Posted on 11/30/2004 5:50:00 AM PST by OESY
...The staggering defeat of the Democratic Party and its ever-accelerating death spiral weren't obvious from the election results. Two factors masked the extent of the party's trouble. Without the innovation of Internet-driven small-donor fund-raising and a corresponding surge in support from the youngest voters, John Kerry would have suffered a dramatically larger defeat....
Mr. Kerry was a weaker candidate than Mr. Gore. He lost so much ground among women, Hispanics, and other key groups, that the millions in Internet money, the most Herculean get-out-the-vote effort in party history, and the largest turnout of young voters in over a decade, couldn't save him. Had the young stayed home, the sea of red on the map would have grown to include at least Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New Hampshire....
...But the problem for Democrats is not Mr. Rove; it's that they're doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. That's the definition of insanity....
• Democrats can't keep ignoring their base. Running to the middle and then asking our base to make sure to vote isn't a plan....
• Democrats must reconnect with the energy of our grass roots. One of the failures of the DLC was that its ideas never helped us build a grass-roots donor base. As a result, Democrats held a lead over Republicans in only one fundraising category before this election cycle: contributions over one million dollars....
• ...Democratic National Committee members in each state, along with the state party, should host and moderate these meetings to develop ideas that come from the people, instead of the experts in D.C....
• ...Democrats should lead the way by placing stricter money restrictions on candidates than the toothless Federal Election Commission does....
• ...Very few good ideas come from the middle, and they tend to be mediocre....
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Sounds to me like a winning prescription -- for Republicans -- but why not push to have Dean take over for McAuliffe? -- Ed.
YES! Depending on the Grassroots (far left) is certainly a winning strategy. Go for it!
Do you think the Dean Scream will work for Hillary? If Dean is the head of the DNC, can he energize candidates to be like him and get folks like Hillary to do the scream?
Democrats are the party of irresponsibility. So long as they remain so they will either continue to lose elections (the good result) or rule an irresponsible society (the bad result).
The only thing that can save the depraved, decadent, immoral, dissolute, mendacious, deceitful Democrats is truth, and that's the very thing that will destroy them and everything they stand for.
....and let's see how we can **help** separate the Kentucky Bluegrass (like Zell Miller) from the Crabgrass Leftists! May the Leftists be crabgrass and the Truth a Lawn-Boy!
If we had a "free press" instead of the "Media Wing of the Democratic Party" Bush would have won by 40%. John Kerry was an utterly unqualified candidate, but the media made sure the truth didn't get out to many.
And so begins the power struggle between the "moderate" and the Karl Marx wings of the democrat party.
I love this. Move further to the left. Yeah! That's the ticket.
We might get what some of us really want....a contest between real conservatives and real socalists instead of socalism with a conservative bent and conservativism with a socalist bent.
If most of the people choose socalism...I will have to change the way I operate. I will have to find out where the hand-out offices are and I need to quit working so many hours.
Finding out where the handouts are would be easy however......all I have to do is ask most any illegal mexican.
Couldn't agree with you more, Mr. Trippi. You keep running to the left and don't look back--we're right behind you....promise.
As long as the far laft runs the DemoRat party, they will continue to get thumped with alarming regularity, plain and simple. However, all these scholarly post-mortems of the 2004 election ignore that obvious truth. I hope they continue to ignore it and sink into oblivion, where they belong.
As long as the DemoRat candidate has to continue to "sing the songs" demanded by the Hollywood, tree-hugger, ex-hippies that run the party - they will continue to alienate the majority of America.
The problem is that these far left types enjoy being Captain of the ship so much, they don't care if it is named Titanic?
The Dems won the White House with a Southern "Likeable" figure of Bill Clinton who if you all recall as a "New Democrat".
Let that sink in for a sec.
Bubba was smart to avoid the "Liberal" tag and I'm sorry. Anybody from any state north of the Mason Dixon line and that goes for double if your north of New York City.
If the Liberal Dems think Dean is their answer, or Hillary. So be it. It will be their downfall for another national election.
On the flip side the GOP can't go and rest on it's victories.
Also, we must all work diligently in the coming months to convince “progressives” that the Democratic Party has let them down. They must abandon the party. Their only recourse is to join and work for the Green Party moving forward. I may even register as a Green Party member to swell their voter registration rolls. Divide and conquer.
Begin with putting all known “progressives” in your sphere of influence on the Green Party mail list from their website. Great fun. Start inundating them with information now.
"• ...Very few good ideas come from the middle, and they tend to be mediocre...."
Excellent - that should do it.
Signed,
Just Trying to Help
What grass roots is he talking about?
If Trippi would take time to look at that red-blue, county-by-county map, he'd find that a grass roots movement has to involve more than large blue population centers.
The Democrats are going the way of the Whigs, but they haven't figured that out yet.
I have never agreed with this idea. Both Gore and Kerry were, and are, awkward, unattractive, spoiled, lefty, loons, the endless fraudulent puffery both received from the ratmedia notwithstanding. The crucial difference this time around was Bush and Rove's four-year, grassroots vote building effort, particularly in targeted states such as Ohio and Florida. Bush and Rove's plan and its execution worked very well. That is the big difference between 2000 and 2004.
Greens oppose drilling in ANWR, unions want it....black parents want vouchers, the NEA opposes them....everybody in America wants tort reform, the lawyer lobby opposes.....
Everytime they say the voters "didn't get their message", I rejoice, because their problem is the voters do "get" their message, despite all the attempts to obscure it.
"Hard-a-starboard! Full speed astern . . . hard to port!"
(Orders during the Titanic's collision with the iceberg)
There are a number of Democatic candidates that would appeal to the base to which Trippi refers: Al Sharpton; Dennis Kucinich; Jesse Jackson; or perhaps even Michael Moore himself. I hope that one of them gets the nomination. Unfortunately, I don't think that the Unibomber can run because he is a felon, but he would certainly appeal to the Democratic left.
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