Now that Bush's popularity has fallen to an all-time low, even the lethargic and obedient Congress shows some signs, if not of conscience perhaps of uneasiness. Democrats, like Brooklyn Dodger fans of old, raise their eyes heavenward and hope that this is the Year of Deliverance.
Possibly, but as our Brit friends say, not ruddy likely. Of course some dramatic and immediate catastrophe, such as a bloodbath of GI's in Iraq or the collapse of the stock market, might galvanize the electorate into rushing wide-eyed to the polls and, in their frenzy, accidentally getting it right and electing a clutch of Democrats. But I would not bet my last fiver on it.
Although the Democrats might win some congressional seats in the next election, I am not sanguine about their chances of winning the presidency. I would like to suggest some reasons why.
The Democratic campaigns have been markedly ineffective, and are likely to remain so despite the new leadership at the DNC. Talking heads and columnists on both sides of the Great Divide will offer ritual explanations of why Bush has had such a hold on middleclass voters (upperclass voter fealty is a given), but in my view all this pundit blather is wide of the mark.
The root of the Democrat's dilemma is not that that the Republicans are the Devil's spawn, or that they hold the electorate in some demonic thrall. Nor is it true that the last presidential election could have been won had Kerry and the Democratic candidates only gotten the words right and explained more cogently what they stood for. That their failure was one of syntax and presentation, not one of understanding. (Why We Lost by Andrei Cherny, NY Times, 5 November 2004).
The November 2004 debacle was almost inevitable. Barring the aforementioned voter epiphany, another loss might be inevitable in 2006 and 2008, even though the elections could be close. A large part of the problem is that the Democratic leadership (and the network commentators) lack a historical perspective. Not knowing where the Party and the electorate have been, they have no context for understanding what is happening. The world has changed, and although the Democrats understand quite well the root problems of the nation and how Bush & Co. are destroying it, they have only the foggiest notion of who is, or could be, their constituency. That is not a failure of intellect or resolve. It might be that in this transitional society the Democratic position is intrinsically untenable.
Consider the lessons of history: In the Thirties, when I was growing up, we were suffering from the Great Depression. Democrats could be divided into three major constituencies: blue-collar workers, rural farm workers, and the great masses of urban poor. The common people (read: voters) knew who they were and what the issues were. Upward mobility and market fluctuations were not the issue, survival was. If there was any commonality of identity it was being broke and out of work. The Democratic constituency had a clear, if somewhat simplistic, conception of who the adversary was: Big Business. The issues were quite straightforward. Except for the anti-Catholic brouhaha regarding Al Smith's candidacy, religion wasn't a campaign issue. A Protestant affiliation was assumed. Churchgoing was not a campaign issue, it was a given. A basic anti-Semitism also was a given, as was isolationism. Lindbergh was a hero, and Father Coughlin's messages of hate had a wider radio audience than Roosevelt's Fireside Chats. Identifying who you were and what you believed was very straightforward for all sides. It was a black and white world view, in both the metaphorical and the ethnic senses of the phrase..
In this political climate the Democrats could not lose. There were many more thin cats than fat cats. Roosevelt had an electoral mandate that really was a mandate, not just a slim majority. The electorate knew who they were and what their problems were, and the Democrats understood both their constituencies and what needed to be done. A simple message in a much simpler time. Even a candidate as emotionally disengaged as Gore or Kerry hardly could have lost.
But before you read on, please keep this in mind: Traditionally the Democrats are the party of Fixing Things, and the Republicans are the party of Getting and Keeping Things. That is a profound difference. Now, in the dear old days gone by, things that needed to be fixed were well understood by the voters, but few of them aspired to slither into the Republican camp and get and keep things. That was not their agenda. So the Democratic constituency not only was identifiable, it also was stable. Folks who voted Democratic also stayed Democratic. There was little crossover.
When I was a kid a worker in a steel mill or at General Motors had a small house with a backyard, enjoyed cookouts on the weekend, attended real ball games (radio but no TV), went to church, had a car, worried about his daughter's chastity, and expected his sons to go to college or to follow in his footsteps and work at "the mill." Even with the Depression, stable employment from generation to generation was a commonplace, and people prided themselves on having three generations working at General Motors. Fathers and sons carried metal lunch boxes and went to work together. Women were expected to be housewives, nurses or schoolteachers. A guy with only a high school diploma could, and often did, borrow a thousand bucks and start his own little business, such as automobile repair. The need for expensive computerized equipment and a demanding technical education still was far off, on a horizon no one even suspected. And we still talked about the starving Armenians, "Oil for the Lamps of China," and "keeping our boys out of foreign wars." Quaint, wasn't it?
And when the run-up to WW II started the long recovery from the Depression, that expectation and that ethic remained unchanged. You got a factory job, you voted Democratic, and you looked forward to the same comfortable and stable lifestyle that your father once enjoyed. If your family was very forward-thinking and could afford it, a boy (but rarely a girl) went to college, usually a state college with very low tuition. And everybody looked forward to that great day when the awfulness was over and we all would enjoy more of what we had before the war started. Back to the future. Nobody doubted that we would win (after all, the Germans had been beaten only two decades before, and it was well known that the Japanese were a primitive people who made cute wind-up toys, wore glasses with Coke-bottle lenses, and could neither shoot straight nor fly airplanes. Gold Star mothers who lost their sons in combat soon would hang those terrible little flags in their parlor windows, but that hadn't happened yet.
And then the technological genie (or demon) was let out of the bottle and the world changed forever.
