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I can remember the same things being said about Kerry when compared to Gore. People said oh no, no, no, this won't be anything like the Gore campaign. This time we are really going to fight and kick the their butts. Don't have doubts! (As though having doubts somehow harmed the effort - which is a measure of just how desperate and weak we are to think that feeling good or thinking positive will make the difference. We may as well sit around the Pentagon chanting in hopes of levitating it, as some people did in 1969.) All false bravado and wishful thinking. The same fatal errors made going into 200 were repeated in 2004, and there is every reason to believe that we are making the same errors again.
You say that it will be different this time because we have a different and presumably better candidate. That is not what has been missing. The Republicans can run any old clown and win. They put people into office who represent a coherent program, are committed to a comprehensive plan, they don't look for some perfect charismatic personality to lead us. Any bum they grab and run for office will do, because they know the nature of the battle, they know where the battle lines are, they know which side of the battle they are on, they know what they want to achieve and they know how to achieve it. We lack all of those. We don't even know whose interests we represent - we have no consensus or solidarity, no clarity of vision, no focus or determination. Our plans are all wishful thinking, pipe dreams - a grab bag of positions on issues, disconnected and poorly articulated, promoted with an emotionalism that will always be limited in its reach and appeal to a narrow demographic.
In my opinion, the party is floundering - battered, bruised, traumatized. There is no solid and clear foundation, no coherent program. Who does the party represent, and why and how, are still up in the air at this late date, which leaves us with "we aren't as bad as the Republicans" and "we are smarter" and "we have some better programs, just go read 200 pages of boilerplate and convoluted double talk on some website and see for yourself!" and not much else. The Republicans are so bad, that we win here and there anyway in spite of ourselves, but that is more a matter of stumbling into office and then not knowing what to do once they get there. This isn't to blame people. I think the whole country is traumatized by the destruction the right wingers have done to the country.
I know that many see the current primary season as some sort of epic battle between good and evil, rather than as a very strong indicator that the party is in fact adrift, confused, and divided. We have the utterly absurd and self-contradictory idea floating around now that unity needs to be forced upon people - "we need unity! You people are blocking unity!" Unity doesn't happen in a vacuum, and if it needs to be forced on people that tells us that it is not there, and that tells us that there is something more profound that is wrong. Unity about what? Because unity is good? Because we need to beat the Republicans? The demands for loyalty and unity are all about silencing critics, dismissing anyone who is expressing reservations, for the purpose of eliminating any ideas that could threaten the illusion, the fantasy, that we can "believe" our way into power. In other words, the demands for unity and loyalty are actually working against solidarity and success.
Conditions in the country get worse and worse, and yet still Democratic politicians waffle, compromise, back pedal, cynically calculate each cautious move, as they fiddle at the fringes of the problems and tell us to settle for inadequate and laughable "baby steps" and small wins. Meanwhile, the Republicans run circles around us, and our leaders and the most prominent and dominant voices in the party at all levels tell us to be patient, to be careful, to go slow - they tie our hands behind our backs while the right wingers pummel us.
I do not blame Obama. We have a representative democracy - sort of, still - and he cannot represent something that is not there among us. We do not have his back, anymore than we had Gore's or Kerry's. We are not doing our jobs - rather than giving the politicians something powerful to represent, we represent them. We act as unpaid public relations agents representing them, promoting their careers rather than demanding that they promote the interests of the people.
Obama perfectly represents the liberal activist community. This is an all or nothing gamble, and what is at stake is control of the party, which must precede taking control of the country. This is the last stand for a particular style of politics that have dominated the party. Should the party win this fall, that will vindicate the dominant group and that style of politics. That will leave a vacuum into which a new political movement no doubt will form. A loss, on the other hand, will kick over the bee hive and anything can happen. Either way, the people are suffering and that is not going to be magically ended any time soon, and I do not think that people will be willing any longer to be patient, nor to get up to speed on the complicated, nuanced and disorganized program that the Democrats keep presenting and turn themselves into "like-minded" progressives. In other words, we will see either a loss with the collapse of modern liberalism as a political force, or a win with the disaffection from modern liberalism by millions of people and the formation of a new political movement.
Or....
We can hope for a miracle and believe in change just sort of happening. I don't mean to be too critical of that - strange and unexpected things can happen.
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