Thursday, November 06, 2003
The Dumbest Thing Happening in Politics this Week
Running Against America
THE FAILING DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL STRATEGY
By Ozymandias
There is a park in central Philadelphia called Rittenhouse Square. It is a restored Victorian era park with great old trees that stand tall and shade the wide herringbone brick walkways. Children play on bronze sculptures, dogs wade in the reflecting pool and run under the fountain, and couples sit on stone benches and hold hands, while little American flags flutter on 1920’s lampposts. It’s all very Normal Rockwell.
It is one of those places in America where you can forget that there is a war in Iraq and American soldiers are dying everyday. But, of course, there is such a war and families, just like those here at Rittenhouse, are getting the worst possible news – right now today, somewhere, in America - some strong American family lost its son. It is a very serious business we are in, and we can’t leave till it’s done. Anyone who thinks otherwise – on both of those counts – shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone.
The Democrats just lost two more Governors. Kentucky elected a Republican governor for the first time in 30 years and Mississippi elected a former chairman of the RNC. In last fall’s elections, Democratic governors lost in Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama, and then in October, California’s Gray Davis was recalled and replaced by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans control the Senate: 19 states have no Democrat senator, compared to 17 without Republicans. Republicans in the House of Representatives hold a 229 to 205 advantage over Democrats, with one Independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
The Democrats are now running for president, and offer nine candidates for the nomination. With one exception, each of these nine candidates is running a terrible campaign that inspires very few true believers and has served mostly to highlight that there is no true Democratic star. This fact was proven beyond doubt when Senator Hilary Clinton – the undeclared yet unstoppable 2008 nominee – is polling at 30 points higher than Howard Dean, the current Dem leader, and she’s not even running.
The fact that when the economy goes bad or soldiers get killed in Iraq and democrats in small campaign offices across the country make a fist and exclaim sotto voce “Yes!” – and let us be honest enough to admit this is happening, because it is and every democratic campaigner knows it is – the fact that the first reaction by Democrats to American tragedy is positive leads the democratic party in a dangerous direction – the direction of rooting for bad things to happen, of looking always for the darkest reporting, to, in effect, running for president against America.
The liberal movement is a little schizophrenic right now. After tremendous record of successes – Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, freedom of the press, and others – and these are, of course, ongoing – the liberal movement is now faced with a very strange dilemma indeed. The liberal movement has become dominated by a Peace activist element that has only a minor role in traditional Jeffersonian liberalism. Howard Dean, the only candidate running an inspiring campaign, co-opted the Peace camp in the U. S. completely, and the counter-culture cache that came with it.
Campuses now dominated by former and current liberal activists, who already don’t want a war and have anywhere from a calm mistrust to a visceral hatred of Bush, swarmed to this new anti-war, West Wing, blunt-talking candidate. War is wrong and damn anyone who thinks otherwise, etc. Saddam is not a threat. Militant Islam is a fringe element created by bad American foreign policy, etc. The problem is that much of this is simply not true, as many liberal know, but don’t say.
The problem is that the enemy isn’t a tiny far-flung former French colony whose puppet regime we tried to install over a dissenting public. The problem is we are at war with a fringe ideology of Islam that declared war on us and attacked us on our own soil. Jefferson himself would fight in this war, and be rightly disgusted at ‘liberals’ who don’t understand the difference. University liberals have barely noticed that much of what they are defending is a fascist religious extremism whose first order of business if it was successful would be the utter destruction of the liberal university system, and all the above-mentioned achievements.
Today’s intelligentia is made up primarily of commentators, especially because politicians are never truly felt to be acting honestly. (It is a strange truth that we choose people to run our country we would probably not trust to baby-sit our children.)
Liberal minded intellectuals will always harshly critique the government – that is in effect, their job. Liberalism at its very core is about that very thing: finding what is wrong, what is broken and fixing it; finding who is needy, who is left out of the benefits of democracy and getting them back in. All deference to Ann Coulter, who is often brilliant – it is ludicrous to think America can do without this influence.
