Reply #10: Some Of My Thoughts [View All]

[ihavenobias]

Obviously, for the record, it's not like ALL democrats cave in and sell out. There are *some* fighters, like Kucinich, Feingold, Dodd, etc (don't be mad if I left out your favorite, I can't think of them all!).

But clearly, overall, they ARE horrible sellouts. Or, as suggested in the video/article, maybe some of them are just dumb? I'm sure most of them are plenty educated, so maybe dumb really means naive or *politically* ignorant. Honestly, I think it's a combination of those things, along with the general corruption from special interests, which has also made the economic difference between democrats and republicans much, much smaller over the last 30 years (I wrote about that at length before).

Consider that before Regan took office, there were less than 50 registered lobbyists. Today there are over 35,000!

Will publicly funded elections clean up this woeful bunch? I'd like to think so. Reducing the special interest influence HAS to have a major impact. I wonder how many of these politicians would just jump ship if there was sweeping reform to bring about publicly funded elections? Or who knows, maybe they would actually start to represent their constituents.

But does any of this explain why *this* bunch of democrats has been so pathetic in particular? I mean, even from a purely political perspective, I think they'd be MUCH better off standing up to the most unpopular president in our history. Who will they anger, the 25-30% that hates them anyway? Which again, makes me think they really are dumb (and subject to varying special interests).

If you think about why the republicans have continued to be tough (and ignore compromise, cram their agendas through despite low public support, etc.), it also goes back to special interests IMO. After all, large, corporate interests have a history with the republican party in particular, so if the repubs "cave" to this pressure it's not like their push for tax cuts and deregulation contradict their mission statement to begin with!