http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/link.php?id=40285
The real lesson here as far as I am concerned, ignoring what we all on this site know to be poisonous and horrific Rovian policies is that whether you are on the right or the left, if you overreach and enact policies or run election campaigns on things for which the populace is not ready, you may win in the short term, but in the long term, you lose.
That point is regardless if the things for which you are fighting are "Right".
This is the central point of what I am often trying to argue here with Rich and many others. You argue that Democrats aren't doing enough of the "Right" things. I dont necessarily disagree. But look what happened to the public acceptance of Democratic policies in the wake of Lyndon Johnson's great society policies. I think they were "Right" but they resulted in a massive amount of the population believing that the Democrats were not in line with their way of thinking. Over the next 10-20 years after LBJ, more and more people identified themselves as Republicans.
If Nixon had not committed his crimes, you would have had probably 30 years or so of uninterrupted Republican rule after LBJ. Think about that and what it would have meant.
It doesnt help if we elect 400 progressive congresspeople and a President to go along with it one election cycle only to have the population decide they were not ready for it and elect conservative republicans for the next 10 election cycles who not only dismember everything the progressive legislators did but roll back various other democratic/liberal/progressive programs.
The answer is to convince the populace of what you believe is right before you attempt to enact legislation. People who have followed my writings will know that I have been calling for this for a long time.
