[Johnny Shear]

I've donated to The Greens before and I'll HAPPILY do it again!!

[Libertarianize the GOP]

bump

[45Auto]

Mr. Perry must be under 30 years of age; otherwise, he would understand that the demonRAT party took a left turn right after JFK and hasn't looked back since. That may be part of the reason for its slow demise, hopefully, a demise that has not reached bottom, yet. The Greens offer so much rewarmed Marxist BS; they are communists to the core, but some of them think they are a "new wave" of political thought. Most are under 25 and have no clue as to what the hell they are talking about.

As commies, their beef is NOT with a despoiled environment, but with the notion of private property; as such, they are going nowhere in America, since private property rights are the cornerstone of the Republic. Once some of them become home owners, and find out what a bath will do for their social lives, they will change their tune.

[45Auto]

Bill Clinton set the tone for his first administration by provoking a public fight with a relatively obscure female rapper in order to distance himself and the party from the great mass of black America, a gesture he spent the next eight years underscoring with all the right kinds of coded talk about poverty, pathology, and responsibility

Which is why he was recently inducted into the Black Hall of Fame.

Bill The Rat set the tone for a new low in political morality; that was his claim to fame.

[beckett]

Johnny Shear: The civil rights movement, to cite the greatest uprising of American citizens in this century...

The guy doesn't even know what century he's in! That about sums up the value of the political insight this whining, oh-so-clever, oh-so-good, self-important sap has to offer.

[jdege]

How much longer can we listen to all the plaintive, futile pleadings to "change the system from within," to make the party wake up and smell the electorate? This is a wish, not a strategy; it hasn't come true and it won't.

The real wishful thinking is that of the confirmed socialists that socialist economics actually worked. They don't, and they've never been able to come to grips with that.

The party's right turn was a move conceived from within and designed to make the Democrats a more appealing vehicle for major private and corporate donors. This past election notwithstanding, the strategy has been an enormous success. Cash receipts have grown mightily.

The Party turned to private and corporate donors, thirty years ago, and intentionally abandoned their grass-roots, because they knew that so long as they depended upon their grass-roots, they'd never be free to take the radical socialist and anti-american positions they wanted.

The Reagan/Bush/Clinton years worked many changes in the political culture, and none was more profound than the market revolution. Over the past generation the American public has been relentlessly conditioned to believe that whatever is dictated by the market--in more guileless days, it was simply called the money power--is sensible, reasonable, necessary. Our values and aspirations as a society are now routinely subjected to the flummery of cost/benefit analyses in which it's understood that the only thing that really matters is cost.

Which amounts to little more than a petulant whine that other people seem to have been able to learn from history, while the left has not.

The DLC, if you don't make a habit of following such things, is the Democratic Leadership Council, a creature hatched in the mid-1980s and promoted mainly by conservative Southern and Western Democrats--people like Bruce Babbitt, Charles Robb, Al Gore, Sam Nunn, and the winsome young governor from Arkansas. To anyone paying attention, it was immediately clear what they were up to. In 1986 Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers published a little-noted book called Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics that traced the rise of the business Democrats who would eventually constitute the heart of party leadership. I

The DLC recognized that the lunatic leftists in the party were leading it into irrelevency, and attempted to either return the party to sanity, or to provide a mechanism for the party to adopt a pretense of sanity, depending upon who you talk to. That they've failed to return the party to sanity is obvious from this writer.

The rise of the pro-business Democrats was less a coup than a summation of moves the party had been making since the unruly events of 1968 and 1972, a period marked by a "crisis of democracy" in the infamous phrase of Samuel P. Huntington, meaning there was too damn much of the stuff and it was proving unwieldy. After those tumultuous years the party promoted a number of changes designed to ensure that no upstart could sway the party from the will of its national machine. Thus we got super-delegates at the national convention, a battalion of party regulars who could be counted on to back the right horse in the event of a close race, and electoral tricks like Super Tuesday, a carefully juggled slate of early primaries that skewed heavily toward conservative southern states--both of them steps designed to prevent any left-liberal insurgent from building a prohibitive lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The Democratic leadership adopted the measures he writes of for the specific purpose of ensuring that the voices of the lunatic left would be heard, despite the angry voices of the solid, working-class americans who had made up the backbone of the party. It's precisely because these measures succeeded that the Democrats have been losing voters so consistently over the last 30 years.

Say what you will of presidential politics; aren't the people we choose to represent us in House and Senate races the product of more homespun, democratic deliberations? No. Here again the national party has the final say. The mechanism is simple enough. In races for national office these days you are nothing without soft money, and the flow of these dollars to would-be Democratic contenders is controlled by the party's national campaign organizations, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). The committees are happy to welcome all candidates at first, since they are all prospective fundraisers for the party, but that doesn't mean the party will return the favor to just anybody.

Oddly enough, the Republicans aren't dependent on soft money - because the Republicans still have millions of ordinary folks who contribute to campaigns. The Democrats are dependent upon soft money as a conscious choice - they were tired of being restricted by the opinions of the millions of ordinary people who had supported them.

And they're paying the price.

[The Iguana]

Mr. Perry is seriously deluded if he thinks that the Green platform will be palatable to any but a very small percentage of the American public.

