Tom Holsinger e-mailed be the following link for a David Brooks column titled "Democrats Go Off the Cliff: Powerlessness corrupts" over on the Weekly Standard. This paragraph just jumped out at me:
"It's mystifying. Fury rarely wins elections. Rage rarely appeals to suburban moderates. And there is a mountain of evidence that the Democrats are now racing away from swing voters, who do not hate George Bush, and who, despite their qualms about the economy and certain policies, do not feel that the republic is being raped by vile and illegitimate marauders. The Democrats, indeed, look like they're turning into a domestic version of the Palestinians--a group so enraged at their perceived oppressors, and so caught up in their own victimization, that they behave in ways that are patently not in their self-interest, and that are almost guaranteed to perpetuate their suffering."Meanwhile I just saw this post from blogger Patrick Raffini on the Dean campaign. Dean supporters are apparently NAMING THEMSELVES "Dean Fedayeen."
And here I thought that the Religious Right were nuts....
I feel a scale recalibation coming on. Tom clipped the following paragraphs to give me a sense of the Brooks article with his link:
"Republicans are suffering from many of the maladies that afflict the powerful, but they have not been driven into their own emotional ghetto because in their hearts Republicans don't feel that powerful. Democrats, on the other hand, do feel powerless. And that is why so many Democratic statements about Republicans resemble European and Middle Eastern statements about America."Now put that together with what Patrick said in the last three paragraphs of his post:
... Sometimes reading through this literature one gets the impression that while the United States is merely attempting to export Western style democracy to the Middle East, the people in the Middle East have successfully exported Middle Eastern-style conspiracy mongering to the United States.
... There is little evidence that moderate voters share the sense of powerlessness many Democrats feel, or that they buy the narrative of the past two and a half years that many Democrats take as the landscape of reality.
And the problem for Democrats, more than for Republicans, is that they come from insular parts of the country. In university towns, in New York, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and even in some Democratic precincts in Washington, D.C., there is little daily contact with conservatives or even with detached moderates. (In the Republican suburban strongholds, by contrast, there is daily contact with moderate voters, who almost never think about politics except just before Election Day.) So the liberal tales of Republican malevolence circulate and grow, are seized upon and believed. Contrary evidence is ignored. And the tone grows more and more fevered."
"In a sense, two primary campaigns are being waged. One is for the hearts and minds of hardcore Democrats, one in which the party’s most prominent national leaders are being ignored, and where the Dean Fedayeen are sucking up 50% to 70% of the energy. The second is for all intents a shadow of the first; the scramble for name recognition, where Dean can’t break 5%. Emblematic of this contest is the fact that 66% of Americans can’t name a single Democrat running for the White House, and Lieberman, Kerry, and Gephardt are the most vaguely recognizable. In this primary, even Democrats who are likely to vote at the end of the day are picking their candidate out of thin air, and the number who have actually heard of the top 5 or 6 contenders – much less evaluated them side-by-side – numbers no more than a few million.Both observations seem to be closing in on my own post Dead and Damned -- Democrats after 9/11.At some point, these two dynamics are going to have to be reconciled. Will Lieberman’s grassroots eventually catch up to his high name recognition, or will Dean leverage his near-monopoly over the grassroots Left as the number of interested Democratic primary voters grows by leaps and bounds? The advantage Dean has is that a growing Meetup constituency actually gives him a grassroots base in cities like Phoenix and Oklahoma City where early primary voting will actually take place – something no other candidate will have until very late in the game. The main question then becomes whether this Web-based mobilization will radicalize the shrinking Democratic primary base in the Red States and make it as liberal as it is in the Blue States, and hence fertile Dean territory?
Can Dean Berkeleyize the Heartland? In today’s Democratic Party, it’s certainly possible."
I can't say I like this. America needs are real opposition party to keep the Majority Party honest, most especially during a war.
At the current rate of radicalization, the Democrats are choosing to be on the national level what the California Republican Party is today...Losers, dead and damned. I think Armed Liberal may wind up owing me a dinner.
Anyone with the "Clinton" surname seems to have a similar effect on your Republicans. Still, being in power seems to have nostly cured them - and perhaps some huffing over Hillary's book will serve as an innoculation against future outbreaks.
Meanwhile, McArdle's Law wins again.
Well, all those people hating Clinton certainly didn't cost him any elections. It did cost the Democrats control of Congress, however. I wonder if Bush will have the same effect?
John,
Having Senator Orrin Hatch has cost the Republicans any chance at a filibuster proof Senate when the Democrats go off the cliff in 2004.
"I can't say I like this. America needs are real opposition party to keep the Majority Party honest, most especially during a war. "
I'm sure either the Independent Party or the Libertarians will step forward to fill the gap.
Interesting choice of terms. If you wanted to make an analogy between the Democratic party's asserted adoption of non-violent techniques that are obviously against its own self-interest, you could have compared it to a number of other groups (say, the Green Party U.S.A.). Yet you choose to associate it with a group who has broadly supported violent, murderous terrorism.
Nice touch, Trent. What's next, Hitlery Klintoon?
Clue,
You need to find one, as David Brooks is the one who made the comparison and he strictly limited it to the Palestinian verbal assaults we see every day translated in MEMRI.
I found this article a little disturbingly spot-on. I've said such things before; I think it's a little sad that the current Democratic party has nobody inside who'll say it to them now, and has to get David Brooks to make the analysis, which makes it sound partisan (well, it probably is!), mean-spirited and such.
I've despaired as the party ranks have concentrated on complaining that the Republicans outmaneuvered them in (chiefly) Florida, rather than figure out exactly what they could have done differently to capture legitimately those measly 16,000 votes that accidentally went to Pitchfork Pat, which would have won them the state and the election. Or just the matter of nominating a candidate who can, in fact, win his own state. (They seemed previously to be in a slump where they only nominated candidates who would win their own states -- and nearly no others!)
Sheesh. Can you cite a reputable, non-partisan source that there were 16,000 morons in Florida who cast the wrong vote? If that's true, I would suspect there would be just as many morons who accidentally voted for Nader instead of Bush. So statistically, the moron vote would just cancel itself out.
But I do agree with your main point. The Democrats only hope seems to hinge on how better to capture every moron vote, as the huge plurality they currently enjoy won't be enough.
Raoul,
Pat "WW2 was a mistake" Buchanan won a number of Jewish districts. Ahem. I'm a right-winger, and that sure looks like a mistake to me.
That said there's just no possible option except going by what people marked on the ballot, period. No "do-overs," either. Anything else is way too open to serious abuse.