I was sitting in the hotel bar with a bunch of conference attendees, and was talking to Bob Borosage (one of the founders of Campaign for America’s Future) and said the presenters at the conference were all asking the wrong questions.
“The right question is, if Democrats don’t stand for public education, Social Security, Medicare and help for the unemployed, what the hell do they stand for?” I said. (Okay, I didn’t really say “hell.” But you might be reading this at work.)
He looked at me, thought about it and said slowly, “They stand for keeping themselves in office.”
“Bingo,” I said. “And that’s why I don’t care about the Democrats anymore.”
Me too, and I’m voting OUT
Yup, you’re so right.
That’s something I have to tell the DSCC every single time they call me.
It’s not MORE democrats we need in Congress, it’s BETTER democrats.
The national committees seeking to retain the DC insiders can stuff it. We want progressives who can engage their local constituents, not politicians with corporate backing and bigger aspirations than helping the workers in their district/state/nation.
I say fuck em all. The truth as we now can clearly see is that Bush may as well have stayed in office for, I dunno, another 2 or 3 terms. I mean, wtf, why not? Unless there’s a strong primary challenger in the wings to give Barry a run for his money—and I have NO idea who that might be—-then we’re either stuck with asshole we got, or we’ll be stuck with another rethug asshole in ’12. Bottom line? What’s the diff?
Come on now dandy. You can’t seriously believe that Obama and the Democratic congress has been as bad a W and his bunch of a-holes. I think many posters here suffer from significant memory loss. IIRC, things were abysmal under W and got worse every single year that he was in office. Since Obama has been in office, things have improved greatly. Maybe not as much as you thought they should have or hope that they would have, but no one can reasonably argue that there hasn’t been improvement.
Foraker has it right — we need better Democrats in office. It’s nice (and important) to have the big tent party but we need to continue to try to push the party back to a center-left position from it’s current center-right spot.
That said, I’m all for a viable third party; perhaps a labor party (actual labor party, I mean). The problem is that if it only takes away a portion of the vote from the Democrats, it’s a lose-lose proposition. This point underscores the importance of the primary challenge in Arkansas. While Halter narrowly lost, it sent an important message to the Democratic establishment — continue to piss on your base and be prepared to lose votes, money and, ultimately, seats to Republicans. This may be the way to reform the party.