To believe that the Democrat party is to be credited with welfare reform is past self-delusion and well into clinical pathology. Crime? I suppose he means 100,000 mythical policeman patrolling our streets. The self-delusion continues. In this parallel universe, Newt Gingrich had nothing to do with welfare reform and Rudy Giuliani had nothing to do with controlling crime.
Today, the council has almost no constituency within the Democratic Party. About every five years, the Pew Research Center conducts a public opinion survey to sort out the country’s major ideological groupings. In 1999, Pew found that liberals and New Democrats each accounted for nearly one-quarter of the Democratic base. By the next survey in 2005, New Democrats had completely disappeared as a group and the liberals had doubled their share of the party. Many moderates, radicalized by President Bush, now define themselves as liberals.
I suppose if you can steal a language, you can steal the reality it expresses. In this lexicon, "left-wingers" are characterized as "moderates" and "leftists" have lipstick smeared on them and are herded out to us as "liberals."
Two decades of work by the Democratic Leadership Council — and a not inconsiderable assist from President Bush — have made the Democratic Party the healthiest it has been in the 22 years of the council’s existence.
And the author has finally got something right, President Bush has given the American left its best chance for electoral domination which its own lunacy had denied it for decades. I suppose that makes the Democrat party "healthy" but its robustness comes only at the mortal peril of the country.
