Posted on 07/17/2005 8:30:52 AM PDT by John Jorsett
After last November's defeat, Democrats were like aviation investigators sifting through twisted metal in a cornfield, struggling to posit theories about the disaster all around them. Some put the onus on John Kerry, saying he had never found an easily discernable message. Others, including Kerry himself, wrote off the defeat to the unshakable realities of wartime, when voters were supposedly less inclined to jettison a sitting president. Liberal activists blamed mushy centrists. Mushy centrists blamed Michael Moore. As the weeks passed, however, at Washington dinner parties and in public post-mortems, one explanation took hold not just among Washington insiders but among far-flung contributors, activists and bloggers too: the problem wasn't the substance of the party's agenda or its messenger as much as it was the Democrats' inability to communicate coherently. They had allowed Republicans to control the language of the debate, and that had been their undoing.
Even in their weakened state, Democrats resolved not to let it happen again.
[snip]
Democrats thought they knew the answer. Even before the election, a new political word had begun to take hold of the party, beginning on the West Coast and spreading like a virus all the way to the inner offices of the Capitol. That word was ''framing.''
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Republicans are good at fighting terrorist, Democrats are only good at fighting Republicans.
Democrats never were any good at anything, much less socialism. The leftist-MSM made it look like the Democrats were on the right track, they never were.
I wish some Democrat would someday take the stage and tell us what IS the message of the Democrats other than tax = good and spend = good and traditional western culture = bad.
The Democrats made a habit of lying to themselves and painting a rosey picture of even the gloomiest times. They swore that a lot of their base was not being polled because they had only cellphones, they expected a huge groundswell of support from young people. They took too much of their base for granted and did not see it switching to the other side.
Democrats never were any good at anything, much less socialism. The leftist-MSM made it look like the Democrats were on the right track, they never were.
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The MSM is working very hard to mask the irrelevancy and uselessness of the Dems and their socialist agenda. IMHO, the bottom-line analysis is....
** IF EVERY FAR-LEFT LIBERAL DISAPPEARED FROM THE COUNTRY TOMORROW, NOTHING WOULD CHANGE FOR AMERICA **
...except that the government could get back to running America instead of spending its time DEFENDING ITSELF against constant attack and obstructionism from the left...
Does the article list the messages that the democRATS have a hard time delivering?
How could Republicans "control the language of the debate" when 95% of the mainstream media was touting John Kerry 24/7?
I wasn't aware that obstruction and lies equated to "not a bad message".
The MSM/'Rats are soooo busy trying to frame Bush that they haven't time to get any message out.
Better analysis:
Liberalism is wrong, the Liberals just don't know it.
Why do they have to "frame" their ideas? Why is it about presentaton? One would think that a good idea would be able to stand on it's own.
Gosh - looks like the Intellectual Party hasn't the facilities to put two words together. But then, "I hate Bush" is really three words. I doubt very much no one understood this.
Belittling the people you need support from is a curious win strategy, to say the least.
Yes, he did serve in Viet Nam. Hundreds of fellow VN vets questioned his accounts of his service.
Why has he not released all is service records? Even if he really was a hero Benedict Arnold was a hero for both sides during the same war also.
Though many younger Freepers questioned bringing up Viet Nam (one wished all the old people would hurry up and die so we'd stop talking about it) Viet Nam still matters. It should matter. It must always matter.
Our forces and allies won all the battles; the enemy was let off by a surprise gift from the likes of Kerry's ilk here at home.
Later, after the peace signing, the enemy received yet another gift from Kerry and comrades, the promised military aid to South Viet Nam was denied. The North was awarded victory though they violated the peace.
Walter Cronkite smiled and flashed his eyebrows one last time.
I think this article is a guest columnist piece. Isn't the author, Matt Bai, the Democrats new hope for a political strategist?
Despise the change of venue from Leonard Bernstein's digs in Manhattan to the banks of the Potomac, the philosophies are equally disconnected from reality. Therefore, changing the linguistic packaging won't work except for those who are predisposed to buy the bit.
In short, the Editors and Publisher at the Times will continue to buy the bit, and write stories about how everyone else should believe it, too. But they were writing the same stories when Bernstein was the belle of the ball, so to speak.
Did I miss anything?
Congressman Billybob
No...the fact is they have bad message.
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