Moonie Times: "Democrats fail to gain traction from Bush slip"

[sabra]

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050819-095812-6350r

Democrats fail to gain traction from Bush slip
The Washington Times

WASHINGTON -- Democrats hoped they would be scoring political points in this year's election cycle as a result of increasing terrorist violence in Iraq and skyrocketing gasoline prices that have combined to send President Bush's job-approval ratings plunging into the low 40s.

But things are not turning out as they hoped. The Democrats are beset by internal division over the lack of an agenda, carping from liberals who say party leaders are not aggressive enough in challenging Mr. Bush's nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court, bitterness among abortion rights activists after criticism by Democratic leaders that forced them to pull a TV advertisement attacking Judge Roberts, and complaints from pollsters that they have no coherent message to take into the 2006 elections.


Independent pollster John Zogby says that although Mr. Bush is not doing well in the polls, the Democrats aren't doing any better.

"The Democrats aren't scoring points in terms of landing any significant punches on Bush or in terms of saying anything meaningful to the American people," Mr. Zogby said.

[bryant69]

1. The problem is that the President is a focal

He's one guy (with his top advisors I guess) who can tightly control their message (should they choose to). The Democrats - well you have the DNC head, but you have a lot of other people vying to speak for the Democratic Party. So the message inevitably gets dilluted a bit.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[smartvoter]

5. Yes. And Dems make a point of saying Dean doesn't speak for them

at every turn.

nt

[Roland99]

7. Hillary needs to NOT run so the DLC has less power to determine

candidates and direction for the '06 and '08 elections.

It's time to dump the pro-corporate, pro-military industrial complex stance.

[montanacowboy]

2. Never thought I could agree with the Moonie Times...but

hell, they have a big point. I am sensing total disgust among my family and friends about the dems. We are all so sick and tired of the Hilllary/Biden/I love a centrist campaign, and they never saw a piece of repuke legislation that they could oppose (i.e., war, bankruptcy bill and on and on). These people do not represent me.

I think they will find if they do NOT become aggressive and become a real opposition party, the repukes will continue to gain in elections and we will continue to lose. They have learned NOTHING since 2000 and are still riding the same old horse.

With the combination of election fraud and turning away from the centrist democratic party, I see no chance for our progressive voices. We need a real leader - one who speaks up for the people - who tells the friggin truth about * and the corrupt criminal gang running this country into the ground.

If the Dems do not run progressive candidates who reflect my values, me and many of my friends are not voting come next time. They either get on OUR bandwagon and they can go the way of the dinosauers.

[sabra]

4. I totally agree!

about agreeing with a Moonie Times piece, and your sentiment regarding the party...

[Skidmore]

3. Yoohoo!!! Dems in DC...

read the last line in the above post. Message from Skidmore: Stop trying to be Rs. The Rs are doing quite well without your help. They are doing even better BECAUSE of it.

[JohnyCanuck]

6. Justin Raimondo says Dems should be making hay while the sun shines

Antiwar Populism:
The Floodgates Open Russ Feingold, Chuck Hagel, and Cindy Sheehan give voice to the pro-peace zeitgeist

by Justin Raimondo
www.antiwar.com

..........Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.), a prospective Democratic candidate for president, was telling U.S. News it's time to set a deadline – Dec. 31, 2006 – for withdrawing our troops from Iraq. He'll make the announcement today, at a "listening session" in Marquette, Wisc. Said Feingold:

"I call what I am doing breaking the taboo. The senators have been intimidated and are not talking about a timeframe. We have to make it safe to go in the water and discuss this. A person shouldn't be accused of not supporting troops just because we want some clarity on our mission in Iraq."

The Democrats, Feingold avers, are too timid when it comes to confronting the president on the war, and he's right about that: it was, after all, two Republicans, Reps. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) and Ron Paul (R-Texas), who took the lead in introducing a resolution calling for the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal no later than Oct. 1, 2006 (although it was co-sponsored from the start by two Democrats, Neil Abercrombie and Dennis Kucinich, Jones, being a Republican, was more visible and took the most heat). With national polls showing support for the war plummeting, it's time for the Democrats to play some catch-up, but the party honchos are slow to realize their opportunity – or have ideological problems with doing so. As Ari Berman, writing in The Nation, put it:

"The prominence of party leaders like Biden and Clinton, and of a slew of other potential prowar candidates who support the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, presents the Democrats with an odd dilemma: At a time when the American people are turning against the Iraq War and favor a withdrawal of U.S. troops, and British and American leaders are publicly discussing a partial pullback, the leading Democratic presidential candidates for '08 are unapologetic war hawks. Nearly 60 percent of Americans now oppose the war, according to recent polling. Sixty-three percent want U.S. troops brought home within the next year. Yet a recent National Journal 'insiders poll' found that a similar margin of Democratic members of Congress reject setting any timetable. The possibility that America's military presence in Iraq may be doing more harm than good is considered beyond the pale of 'sophisticated' debate."

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7009

[TahitiNut]

8. Donald Lambro is a fascist propagandist of the first rank

If he's a 'journalist' then Heidi Fleiss is Dr. Ruth in mufti. He doesn't even have a fig leaf of 'balance,' pandering to the neoconservative agenda with armband and jackboots. This is merely one of a repeated series of rants about "disarray" or "divisions" in the Democratic Party -- a condition that's clearly exacerbated by effective influence-peddling by the corporatist right ("we'll get you to agree with us and then savage your party").

