Posted on 09/25/2018 6:49:53 AM PDT by rktman
On Nov. 5, 1980, a generation of Democratic leaders awoke to a startling fact. Their party, the fountain of New Deal and Great Society liberalism, the coalition that had run this country virtually uninterrupted … [awakened to find] the reins of power were gone, and the party officialdom were reeling.
Months later nothing has changed. … [O]bserved … party theoretician Ben Wattenberg, “What has been happening in this party for the last six months is people saying, ‘We have to come up with new ideas.’ We have a lot of people phrasing that idea, in several very novel ways, but I have yet to see a brilliant array of new ideas; the party has only the old ones. Like alcoholics hooked on the sweet elixir of Great Society liberalism, Democrats know they have got to go on the wagon. But with no easy cure in sight, they must keep running back for one more nip at the same old bottle.
The party is in horrendous shape … summing up a prognosis heard often in party circles. It is bankrupt of ideas, it is bankrupt of money, it is bankrupt of leadership and personalities. It is a party so used to power that now that it has lost the mantle of leadership, it has no idea what to do. You have a great floundering and posturing, a lot of people screaming that we need to do something, but not very much happening.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
55 years is more like it. Kennedy was the last democrat to have even a few conservative ideals.
ahh, SDS. They staged a raid on my high school in the 60’s.
I was too young to be there but years later when I was a student the teachers who were there at the time were still traumatized.
LOL! When I was stationed in NOLa, I went out with a young lady who was going to Newcomb College. She said she was a member of SDS. Can you say HOT POTATO? Gone in 60 seconds!
They don’t need a good idea. Any bad idea will get 40% of the vote automatically, and 90% in certain segments of the population.
The “new ideas” Democrats got accused of being too much like Republicans, so they were forced to change their tune.
240 years later.
Not really. Their idea, and appeal has always been:" Vote for us we will get you someone else's money." - Tom
Promises made, promises denied. You would think some of them would finally catch on but............
Thirty years ago the GOP had become more of a free trade party and it was Democrats who were complaining about job losses, deindustrialization, Japan, and NAFTA.
Even with Bill Clinton backing NAFTA, more Democrats voted against it than Republicans.
Back in the Eighties and Nineties it was dissident Democrats and ex-Democrats like Richard Lamm and Eugene McCarthy who started talking about the problems in our immigration policy.
Nowadays, the parties are much more polarized and there's less room for innovators and freethinkers.
And look where it got N. Grigsby!
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