Monday, October 17, 2005
In a stunning reversal ...
No sooner did I write my last post than I read Bob Herbert's column in today's NY Times:
...He's right, of course, and that IS the question for the Dems - where do they go from here? I'm afraid they have no clue what people are looking for, and without a compelling story of their own to tell, 2006 voters likely as not will stick with the 'the evil they know.' The DLC folks want the party to move farther to the middle and I can't say I disagree entirely. What we know now as "the middle" is so far off the charts that Richard Nixon would have had to look over his right shoulder and squint into the distance to see it. But I'd be happy to see the Democratic Party move to the middle - as long as it's the middle as we understood it in 1975.
It's no wonder the Democrats are gleeful.
They should get over it, and get on with the very difficult business of convincing the public that Democrats would do a better job of governing a country that is already in deep trouble, and sinking deeper by the day.
It's not enough to tell voters how terrible the Republicans are. (Leave that to the left-leaning columnists.) What Democrats have to do is get over their timidity, look deep into their own souls, discover what they truly believe and then tell it like it is.
Give us something to latch onto. Where do we go from here?
...
What the Democrats have to do is get off their schadenfreude cloud and start the hard work of crafting a message of hope that they can deliver convincingly to the electorate - not just in the Congressional elections next year, but in local elections all over the country and the presidential election of 2008.
That is not happening at the moment. While Americans are turning increasingly against the war in Iraq, for example, the support for the war among major Democratic leaders seems nearly as staunch and as mindless as among Republicans. On that and other issues, Democrats are still agonizing over whether to say what they truly believe or try to present themselves as a somewhat lighter version of the G.O.P.
...