But now let's fast forward to November 2004. The world has changed, and villains are very hard to define. The simplistic solutions of the 30's and 40's no longer are effective or even relevant. General Motors, for example, no longer is an American company, but sees itself as an international entity with loyalties to no particular nation or place. The Technology Genie enabled that transformation. Wall Street robber barons, once so easily cartooned, now are replaced by... whom? Japanese? Saudi sheiks? We go to work in the morning, only to find that we have been outsourced, or that our company has been bought by some shadowy foreign holding company. The ground rules for success are undefined and fluid. Hard work and good performance no longer are an assurance of anything. We build our houses on economic quicksand.
In this complex, international, Web-driven, cellphone obsessed world, ordinary folks with their backs to the economic wall don't even know whom to blame. For these people there is no sense of who or what is responsible, no confidence in the short term, and great anxiety about the long term. Nothing is certain, everything is in flux, and for millions of Americans life has become incomprehensibly threatening and complex. In this economic arena we don't even know who our enemies are, and we are struck down by shadowy and unreachable adversaries
Well, what do we have here? We have a nice and logical explanation of why Republicans can do what they wish and why Dems are hopeless. But I beg to differ. Dems are hopeless because they want to be hopeless. The Y2000 was stolen aand they knew it. The Y2004 was stolen and they knew it. They do not want to win. It is an intrigue on the highesst level since Clinton time. And it still holds. We better open our eyes or we will always 'sell the rope on which we will be hanged'
by
Mark Sashine (54 articles, 19 quicklinks, 252 diaries, 3605 comments)
on Saturday, August 26, 2006 at 11:47:10 AM
I too think that the situation has more complexity than the author suggests but I would place much of the blame for the Democrats' problems on the concentration of the media and the unsympathetic treatment that the Democratic party gets from that media. The media no longer even refers to them with the correct name, but instead uses the disrespectful and ungramatical term Democrat Party.
Yes the election was stolen. I think even the Republican trolls know that, but the question is not so much why the Democrats allowed that to happen but why the media let such a good story pass without reporting on it.
by
PrMaine (11 articles, 9 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 395 comments)
on Monday, August 28, 2006 at 7:21:23 AM
Algore was the VP, the country was strong, the sky was blue, everyone had a job, gas was under $2 a gallon, Clinton made peace in the Middle East. SO, WHY DIDN'T Algore KICK BUSH'S BUTT WITH 55% OR 60% OF THE VOTE. Because the Dems message is out of date.
Because the Dems live in the past.
The Democratic Party's good days were 1930 to 1980.
by
Right is right (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 18 comments)
on Saturday, August 26, 2006 at 2:18:36 PM
Vincent Bugliosi, the leading jurist in the US ( Helter- Skelter case and others) proves in his book how the Y2000 elections were stolen. Besides him there were many signs: Clinton did not help his candidate at all, Joe Lieberman, now we all know who he is- a GOP man, the debates were practically lost by Lieberman beforehand, there was nearly no real Dem campaign, Al Gore openly and cowardishly presided over his own demise although he knew that it was all staged and those black congresswomen who protested knew thaat too..
The Dems, their leadership knew in advance that they had the elections rigged and they sold us raw... of course, I agree that they haave no voice. They adopt the squeal.
by
Mark Sashine (54 articles, 19 quicklinks, 252 diaries, 3605 comments)
on Saturday, August 26, 2006 at 3:05:10 PM
What history shows is that, as Howard Dean says, "You can't trust a Republican with your money." It is the Democratic party under which all citizens of this nation have prospered. Remember the phrase, "a rising tide lifts all boats?" Conversely, the rich have boarded the ship of state "Titanic" and it is finally sinking under the weight of its own heavily corrupt and greedy "captain" and his "mates".
Nice history lesson and a good review of the sociology of the American voter.
If politics were static and the world situation did not change, I think Mr. Richardson would be spot on and would probably switch my registration to Republican.
American industry and probably the American military face a massive challenge in developing the technological basis for dealing with $90-$110 per barrel petroleum. The price of gas may retreat a few cents now and then, but it is clear that the prices are going to stay high and go higher.
Other powers are emerging that are relatively less vulnerable to the high cost of petrol and they are increasingly ready to challenge America's hegemony.
In addition to its technological near obsolence, the American social structure, now based on concentrating wealth in the hands of the wealthy will come under increasing stress.
Mr. Richardson's vision of survival rather than a beemer will become a reality for larger and larger segments of the American electorate. Unlike the situation in the 30s when America was the biggest and richest power in a world-wide depression, our future is that of an increasingly impoverished, debt-ridden and internally conflicted nation facing an array of stable, economically dynamic and powerful rivals.
Continuing GOP policies will simply mean the continuation of the stagflationary cycle already beginning. Bereft of its promise of lucre the GOP "values" campaigning will fold.
The Dems will prosper simply because we already represent the poor, the outsiders and are diverse and decentralized.
The Democratic Party's leaders will provide the ideas and the energy to re-build America and restore us to an honored place among the nations. These leaders will come from among the Governors, mayors, state legislators and other officials we will elect this year and in each subseuent electoral cycle.
The GOP is simply too tied to its concepts of privilege, American singularity and materialism to be able to lead in the challenging new environment we will find in the next decade.
Will the Dems establish a federal legislative majority in either chamber in 06? No.
Will the Democratic candidate be elected President in 08?
Yes.
Our next President will give the Democratic Party the organizational head start it will need to grow a cadre of leadership to meet the challenges of the next decade.
Robert Chapman
Brooktondale, New York
by
Robert Chapman (28 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 556 comments)
on Monday, August 28, 2006 at 9:39:31 PM
9 comments
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