November 10, 2004
THE RULES:
Five Reality Checks For Democrats: Dump Kofi, Moore, Dopes (Tish Durkin, 11/10/04, NY Observer)
If you were really going to kill yourself in the event that President George W. Bush got re-elected, you would have done so by now. This leaves you, like every other loser, with two things: a bitter taste in your mouth, and a choice. You can sit around and keep telling each other how stupid and scary the winners are. Or you can put down the hemlock and the Häagen-Dazs, splash some cold water on your face, look in the mirror and tell yourself some awful truths.Read your lips:
Bush is not an idiot. Kofi Annan is not an oracle. Michael Moore is not Everyman. Women are not ovaries with feet. And to be an American is not an embarrassment.
Lest this sound like gloating, I confess to having a pronoun problem here, and will hereby switch from "you" to "we." I voted for John Kerry. As a liberal separation-of-church-and-state type, I don’t like the idea of a President who owes his political life to a conservative religious base. I can’t fathom George Bush’s policies on the economy and the environment. As for Iraq, while I find nothing of genius in the Democrats’ prescriptions at this point, I find astonishing the idea that the administration’s performance there is, on balance, something to reward rather than something to punish.
Curiously, then, it is not the party I voted against that is driving me nuts right now. It is the party I voted for. It’s the same feeling that I got about the Democrats after 2000: I agree with them, but I can’t stand them, in the exact same way I can’t stand anyone who would rather whine than shine.
Now as then, Democratic partisans seem to be more interested in coming off as wronged rather than defeated. We have lost an election—and so far, we are acting as if we have lost a contact lens, crawling around the red parts of the map in search of the speck of strategy that would have turned it blue. We are all set to keep on ridiculing the President’s syntax, when it is our message that no one can make sense of. The party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. has turned itself into the political equivalent of the woman who responds to her husband’s leaving her by living in her bathrobe for years: It’s O.K. for her to be miserable, so long as enough people around her know that he’s the bad guy.
In short, the Democratic Party is losing the American people—and so far, we aren’t even looking for them.
To get started, we should go with the five rules of reality-checking:
It's not that Ms Durkin's advice to her fellow Democrats isn't perfectly sound, but that she has to offer it and that all it would do is shave the most extreme edge of the Party, not actually move it much towards the center, that's remarkable. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 10, 2004 6:21 PM
Her advice would NOT "shave the most extreme edge of the Party." She would remove the Michael-Moore-lovers, the "global test" advocators, and the abortion absolutists. Take that away, and where does the energy and money come from?
Posted by: brian at November 10, 2004 7:46 PMAnother writer in this week's New York Observer, who voted for Kerry, Michael Thomas, indicates that the Democrats' core constituency needs to look at their beliefs on other things in society besides hating Republicans if they're going to turn their party around.
When Thomas can write, "I can’t stand 90 percent of the people I think of when I think of Blue America—which is not to say that I relish watching the country turned over to a bunch of Jesus-freaking rednecks bearing AK-47’s, which is what Blue America’s condescending, self-congratulatory, knows-best interfering, cynical post-mortems claim has happened." it shows at least a few people on the Democrats' side are coming to grips with the fact that in many ways, they've become their own worst enemy.
This guy is wasting his breath. His fellow Democrats won't listen because they are incapable of doing it. Clinton was an abberation and he turned the Democratic Party into a cult of personality for 8 years. Since then, they mainstreamed Michael Moore and all the kooks.
Posted by: pchuck at November 10, 2004 10:11 PMTish is too smart (and too cute) to remain a Dem forever.
Posted by: curt at November 10, 2004 10:28 PMThe folks Ms Durkin is talking to are much like this:
A policeman on late-night patrol sees a man on his hands and knees under a streetlight. The policeman walks over and asks the man what he's doing.
"I've dropped a $20 bill and I'm trying to find it," the man responds.
"Are you sure you dropped it here?" asks the cop.
"No - I dropped it somewhere in the next street," says the man.
"Then why on earth are you looking here?" demands the policeman.
"Because the light is better here."
Posted by: Uncle Bill at November 11, 2004 10:34 AM