Conservative intellectuals tend to be focused on what is already working – locating what is right, what is successful, and finding ways to preserve that. All deference to Molly Ivins, whom I adore, such a focus is right and good and requires no Bible to thump.
The core mission of liberalism today – identifying problems and proposing solutions, is often pursued to the detriment of the greater good. The core mission of conservatives today – identifying successes and strengths, is often pursued to the detriment of millions of Americans who slip through the cracks and should not be abandoned.
Many liberals today can’t enjoy America because they can’t sit in the Rittenhouses and not think about the South Phillys, where crime and drugs, and other serious problems are rampant. They would rather take the money and effort that built Rittenhouse Square and do something about crime and poverty and so forth. Conservatives like the park, and will do what it takes to preserve the park, and see there kids enjoying the park, and focus on the fact that it took 200 years to get this park the way it is and that is worth preserving and doesn’t happen overnight.
Now, there are a lot of sides here. There are Molly Ivins’ liberals who are smart and thoughtful and look for ways to maybe put off some of the superficial repairs to the park in order to maybe work on some of that drug problem in South Philly. There are the Noam Chomsky liberals who stand up and cheer if all the Rittenhouses burned to the ground as long as he still got his paycheck, and there are Maureen Dowd liberals who will sit in the park and criticize all those others in the park who are not down in South Philly helping fix all that crime and drugs that Bush caused.
There are also the George Bush conservatives who run the park and decide the first priority will be to preserve the park and we’ll get to South Philly when we get there. And there are Ann Coulter conservatives who say damn anyone who touches this park and I don’t live in South Philly anyway.
The problem with the Democratic strategy of the post Clinton era and certainly the post-9/11 era is the entire Mudville nine are campaigning in and on South Philly to become president of Rittenhouse Square.
There are two kinds of critics, those who want you to succeed and those who want you to fail.
Maureen Dowd is harshly critical of everything Bush does or says because she actually wants him to fail. His failure would please her. It is painfully obvious, reading even one column, that this is a personal dislike based on very little fact – much like Republicans’ standard treatment of anyone named Clinton. What is less clear is Ms. Dowd’s ability to see that Bush’s opponents offer few viable alternatives.
Molly Ivins’ is critical of Bush because she’s afraid he will fail and is truly concerned for the country. Bush’s failure would perhaps not surprise her but would disappoint her. Hers is the more honest liberalism.
Noam Chomsky is critical of everything American because he actually wants America to fail. The downfall of democracy and this republic would allow him to feel vindicated and proud. He would never even notice, until the very last moment, that his own world was lost too. And even then he would take no blame upon himself.
The Democratic Party is very close to becoming deeply and broadly associated with the worst versions of the above critique. Dems campaigning in the south are forced time and again to defend raising taxes, gays, secularism, and gun control.
In the South, schools are bad, race relations are not great, and rural areas are fantastically poor. There are things a Dem could say, but right now a Dem comes to town to say, “I’m gonna take back that money George Bush gave you, I’m gonna let gays get married, I’m gonna make your kids stop praying in school, I’m going to take your guns away, and I’m gonna get rid of all those Ten Commandments plaques. Vote for Me.” As they say in Mississippi, that dog won’t hunt.
Democrats must find a way to reengage the electorate on real substance. Democrats have to be willing to admit that militant Islam is bad and that we are going to kill every terrorist that wants to kill us. Democrats have to say the tax code is unfair and we are going to rewrite it. Democrats have to stand up and say that education should be a major budget item, like national defense, and schools should be palatial, and all money spent by parents on college is tax deductible. Democrats have to say that soldiers are actually fantastically underpaid and we are going to double all military salaries and benefits, and make all housing payments for soldiers on active duty.
Democrats need to stop rooting for the other team’s quarterback to fumble, and instead get some pads and a helmet and suit up, or they're going to spend the next few decades watching from the bleachers.
