February 2, 2006
State Of The Democratic Party
The Washington Times’ Tony Blankley’s latest column presents a good analysis of the Democratic Party as it now stands, citing the relationships between some of George Bush’s statements in Tuesday evening’s SOTU address and the folks on the left side of the aisle.
During an election campaign, political operatives are fond of seeking to induce in their opponent a negative “defining moment.” That is to say a highly publicized moment when their opponent portrays everything that is wrong with him. In 2004 John Kerry provided that moment when he said he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it.
Surely, at the State of the Union address the Democratic Party provided such a moment when, as has already been well commented on by others, they wildly applauded President Bush’s statement that Congress failed to pass Social Security reform last year.
As the party of reactionary inertia — as the party that not only doesn’t have any solutions to today’s dangers and problems, but denies that such problems exist — the Democrats on the floor of the House Tuesday night demonstrated a flawless, intuitive sense of its new, disfunctional self.
The Democrats’ wild applause on behalf of doing nothing was more than a merely tactical political blunder. It displayed a deeper truth about them.
It sure did. It seems like ever since Bush beat Gore in 2000, the Democrats have put all other issues, in fact their very minds on the back burner in order to prosecute their War On Bush.
If one recalls, last year the official position of the Democratic Party was not only that they opposed President Bush’s Social Security reform. They also argued there was no crisis — no major problem that required rectification.
(In fact Social Security has four trillion dollars of unfunded liability, and if major changes are not made quickly, will only be able to pay the retired baby boomers about 70 cents for each dollar of promised benefits.)
Social Security is the single most iconic Democratic Party issue of the past hundred years — the Democrats created Social Security in 1935 and have won countless elections since then by beating up Republicans for allegedly not supporting it. It was the Democratic Party’s sacred virgin. They would lie for it, die for it, steal for it, demagogue for it — but never cheer its demise or harm, even sarcastically.
Their collective decision to cheer the failure of the body politic to provide for sufficient revenues to pay the benefits was an act of historic shame for the Democratic Party.
Worse than that for the Democrats, it shows how severely degraded their political instincts have become. Tip O’Neill’s Democratic Party of 20 years ago would never have cheered the failure of Social Security — even to try to make a small political point. To be sure, they would demagogue the issue ruthlessly, but never be seen to be walking away from the sacred program.
Until George Bush became president the Democrats, for better and for worse, were a liberal party. Deformed by hatred of the current president, the Democrats have become a nihilist party.
Yeah, well, thanks to alternative media and the Democrats’ own obvious lack of either unity or direction, their uselessness as a political entity is costing them more and more public support, despite the misleading reports to the contrary by the liberal mainstream media.
The Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress and we have a strong conservative in the Oval Office, and the numbers can only increase on the right as the nation realizes long before this November that the left hasn’t a clue about anything, they’re standing at a $25.00 minimum table with four $5.00 chips.
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February 3rd, 2006 at 5:04 pm
Truly the Democratic Party has no other agenda than to diminish President Bush. You would think that at least some of things that need action in America that the Democrats would try to acheive a compromise or consensus. Unfortunately Democratic and liberal hatred is so systemic that they view everything Republican through the filter of rage. Get over it and fix some things!
February 3rd, 2006 at 11:10 pm
The upside is that most Dem politicians haven’t a clue that their incessant attacks on POTUS are hurting them more than anything else, they still think their assaults are helping them gain votes.
For those of us on the right, it’s nice to have the opposition helping insure that we enjoy fruitful elections for years to come.
February 4th, 2006 at 7:31 am
I remember when the Democratic Party was a formidable political party with ideas and solutions that were relevant to the national issues. I tag the beginning of the party irrelevancy to LBJ. The decline steepened and hate entered the political field when Reagan became president. Clinton won by portraying himself as a centrist (which of course he wasn’t). However, during the Clinton years, the GOP took the House and that raised the ire again. The hard left has never really recovered from the Gore defeat and has responded with such bitter anger it truly is astounding. The anger is not hidden, but seeps into every aspect of how the left now engages in politics. It’s all about “getting even”. That posturing is harmful to our nation, especially now that we are at war. Lord, I hope they can turn the Democratic Party around. We need two functioning parties; not just one.
February 4th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
Old Soldier –
I concur, they did begin to fragment during the Johnson Administration, and it was all downhill from there.
The Democrats have indeed become increasingly more like a collective of abusive children than one of two major political parties in this country, and it does seem to have snowballed thus into the twenty first century.
IMO, the only way the Democrats will get their house in order at this point will be to wrest control back from the bitter and angry far left elements that run their party today.
That will not be an easy feat, as first their leaders will have to acknowledge the root of their still-worsening problem(they all seem to be in denial that they’re screwing up) and act with team integrity to solve it.
If that ever happens, their greatest obstacles will be the Kennedys, Pelosis, Kerrys and Deans, et al, that keep getting reelected because they rarely seem to encounter any strong opponents at the polls, the more extreme political activist orgs that kick in large quantities of campaign financing and votes(meat and drink to the politicians they support), and the leftism of the MSM, to which all too many people still lend credibility where political issues are concerned.
Fixing the Democratic Party would make the Twelve Labors of Hercules look like child’s play at this juncture, and we’re still not seeing even a viable effort to start the ball rolling.
February 5th, 2006 at 5:27 am
Very perceptive, Seth.
To become that party of relevance, they once were, the Democrats will have to start coming up with ideas that are worth discussing. The far left has only one motivation - hate. Hate won’t bring solutions to the table, Heck, hate won’t even sit at the table.
I do not perceive that the GOP is cowtowing to the far right. There are some fundamental issues shared by most conservatives that the GOP supports and there are others that they seem to consistantly ignore. As a conservative, I would hate to see the GOP hijacked by the far right. I think the balance within the GOP is about right for this era.
February 5th, 2006 at 11:11 am
Old Soldier –
I, too, see the right as pretty well balanced, and fortunately functioning(unlike the political left) rationally. It’s only the left that tries to convince the voting public that we are dominated by Christian fundamentalists or whatever, the liberals’ spiritual Halliburton.
In truth, we only seek what our founding fathers left us as a legacy, the very concepts that made our nation the greatest in world history and that made the United States what it is today. Our traditions, our freedom, our concern for people in less supportive circumstances.
The liberals don’t understand the commitment our founders engendered when they created the U.S.A. They still believe that there is room for socialist adjustments in our historic documents and our way of life, they still fail to recognize the roll our belief in G-d plays in the way we run our country. They are so paranoid that they believe a child saying a prayer in school or a Ten Commandments display in a court house automatically means that the church controls the state.
I’m 50 years old now. I’ll be completely amazed if the Democratic party repairs itself by the time I’m 65.