posted this in BN, wanted GD thoughts: Will Dems ever learn.......

[rlev1223]

....that Bush never backs down....never. In the past week our party caved on the energy bill
and CAFTA, could have filibustered the NRA fiasco and let Bush know that notwithstanding Christopher Dodd standing in front of every available microphone explaining why it was a bad idea, there would be no price to pay for the Bolton shove. Oil drilling is next, as a budget add-on with no chance of blockage.

And now Hillary Clinton wants to "redefine" the party's goals? That means, of course, that actual progressives should just shut up.

The one party system is alive and well.

[earthside]

1. No, They Won't Learn

The 'inside the beltway' Democratic Party will not learn how to be a real opposition party as long as they continue to scramble and compromise to get a smaller piece of the same corporate PAC campaign contributions that the Republicans get.

That is the honest truth ... sad to say.

And ... that is why I am a small 'd' democrat and a registered Green.

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Exactly

[Moochy]

3. Liberalphobia

We dont have the votes, any filibuster will be overridden by Democrats afraid of the "L" word .. Liberal

We have 15 or so in the congress who practically caucaus (cock-ass) with the republicans.

[Greyhound]

4. I gave it a hopeless recommendation

Hopeless because the actual democrats will never learn. They've been sending the same gang of donation whores back for decades, no matter how many times their 'representatives' sell them out. Witness the countless threads defending various republicrats actions as politically necessary, or centrist, when, in fact, they're just repugs with a different set of hot buttons. :banghead:

[emulatorloo]

5. Dems fought Bolton, GWB appointed him anyway. . .

Not sure I get your point -- Dems don't hold any power now.

OTOH, They worked hard, and now to some more people out there Bush looks like a willful petulant fool. WAH WAH WAH must have my Bolton. Now I must run off to Rancho Crawfordo and hide.

[rlev1223]

10. How about....

"unless you withdraw Bolton, the energy bill is dead and the Court hearings won't even start until January." That's how Bush would play.

Dems do have procedural power in the Senate, and Frist can't threaten a nuclear option on anything but judges...probably not even that now because of the time frame.

The real problem was best typified by Leiberman's politeness to his friend Cheney during the 2000 VP debate...Cheney reamed him a new asshole while he sat giggling as the major league Dems have been doing ever since.

IMHO

[bryant69]

12. I strongly disagree.

Certainly there are Lieberman democrats out there; but I don't think they define our party. THere are plenty of senators and representatives who have stood up to the party.

This Bolton recess appointment is a sign of weakness, not strength.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[rlev1223]

15. it depends..

..on what price Bush pays for it. Perhaps it is weakness, but it is completely of a piece with his constant approach to political conflict; never compormise, always push, worry about the consequences later. If there are no consequences, he prevails bit by bit.

[patcox2]

6. You think of all dems as somehow belonging to you; they don't.

Unfortunately, they have to answer to their constituents, who actually vote for them.

When legislators make their decision about how to vote on any given bill, 9 times out of 10, their decision is first, foremost, and always, based on the political dynamic back home. Dems did not "back down," for example, on the NRA bill. What happened was, a significant number of democrats know that they will be voted out of office if they are perceived of as anti-gun or pro gun control. They can't help it, they come from the west, and the south.

You might think its time for a stupid gesture to be made on somebodies part, and the democrats are just the ones to do it, but calling for them to commit suicide is not justified, to me.

We have to have public support to fight. If you merely obstruct on every issue, the republicans will succesfully paint you in a negative light (look what happened to Gingrich). If you are going to pull out all the stops, it should be on an issue 1. the public cares about, and 2. the public can understand.

Thats why Roberts will be so hard to oppose. Sure, I went to law school, so I understand all the things that are bad about him. But the public isn't going to give a shit unless you can put it on a bumper sticker.

Thats why its going to come down to bloody hangars, if there is any fight at all. Nobody is going to give a crap that he favored a restrictive interpretation of title 9, except the 40,000 of us here.

When you lose the election, you have to accept that you are going to lose ON EVERY VOTE until the next election, when you get the chance to take back the majority so you can start winning again.

But you can't and shouldn't keep badmouthing your team in the meantime for doing what it inevitably is going to do simply because of the results of the election. Its petulant, unrealistic, stupid.

[rlev1223]

11. Support emerges from leading...

..not following.

