Posted on 12/16/2004 11:36:15 PM PST by The Loan Arranger
Looking back on election 2004, it's possible to see John Kerry's loss as a kind of modest electoral near-miracle -- if, that is, you think (as I do) that the Democratic Party has only a minimal reality. Who can doubt that the Republicans really are a party -- with all the usual divisions as well as cobbled-together constituencies with contradictory needs, desires, and agendas. Once upon a time, back in the 1940s, when the Republicans looked to be an out-of-power junior party for the foreseeable future, that might have been a good description of the lumpy New Deal Democrats. But today, what exactly is the Democratic Party? Jostling at the top in Washington are a crew of uninspiring prospective leaders, advisers, and second-rate spinmeisters connected to potential piles of money and focused on what "image" the party should project to have a hope in hell of winning future elections; under them is an old party system ever so slowly buckling and, like the industries whose workers once buoyed the Democrats in the Midwest, hollowing out.
The near-miracle, when you think about it, is that a massive, mobilizing, extended burst of anti-Bush (and, I suspect, largely antiwar) energy -- all those not-quite-Democratic-Party 527s, all those eager young (and not so young) volunteers heading, often for the first time in their lives, into "swing states," all that inspired door-to-door and cell-phone-to-landline energy, all those small-scale donations that flooded in – all of that just about lifted a moribund party and its largely moribund candidate over the top against an incumbent president in "time of war."
(Excerpt) Read more at progressivetrail.org ...
Barf alert? I'd say the exerpt was 100% dead on correct!
But so many libs insist on treating 9/11 and the war on terror like it's nothing more than theatrical politics.
Their belief system does not accomodate a vigorous defense, which is ultimately the top priority of the government. This was the underlying reason for Kerry's real flip flops. He was speaking out of both sides of his mouth to the pacifists and the security moms.
This author only halfway gets it. Their problems are not in tactics and rhetoric, they are more substantial.
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