What The Left Has To Do To Survive
We lost the election. We lost it when we should have won it in a landslide. There was so much anti-Bush sentiment out there that it should have been a walk-in-the-park. But it wasn’t. We lost solidly in Congress too. We’re going to lose the next set of elections too the way we’re going. How did we fall so far from The Clinton Years, when even a cigar and a stain on a blue dress weren’t enough to diminish the nation’s love-affair with the Democratic Party?
Simple answer really… The Democrats became arrogant. We thought we could do no wrong, that election victories would fall from the sky like rain and all they had to do was stand up and say “Hey, remember Clinton? Yeah, he was cool wasn’t it?” When it didn’t work in 2000, we fell apart. We were outraged! They cheated! It wasn’t fair!
Well, regardless of whether or not the election in 2000 was fair or not, we made a single large tactical error. We tried to go against the attitude that kept Clinton afloat through his scandal. That the average person doesn’t care that much. Once we got the first recount back, for most it was a done-deal and we moved on. Once the second and third recounts came back with the same results the vast majority of us moved on. But still, there was a vocal minority that pitched a real fit and made a zoo out of the whole thing. Most people call that “being a sore loser” and they applied the same label against a lot of the really vocal Republicans who went after Clinton for getting a blow job. The louder you scream, the more likely you are to drive people towards the enemy camp. We used that attitude to our advantage a few years earlier, but we were so out of sorts now that we forgot about it and went ahead with our tantrum. We lost and by the end people looked at us and said “Well, that shows you!”
However, even after it was flat-out decided, we couldn’t give up. It became our new mission to attack Bush over everything. He says X, we say Y. He says the sky is blue, we’ll argue whether it’s more a shade of grey or green. I bet if he came forward and said “We need to feed the hungry” the Liberal Party would shoot back saying “How dare you say that when we have such a large deficit!” The man can’t win right wrong or otherwise. We kept it up through Sept 11th. We kept it up after there was no turning back from Iraq. We kept at it through this last election. We did nothing but whine and complain and rant and rave for four solid years. The entire Liberal Party built the platform of “We’re not Bush!” While a nice platform in its own right, it doesn’t actually put forth any ideas or solutions.
That brings us up to the 2004 Election. The zoo that we handed to Bush on a silver plater. Instead of pointing out the failings of Bush AND how we would do it better. We just said “Bush did it wrong.” We had no plan, we had no solution. We just wanted to blame it all on Bush. Then we had people like Michael Moore. The craziest liberal I think there is right now. He became the mascot for the Liberals in ’04. Unfortunately he only represented the most extreme of the camp. His insane tactics and speeches alienated the vast majority of people who were leaning against Bush but weren’t entirely convinced yet. Those essential swing voters took one look at Moore and said “No way am I voting for people who believe what this kook believes!” Then add screaming-monkey Dean, Memogate, Kerry and his complete lack of a platform and finally the general shrill of every Liberal politician and you had a disaster. Anger, jealousy and pure hatred became what the Liberal Party was about this time around. And that drove away a lot of people who were almost willing to vote for anyone but Bush.
Note that I keep saying “The Liberal Party” and not “The Democratic Party” There’s a reason for that. It’s because the fiasco we just went through left the average Democrat out to dry. Many of us still voted for Kerry just because we didn’t like Bush… but some like me didn’t like being placed in such a situation. I had solid reasons for voting against Bush, ones that went beyond the BS rhetoric most Liberals were spewing. Kerry was my only real alternative, and that saddened me greatly. With each passing day since the election, those who control the Dem Party are straying further and further Left, leaving a larger and larger chunk of us with nowhere to call home (and feel good about it). Dean being chair of the DNC makes things about 100 times worse too.
We need to get rid of Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy, Michael Moore and MoveOn.org… These guys make the rest of us look bad. And if the past four years are any indicator, they’ll just keep at it until the next election…
But by then, I wonder how many people will be left that will even consider listening to them.