Running Against America
THE FAILING DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL STRATEGY
By Ozymandias
There is a park in central Philadelphia called Rittenhouse Square. It is a restored Victorian era park with great old trees that stand tall and shade the wide herringbone brick walkways. Children play on bronze sculptures, dogs wade in the reflecting pool and run under the fountain, and couples sit on stone benches and hold hands, while little American flags flutter on 1920’s lampposts. It’s all very Normal Rockwell.
It is one of those places in America where you can forget that there is a war in Iraq and American soldiers are dying everyday. But, of course, there is such a war and families, just like those here at Rittenhouse, are getting the worst possible news – right now today, somewhere, in America - some strong American family lost its son. It is a very serious business we are in, and we can’t leave till it’s done. Anyone who thinks otherwise – on both of those counts – shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone.
The Democrats just lost two more Governors. Kentucky elected a Republican governor for the first time in 30 years and Mississippi elected a former chairman of the RNC. In last fall’s elections, Democratic governors lost in Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama, and then in October, California’s Gray Davis was recalled and replaced by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans control the Senate: 19 states have no Democrat senator, compared to 17 without Republicans. Republicans in the House of Representatives hold a 229 to 205 advantage over Democrats, with one Independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
The Democrats are now running for president, and offer nine candidates for the nomination. With one exception, each of these nine candidates is running a terrible campaign that inspires very few true believers and has served mostly to highlight that there is no true Democratic star. This fact was proven beyond doubt when Senator Hilary Clinton – the undeclared yet unstoppable 2008 nominee – is polling at 30 points higher than Howard Dean, the current Dem leader, and she’s not even running.
The fact that when the economy goes bad or soldiers get killed in Iraq and democrats in small campaign offices across the country make a fist and exclaim sotto voce “Yes!” – and let us be honest enough to admit this is happening, because it is and every democratic campaigner knows it is – the fact that the first reaction by Democrats to American tragedy is positive leads the democratic party in a dangerous direction – the direction of rooting for bad things to happen, of looking always for the darkest reporting, to, in effect, running for president against America.
The liberal movement is a little schizophrenic right now. After tremendous record of successes – Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, freedom of the press, and others – and these are, of course, ongoing – the liberal movement is now faced with a very strange dilemma indeed. The liberal movement has become dominated by a Peace activist element that has only a minor role in traditional Jeffersonian liberalism. Howard Dean, the only candidate running an inspiring campaign, co-opted the Peace camp in the U. S. completely, and the counter-culture cache that came with it.
Campuses now dominated by former and current liberal activists, who already don’t want a war and have anywhere from a calm mistrust to a visceral hatred of Bush, swarmed to this new anti-war, West Wing, blunt-talking candidate. War is wrong and damn anyone who thinks otherwise, etc. Saddam is not a threat. Militant Islam is a fringe element created by bad American foreign policy, etc. The problem is that much of this is simply not true, as many liberal know, but don’t say.
The problem is that the enemy isn’t a tiny far-flung former French colony whose puppet regime we tried to install over a dissenting public. The problem is we are at war with a fringe ideology of Islam that declared war on us and attacked us on our own soil. Jefferson himself would fight in this war, and be rightly disgusted at ‘liberals’ who don’t understand the difference. University liberals have barely noticed that much of what they are defending is a fascist religious extremism whose first order of business if it was successful would be the utter destruction of the liberal university system, and all the above-mentioned achievements.
Today’s intelligentia is made up primarily of commentators, especially because politicians are never truly felt to be acting honestly. (It is a strange truth that we choose people to run our country we would probably not trust to baby-sit our children.)
Liberal minded intellectuals will always harshly critique the government – that is in effect, their job. Liberalism at its very core is about that very thing: finding what is wrong, what is broken and fixing it; finding who is needy, who is left out of the benefits of democracy and getting them back in. All deference to Ann Coulter, who is often brilliant – it is ludicrous to think America can do without this influence.
