is, no one except the Kool-Aid drinkers like George W. Bush anymore. Harris Interactive puts Bush below the 30% mark, and most other polling outfits (except for the Republican-skewed Rasmussen outfit) put him barely hovering above 30%. With these numbers, one would imagine that the Democrats would be on the offensive these days. But they rarely are, so it’s time to issue an ultimatum, courtesy of another corrupt GOP president, Richard Nixon: it’s time to shit or get off the pot.
Yoss made excellent points in his earlier diary on the issue. One has to wonder if the Democrats in D.C. really give half a shit about winning elections. As Markos and Jerome wrote in Crashing The Gate, Democrats continue to hire the same losing consultants over and over while shunning those who do win races. It’s these same consultants that turned Al Gore into a stodgy wooden man on the campaign in 2000, and it’s the same group that told Kerry to downplay his only real accomplishment in the Senate – his BCCI investigation – during the 2004 campaign. I don’t doubt that while the influence of the grassroots, thanks to the installment of Howard Dean as DNC chair and the rise of the netroots after the 2004 election, has multiplied exponentially, we still hold very little power comparatively.
This is where the problem lies: for the establishment Democrats, they see this as a fight of an entrenched power (them) against an upstart rising (us). They would probably be happier staying in the minority so long as our influence is diminished. You keep hearing people call the liberal blogosphere extremists or terrorists or something along the lines of being anti-American, but in fact, we are the ones who are returning true democracy to a Republic that has since long succumbed to the power of money. This is just one reason why the Democratic Party has such trouble articulating any policies – whether it be strengthening Social Security, instituting universal health care, or increasing veteran’s benefits – it doesn’t win points with the big political donors.
Furthermore, we have to convince the average American voter, someone who is far less informed abotu the issues and politics in general, that we are fit to govern. Simply not being the idiot doesn’t make us better by default. We need to present ideas to counter the stuff that the GOP throws out there. I can tell you what I think the Democratic agenda should be – raise the minimum wage to at least $7/hr, reduce pork barrel spending, modify the new Medicare plan, repeal Bush tax cuts, heavily invest in alternative energy, encourage the purchase of hybrid cars through tax credits, pull out of Iraq by the end of the year – and that’s just a few of the things I believe in. There’s a wealth of great plans that the average American can embrace…and yet we don’t push it. Some may argue that Newt Gingrich didn’t unveil the Contract of America until September, two months before the election, but there was already a general unifying theme. In our case, having a unified message won’t necessarily do it – we have a media biased against us, and we have policymakers who, for the large part, are extremely unimaginative in their ideas (giving people $500 to spend on gas?! Come on!). Right now, we need to formulate a progressive agenda that moves past the staleness of harmful GOP policies and pathetically weak (for the most part) Democratic rebuttals of change. Yes, the ‘culture of corruption’ sounds nice, but you need to back it up with substance.
Even with these low poll numbers – caused by the continuing quagmire in Iraq, Katrina, and God knows what else – we continue to roll over to an extreme right-wing agenda. We didn’t put up a fight against now-Judge Brett Kavanaugh, an extremist of the worst kind in the judiciary. We didn’t put up a fight against General Hayden, the man who oversaw the NSA spying program. We didn’t put up a fight on a stupid, idiotic bill proclaiming English to be the national language. It’s time for the Democrats to stop shitting on us, wipe up, and start fighting back…or they can continue to abet the wholehearted shitting on the Constitution that has been going on the past 5 1/2 years.
It’s time to shit or get off the pot.