It isn't just whoring formoney that's killing the Democrats. Every time they let slip a bonafide idea (disarmament, gay marriage, tax hikes, single payer healthcare) the public runs away screaming. And it's not just corporate money that has them doing so.

But if he wants to stand by his convictions - more power to him.

[weikel]

Screw the Dems its the straight communist ticket for this guy from now on I guess.

[summer]

Hi Johnny, Thanks for posting this article.

I didn't read all of it, but I got the gist of it, and I feel all these writers miss an essential failing of the Dem Party: the lack of communication the Dem leaders have with voters. ANY voters. It's pathetic.

As a teacher, I already know if I want to feel gagged and silenced: then, OK, vote Dem again in FL. Because a Dem leader ignores the rank and file, has lunch with the union president and thinks that's all there is to know.

So, I realize: if I want the chance to be heard - then, I vote GOP in FL. Because Gov. Bush has proved over and over again to people that he does listen to the problems of the Average Citizen, includling teachers. Even nurses endorsed him TWICE, in 1998 and 2002. The statewide PTO (Parent Teacher Organization) also publicly praised Gov Bush for being so available. The list goes on and on and on. It is no mystery to me why he won in a landslide, and I honestly think it has less to do with Bill McStumble and more to do with the way Gov Bush governs and leads.

Yet, I never, ever see anything about communication with voters by Dem leaders. Never. To me, these Dem leaders are in a dark cave, or hiding somewhere on another planet. They seem content to stay there, for a long time, without any communication with people here on Planet Earth. And, in that case, they deserve to lose every election.

[Mr. Jeeves]

Since the mid-1980s there has been a steady dribble of social issues polls that have shown the American public standing considerably to the left of its elected officials. (There are polls that prove the converse, too; usually they are the ones that lard their queries with one overriding presumption: You don't want to pay higher taxes, do you?)

Translation: Take a poll asking if people want lots of free goodies from the government, and they will say yes. Take a poll reminding them that they will have to pay for them, and they rapidly wise up and say no. I would say these polls prove the exact opposite of the author's contention - the American public has far less enthusiasm for the expansion of government than their elected officials do.

[steve-b]

The typical leftist-"liberal" position is about halfway between the Democrats and the Greens. Thus, the most sensible way for such people to vote would be to flip a coin: heads, vote Democrat; tails, vote Green.

[Lancey Howard]

"There are polls that prove the converse, too; usually they are the ones that lard their queries with one overriding presumption: You don't want to pay higher taxes, do you?"

"Our values and aspirations as a society are now routinely subjected to the flummery of cost/benefit analyses in which it's understood that the only thing that really matters is cost."

These two passages epitomize the scumbag liberal mindset. That mindset boils down to, "Give me free stuff and pay for it by confiscating the money from.... my neighbors." The selfishness and immorality of this author reeks from his writing. I don't understand why he has a problem with his party. He's a scumbag just like them.

[bulldogs]

"I've donated to The Greens before and I'll HAPPILY do it again!!"




Figures.

[Timm]

This article's good. Thanks for posting it.

I think the Clinton years gave me an inaccurate idea of Democrat politics. Even before the election, when the Dems were making fools out of themselves over the "debate" on action in Iraq, I was expecting them to right their footing and to do the sensible thing. After the "what's the wait?" routine fell flat, in other words, I expected them to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with the president. Then, with flags in their hands, they could seek to hammer Bush on the economy and, eventually, even on foreign policy.

They didn't do this, or, at least, they didn't do so convincingly. They voted with Bush, but they were quite public about their unwillingness to do so. They would openly say that their vote was just a tactic to get what they saw as a Republican issue "off of the table". Why did they continue doing such counterproductive things, I wondered? Has the absence of the Clinton war room left them entirely incapable of reading the most obvious electoral currents in the country?

The answer has become clear since then. The party is simply constitutionally incapable of changing as they ought to to be with the electorate. They simply cannot present a unified front on foreign policy. Too many of their number want the usual mish-mash of dialogue and surrender for those living in the real world to have their way with the party. So the best they can do is try to change the subject.

I always knew about the radical element within the Democrat party, of course. That there were still so many of them and that they still had so much power was a surprise to me. Clinton, I guess, kept them locked up in the attic like a crazy aunt. I thought the party as a whole had changed more than it has.

Now we hear from such strategists as this author. This person can never accept a Democrat party that will win elections in America on taxes or defense. The Democrats must abandon him if they are to have any realistic chance of winning a national majority again. What they cannot do is bring this guy into a "big tent".

In many ways, this author's extremism is reassuring. If his opinions are typical, we can expect far-left Democrats to be disaffected and demoralized for some time to come. This guy's rant reads like an old Stalinist analysis of American politics. Democrats don't care about _winning_ primarily, but about taking money from rich donors? If the author was paying attention to his own writing, he would see that he thinks the problem is not simply Democrat tactics, but the whole idea of elections deciding political matters at all. If people are so stupid as to vote contrary to their interests time after time, as the Democrats claim they are, the problem isn't just controlling how much Republicans can communicate with the electorate before an election or "grass roots" organizing. The problem is that the electorate is not competent to govern themselves. Let them follow their disaffection to its rightful conclusion, then, and call for "revolution" against Bush instead of a change of tactics. _That_ would present the public with the "clear choice" Democrats long for.