Conservative intellectuals tend to be focused on what is already working – locating what is right, what is successful, and finding ways to preserve that. All deference to Molly Ivins, whom I adore, such a focus is right and good and requires no Bible to thump.
The core mission of liberalism today – identifying problems and proposing solutions, is often pursued to the detriment of the greater good. The core mission of conservatives today – identifying successes and strengths, is often pursued to the detriment of millions of Americans who slip through the cracks and should not be abandoned.
Many liberals today can’t enjoy America because they can’t sit in the Rittenhouses and not think about the South Phillys, where crime and drugs, and other serious problems are rampant. They would rather take the money and effort that built Rittenhouse Square and do something about crime and poverty and so forth. Conservatives like the park, and will do what it takes to preserve the park, and see there kids enjoying the park, and focus on the fact that it took 200 years to get this park the way it is and that is worth preserving and doesn’t happen overnight.
Now, there are a lot of sides here. There are Molly Ivins’ liberals who are smart and thoughtful and look for ways to maybe put off some of the superficial repairs to the park in order to maybe work on some of that drug problem in South Philly. There are the Noam Chomsky liberals who stand up and cheer if all the Rittenhouses burned to the ground as long as he still got his paycheck, and there are Maureen Dowd liberals who will sit in the park and criticize all those others in the park who are not down in South Philly helping fix all that crime and drugs that Bush caused.
There are also the George Bush conservatives who run the park and decide the first priority will be to preserve the park and we’ll get to South Philly when we get there. And there are Ann Coulter conservatives who say damn anyone who touches this park and I don’t live in South Philly anyway.
The problem with the Democratic strategy of the post Clinton era and certainly the post-9/11 era is the entire Mudville nine are campaigning in and on South Philly to become president of Rittenhouse Square.
There are two kinds of critics, those who want you to succeed and those who want you to fail.
Maureen Dowd is harshly critical of everything Bush does or says because she actually wants him to fail. His failure would please her. It is painfully obvious, reading even one column, that this is a personal dislike based on very little fact – much like Republicans’ standard treatment of anyone named Clinton. What is less clear is Ms. Dowd’s ability to see that Bush’s opponents offer few viable alternatives.
Molly Ivins’ is critical of Bush because she’s afraid he will fail and is truly concerned for the country. Bush’s failure would perhaps not surprise her but would disappoint her. Hers is the more honest liberalism.
Noam Chomsky is critical of everything American because he actually wants America to fail. The downfall of democracy and this republic would allow him to feel vindicated and proud. He would never even notice, until the very last moment, that his own world was lost too. And even then he would take no blame upon himself.
The Democratic Party is very close to becoming deeply and broadly associated with the worst versions of the above critique. Dems campaigning in the south are forced time and again to defend raising taxes, gays, secularism, and gun control.
In the South, schools are bad, race relations are not great, and rural areas are fantastically poor. There are things a Dem could say, but right now a Dem comes to town to say, “I’m gonna take back that money George Bush gave you, I’m gonna let gays get married, I’m gonna make your kids stop praying in school, I’m going to take your guns away, and I’m gonna get rid of all those Ten Commandments plaques. Vote for Me.” As they say in Mississippi, that dog won’t hunt.
Democrats must find a way to reengage the electorate on real substance. Democrats have to be willing to admit that militant Islam is bad and that we are going to kill every terrorist that wants to kill us. Democrats have to say the tax code is unfair and we are going to rewrite it. Democrats have to stand up and say that education should be a major budget item, like national defense, and schools should be palatial, and all money spent by parents on college is tax deductible. Democrats have to say that soldiers are actually fantastically underpaid and we are going to double all military salaries and benefits, and make all housing payments for soldiers on active duty.
Democrats need to stop rooting for the other team’s quarterback to fumble, and instead get some pads and a helmet and suit up, or they're going to spend the next few decades watching from the bleachers.