Gross inaccuracies and lies in his columns have been noted no less than 16 times by Media Matters http://mediamatters.org/archives/search.html?topic=Donald%20Lambro

I could probably make a good argument for outlawing his columns on DU, infested with lies and mischaracterizations as they are. But I won't. :shrug:

Donald Lambro is chief political correspondent for The Washington Times. His twice-weekly column, which he has written since 1980, appears in newspapers nationwide. One of the most frequently quoted political reporters in Washington, Lambro has interviewed most of the major political leaders of our time and has covered numerous presidential campaigns. He has written widely about the government, the economy and social issues, and won the 1995 Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. Economic analyst and CNBC commentator Lawrence Kudlow has called Lambro "the best political economic reporter in Washington today." Lambro earned a national reputation for his investigations into federal spending programs. The author of five books on government and economics, Lambro wrote Land of Opportunity (Little Brown and Co.), an examination of economic growth and entrepreneurs in the 1980s. His FAT CITY: How Washington Wastes Your Taxes won national acclaim and the attention of President Reagan, who quoted from it during his 1980 presidential campaign and gave copies of the book to every member of his Cabinet. Lambro hosted and co-wrote the PBS documentaries "Inside The Republican Revolution" and "Star Spangled Spenders" and produced and moderated C-SPAN's "The Washington Times Forum." His commentaries have been heard on AP Radio and NPR, among others. A graduate of Boston University, Lambro began his career as a reporter for The Boston Herald-Traveler and United Press International. His investigative series on federal spending programs, "Watching Washington," was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Lambro was named the Heritage Foundation's Distinguished Journalism Fellow in 1981.
http://www.unitedfeatures.com/ufsapp/viewFeature.do?id=10

[NewJeffCT]

9. Randi Rhodes said this before - many are speaking out, but are ignored

Plenty of Democrats ARE speaking out, it's just being ignored! I remember hearing her say that she has heard a lot of strong, passionate speeches by Democratic politicians, but they don't go beyond C-SPAN.

If CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC & Fox don't put it on TV, will anybody know about it?

[Rageneau]

10. Are some Dems really Reps?

Sometimes, I can't help but think that the GOP has infiltrated the highest ranks of the Democratic Party and is working from within to cripple it.

The Democratic Party's political incompetence is so obvious that it seems intentional. Makes me wonder if our leaders really even WANT to win.

The cowardly, anti-confrontational, go-along-to-get-along, asleep-at-the-wheel, members of the DLC (and the House and the Senate) hinder the Dem Party as much as the frothing right-wingers and their meat-puppets in the press do. They need to shut up and get out of our way.

Howard Dean should be cloned.

[wli]

11. yes

[JohnyCanuck]

12. Revelations of a reformed Republican

Revelations of a reformed Republican
by Mary Pitt

However, I was not yet ready to give up my in-born Republicanism. The policies and practice of the Northwestern Republicans were at that time kindly, caring, and progressive. During the "Carter Energy Crisis", we returned to the Midwest and found ourselves living in a "whole 'nother country". At that time the Equal Rights Amendment, affirming full rights of citizenship for women and making sexual disrimination illegal, had passed in Congress and was still trying to gain ratification by the majority of the States. I recall one instance at the local grocery store when a lady was expounding at length to one and all that, "Them wimmen don't need that big pay. They have men to take care of 'em!" I politely inquired whether she had ever know any woman whose husband had died, become seriously ill, or left his family for the favor of another woman or any woman who continued to work to provide the necessities of life for aging parents. The only reply was, "Humphffff!"

I was also finding it more and more difficult to see the error in feeding hungry children because some mothers might be taking advantage of the system or whether there was justification for ending a program that assured a healthy adulthood for those children who were underprivileged in order to punish a few women who had made a career of becoming "Welfare Queens". I had seen and experienced the good that these programs had brought about for families of my acquaintance as opposed to the poverty of my own childhood.

<snip>

Since that time I have been a "searcher", totally out of sync with those in control of our nation today. It is alien to my culture to accept the rehabilitated Iran/Contra crooks that are warmed-over from the Reagan administration as well as the new ones that were shipped in from Texas and imported from the Neo-Con think-tanks. However, the "loyal opposition" has proven to be too loyal and to demonstrate too little opposition. The Democrats allowed themselves to be stampeded into giving President Bush carte blanche to "do whatever is neccessary" in retaliation for the World Trade Center attacks and to sit meekly by while the Neo-Cons diverted that permission into an attack against Iraq because of imaginary "weapons of mass destruction". Then they sublimely accepted a Patriot Act that gave even more dictatorial powers to the President even though they had not even been given the time to read it!

Time after time, this performance has been repeated. The great groundswell of populism was squelched by the Democratic party machine and its manipulation of John Kerry into the presidential candidacy. His campaign was loose and disorganized and the best "messages" we heard were delivered by his wife and by his running-mate, John Edwards. Then we were treated to another spectacle on election day that almost equalled the 2000 results in Florida as hanky-panky was conducted at the polling places. Apparently few of the Democrats in Congress were put off by this as they went right back to their old practice of agreeing with the President that we need to stay in Iraq, we need to renew the tax cuts for the rich and the hated Patriot Act, we need to cut unnecessary, (social program), expenditures, and we absolutely MUST spend even more on the military and pork!

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=22417&mode=nested&order=0