It makes no sense to expect elected office-holders to be people who won’t do what it takes to get elected to office. And one should be angry not with those who are trying to win in the world as it is but with those who are making that world still worse.

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I have a friend who says that the difference between grassroots Republicans and Democrats is that the Republicans care more about winning than about what’s right, whereas the Democrats care more about being right than winning.

He’s got a point, but I wish that it were that simple. My daily inflow of email shows that a great many liberals are blissfully unaware that there might be a conflict between those two values.

Did I say “blissfully”? I should have said “angrily.” Because these people are a lot more enraged at the Democrats for their compromises and capitulations than at the Bushites for their sheer evil.

Reading their angry diatribes makes me angry. I want to shout, “Get real!” It makes no sense to expect elected office-holders to be people who won’t do what it takes to get elected to office.

The point’s absurdly obvious, but one easily forgotten when emotion runs high: those who do not do what it takes to get elected to office will not become elected office-holders.

But here come those emails, furious at the Democrats –for example—for “feeding from the same corporate trough” as the Republicans.

Admittedly, too many Democrats have grown comfortable with our system of legal bribery. The question is: in the political system we now have, what would a fully altruistic person do to attain office in order to do good? Answer: raise the money necessary for getting elected. And in our present system that requires some feeding out of the corporate trough.

One does not get elected without money, and in our corrupt polity even good politicians are compelled to be like the famous bank robber, Willie Sutton, who when asked why he robbed banks replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”

It’s a lousy system, and we should not rest until it’s changed. But in the meanwhile we should not expect those who win at the game to ignore how the game is played.

Of course, our idealist could refuse to do what is necessary to get elected. And then, as a result of such standing on principle, he/she would share in that blessing you and I enjoy: the opportunity to speak our minds –saying all the wonderful things that are so stunningly right—and to be powerless while those who made the necessary compromises make the decisions that shape the world.

Another of the unforgivable sins of the Democrats is their craven stance –ever since the war resolution of 2002—with respect to the war in Iraq. They’re accused –probably rightly—of having known better already when they voted on that resolution than to trust what the administration was saying, even if they weren’t privy to all the intelligence that the Bushites kept from them. And for this –even though it’s highly doubtful they could have stopped this war-- they’re condemned, by many angry liberals, as morally bankrupt and beneath our contempt.

But in 2002, it seemed extremely probable that a Democrat who voted against that war would have destroyed whatever chance he or she had of becoming president—in 2004, or perhaps ever. That was the judgment of those most knowledgeable about the dynamics of the American political system. So John Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton all voted yes.

Profiles in courage? No. But we did want to get those who lied the nation into war out of the White House, didn’t we? And nobody ever gets to be president who doesn’t do what’s necessary to become president. Opportunism doesn’t smell right, but it’s how you get the opportunity to win.

Of course, it’s legitimate to question the “expert” judgment about what was “necessary” that led to such decisions. But how about a little humility in our second-guessing? If there’s one thing the people up there at the top of this heap are likely to know better than the rest of us, it’s how to get elected.

Sure, they make mistakes –just like NFL quarterbacks do, those few men who emerged, out of the tens of millions of boys who took up the game, as the very best. But just as one can find guys in a bar on any given Sunday talking as if they’d have known better than to throw into double coverage, there’s something unseemly about the certainty of some liberal critics about how easy it would be for liberal politicians both to be right and to win.

And there’s an additional, related problem that’s specific to this Bushite era in American politics: the special challenge of campaigning against Karl Rove.

Rove has been called an “evil genius,” and both words are apt. To the advantages that accrue to one who is completely unhindered by scruples, Rove adds his brilliance as a manipulator and liar.

It’s a challenge to which too many grassroots Democrats --furious with their party leadership in recent years-- have seemed oblivious. Since they haven’t been conned by Rove, they assume that a politician could easily get an electoral majority by doing the things that please them. But of course, it isn’t that simple.

Take a look at what happened to poor Max Cleland in Georgia in 2002—the man who left three of his limbs in Vietnam, but then was defeated for re-election to the Senate in 2002 by being unpatriotic –labeled “Osama’s man,” soft on protecting us Americans—because he’d (rightly) voted against a poison-pill provision of the Homeland Security Act. Ridiculous, right? But it worked.

Perhaps someone with extraordinary political gifts –like perhaps Bill Clinton, or FDR—could take Rove on and match him maneuver for maneuver. John Kerry, lacking such gifts, was clearly helpless on the battlefield designed by Rove—one where lies and smears and distractions counted for so much more than discussions of policy. He had no clue how to deal with the Rovian distortions of reality.

And most of the rest of the Democratic crowd has been equally clueless. Genius is not easily defeated—especially when allied with a mainstream media more eager to serve power than truth.

My own belief is that the only way to defeat these Bush-Rove moral poseurs has been with powerful moral truth—a kind of prophetic stance. (See http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1019-22.htm.) And so my critique of these liberals is that they are not sufficiently grounded in a moral core to be able to denounce these liars and hypocrites with the power of such speech.

But I, too, am a bar-room quarterback—never having played on that field—and perhaps I’m wrong about how well my approach would work.

In any case, whatever their shortcomings –of judgment, of moral passion, or whatever—it seems to me misguided to direct one’s wrath at those who are doing as much good as they are able, given the nature of the world they are operating in, rather than those who are systematically making that world worse.

The Democrats are people who are compelled to play the money game that Republicans in Congress have not wanted to change, and that Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have used the Constitution to protect.

And the Democrats are people who were trapped –by the fears cultivated after 9/11, and by the other Rovian manipulations—into choosing between supporting the war or committing likely political suicide.

But it is the Bushites who have come into a flawed democratic polity and worked systematically to degrade it further. It is they who have made this government –even more than it was—an extension of corporate interests. It is they who chose a war into which they deceived the nation. It is they who have taken a country previously much-admired, and made us into one much-loathed around the world.

It is the Bushites who should be the object of our wrath.

And –as for the plight of the liberal leadership—why squander our energies on fury over shortcomings which, in large measure, should be seen as adaptations to the defects of the playing field on which they are trying to win?

We should instead channel our frustrations with their opportunistic strategies into working to change the system and the body politic so that what is right has a better chance of winning.

Authors Bio:
Andy Schmookler, an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia's 6th District. His new book -- written to have an impact on the central political battle of our time -- is WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST. His previous books include The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, for which he was awarded the Erik H. Erikson prize by the International Society for Political Psychology.