There are really very few single issue voters, although it is true that the system of entrenched incumbancy, when primaries are often the only competitive elections, makes politicians overly sensitive to the extremes in their own parties. But people ultimately respond to clarity and have a good hypocrisy meter. Craven voting may get a pol past a current crisis, but it continues to undermine basic trust in the party itself.

[patcox2]

13. Realism emerges from maturity.

Keep telling the party what to do, you'll get them all fixed up, too bad the 240 or so elected dems in washington and their several thousand staff members are all so dumb, but I guess not everybody is an intellectual and moral genius, and bold leader, like yourself.

Or, wait a minute, this is a distinct possibility, maybe, just maybe, ohmygod, maybe they are aware of certain practical realities in the world of which you are utterly ignorant?

[rlev1223]

14. Pretty hostile...

...you are a Democrat, right?

The "practicalities" practiced for the past 15 years have done little but to
further merge the parties into one with an increasingly reactionary agenda. The center has been shoved so far to the right that Richard Nixon would now look like a liberal, a situation you seem all too eager to embrace.

[Lexingtonian]

7. well, to be contrarian

the notion that Democrats should or must oppose every Republican initiative absolutely and/or victoriously is just as absurd. That's totalitarian behavior and inconsistent with claiming to be adherents of small d democracy. After all, the people elected a Republican majority on some bunch of campaign promises and ideas and platform, the enaction of which constitutes the desire of a majority of American voters.

One thing critics of the Democratic Party constantly point to is the idea by a lot of its adherents that it doesn't need to sincerely respect the outcome of elections. For the Right that's stereotypical behavior, even incorporated in their labelling themselves Republicans, but it is undoubtedly out of place for liberals and Democrats.

The true role of an opposition party is not mindless opposition. If you look at it long and hard enough, it is in fact to demonstrate greater wisdom, better understanding of The People's needs and condition and the situation, than the governing one.

To be blunt, I'm as much of a Democrat as you are but I don't see what happened in the last week as a terrible tragedy. Ugly, yes. Disaster, not quite.

The big, overtouted, Energy Bill is a giveaway of $14.5 billion over 5 years or 10 years to Big Oil to do stuff they were going to have to do anyway. But in context, we have budgets of $2 trillion. And the $286 billion 'highway' bill for this year alone passed without comment and contained $100 billion *more* in pork barrel spending than last year. I believe we actually got something really in our favor out of that relatively small $14.5 billion, relatively speaking, very much worth the money- we can now beat on Big Oil without mercy for ethics violations for years to come. This may be the best $14.5 billion ever spent- such a crude and stupid overreach that Democrats can now take apart the Dallas oil mafia when they return to power in '06 and '08. Which is politically worth every dime of that money, imho.

The gun manufacturers' shield- that'll be easy to overturn. Still, no conviction of them has every been upheld in appeals court or in jury trials anyway, American culture simply isn't at rejecting guns yet. It will once average people trust their police and courts to do competent and just work in the Midwest and South, which they don't (sadly, for good reason).

CAFTA, for one thing, doesn't actually change very much in the way of tariffs and such. The impact is not going to be anywhere near the scale of NAFTA. And high as the price may ultimately be, the United States necessarily has to form a strong trade union in the Carribean over the next decade or two to stay competitive with the maturing European one and the nascent East Asian/Australian one. I agree that it's being done in a very painful way, maybe the most painful and stupid way, but that doesn't change the basic fact that the U.S. was going to have to create and fund the arrangement at some point and in some way.

They're all bargains we didn't intend to make, but they're not as wrong and useless as we like to pretend.

[Norquist Nemesis]

8. Bush backed down on Bolton.

He didn't stand and fight that one in any way, shape, or form. He whimped out and fell-back on recess appointment.

While one might try to argue he got his way, so he won, I just don't think that's the case. Hell, he even had a photo-op with Karl Rove at his side boarding the helicopter along with a 'see, Karl sits right behind me in policy meetings so leave him the fuck alone!' videos right after it was out that Rove lied. But no such chumminess with Bolton.

No, Bush whimped out. I suspect he's covering his ass and keeping a promise to a "loyal supporter".

[rlev1223]

9. i disagree

He got Bolton and spared a couple of Republicans the embarassment of having to vote against him. Plus, the shit-feeding smiles today were photo-op enough.