Garvey: As the Democratic Party loses its soul, it loses its voice

[sybylla]

http://www.madison.com/captimes/opinion/column/guest/58756.php

an editorial by Ed Garvey, the Democratic nominee for governor in 1998, and a Madison lawyer and the editor of the fightingbob.com Web site.

<snip>
"Two Dean Rivals Unite Against Mutual Threat" was the Sunday headline in the New York Times that grabbed my attention.

What could the threat be, I wondered. Anthrax? Republicans? The answer came quickly. Kerry and Gephardt have formed an alliance to stop not Bush, but the "threat" of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

If Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt, whose presidential campaigns are down in the polls in key states, are successful in destroying Dean, what happens next? Will Gephardt then team up with North Carolina Sen. John Edwards to kill off Kerry, or will Kerry beat Gephardt to that punch? And on and on it will go, Democrats devouring Democrats while the money boys chortle on the sidelines.

Watching the low blows being thrown at the national level serves as a painful reminder of how much the Democratic Party has lost as it has become obsessed with winning at any cost - even the cost of one's soul - and how sleazy big money politics feeds that blind ambition.
<snip>

This is an excellent editorial on the current state of affairs in the Dem party nationally and, of course, in Wisconsin. This is not the first call from Ed Garvey to the Democratic leadership to pull the party back out of the slim pit it is slipping deeper into. It is another salvo, and a pretty strong one, in a line of many. I'm posting this here because I have seen many in GD fret over the apparent spinelessness and corporate whoring that is increasingly evident in many of our dem reps. Many here think that a third party is the best solution to this problem. But I, like Garvey, prefer holding up a mirror to the party and letting them see what they have become while working internally to make changes.

[glitch]

1. I agree

First we take our party back, then we take our country back.
Great article, thanks for posting.

[KoKo]

2. An interesting article. If only the National Party would listen to people

like Ed Garvey and "us." The DNC/DLC has lost it's soul. In it's race to please the corporatists for scraps it has lost touch with it's base.