The reasons we the people of the party are frustrated, feeling left out....

madfloridian

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Tue May-26-09 11:35 PM
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The reasons we the people of the party are frustrated, feeling left out....

It's been a deliberate planned move to make the progressives of the party inconsequential. It has gone on for years. The people who pulled it off are the ones you see on TV who are careful and cautious in their speech and don't have a clue how to debate the "party of no" Republicans.

The GOP has had a plan for years. Talk louder, be fearless, be on the attack...and don't worry about how what they say sounds. Say it loud enough, be positive enough...and people will believe it.

Democratic leaders have had a plan as well. Be cautious, don't make waves, don't be too offensive to the other party or they might stop our agenda. Hey, that worked until we got such a control of congress and the White House. Now it is just a big joke.

From an article by John Nichols in 2000.

Behind the takeover

We have heard the story before, but we should be taking it more seriously now. We see the ones who are inner circle folks, the ones who are out of the circle...way out. We need to remember.

At the national convention of a major political party, an ideologically rigid sectarian clique secures the ultimate triumph. It inserts two of its own as nominees for the Presidency and the Vice Presidency. Heavily financed by the most powerful corporations in the world, the group's leaders gather in a private club fifty-four floors above the convention hall, apart from the delegates of the party they had infiltrated. There, they carefully monitor the convention's acceptance of a platform the organization had drafted almost in its entirety. Then, with the ticket secured and with the policy course of the party set, they introduce a team of 100 shock troops to deploy across the country to lock up the party's grassroots.

This is not some fantastic political thriller starring Harrison Ford or Sharon Stone. This is the real-life version of Invasion of the Party Snatchers--with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) burrowing into the pod that is the Democratic Party.

Jesse Jackson said ""We have all these progressive Democrats here ready to fight on issues of economic and social justice, Democrats who know these are the winning issues and who know that when we fail to run on them we lose," said Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., Democrat of Illinois. "But, in the leadership positions of the party, we have the DLC trying to pull us in an entirely different direction."

He was right. The little people had no chance against the corporations. Their goal was to end dependency on unions and minorities. They did it well.

The triumphalist talk was backed up by the reality of the convention. Vice President Al Gore, a man present at the founding of the DLC and loyal to the organization ever since, was nominated for the Presidency. Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, the current president of the DLC and very possibly the truest of its true believers, was nominated for the Vice Presidency.

And, with virtually no debate, the convention endorsed a platform that, on the vast majority of issues, deviated radically from the views of most party members. According to a New York Times survey of convention delegates, Traditional liberalism remained the most popular ideological stance. Trade union members made up a quarter of the delegates, and people of color were better represented than at any major party gathering in the nation's history.

They are doing the same thing now on the health care plans. They will probably do it on charter schools, massive changes to Social Security and Medicare, and policies that benefit not the people but the big guys with the money.

In 2004 Jamal Simmons, who is becoming a centrist spokesperson on TV more often now....announced the coming changes.

It's time to pass torch, younger Dems say

A wave of young Democrats is demanding not just to be heard but to take charge.

"This generation is looking for ways to participate because we're tired of losing," says Jamal Simmons, 33, a consultant who has worked for presidential hopeful Wesley Clark and several other Southern candidates.

Simmons and his fellow "Young Turks" worry about the Democratic Party's dependence on interest groups, their relations with minority groups, the stereotypes that they are weak on defense and values, the Republican appropriation of the "reformer" label and the swaths of America that Democrats seem to have written off.

Young Democrats believe that the party is dominated by people who came of age politically in the 1960s, and it's time for them to make room for new ideas and new voices. Theirs.

"We respect the struggles of the feminist movement, the civil rights movement and Vietnam, but (we) are not defined by those struggles," says Kirsten Powers, 37, a New York-based strategist and commentator for Fox News. "We want to take what is good in liberalism and make it better, and get rid of what is not working."

They were worried about what the GOP might think of their agenda. Even then we were allowing the right wing of both parties to set the agenda. Anyone who pointed it out was soon on the way out of party leadership.

Actually things got so bad with all the pushy progressives being so loud that the NY SUN had an article called Centrist Democrats Ponder How To Counter Netroots

They were/are so afraid of the netroots/grassroots that they had to "ponder" how to get us out of the picture. Interesting phrasing. From 2006

At a time when centrism has become a dirty word in some Democratic Party circles, hundreds of the party's avowed moderates are convening in Denver this weekend to discuss their agenda for this fall's election and the presidential contest in 2008. The annual meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that came to prominence in connection with President Clinton's electoral victory in 1992, takes place as the organization has become a lightning rod for criticism from liberal Web-based activists known as the netroots.

The Denver gathering is scheduled to hear from the putative Democratic frontrunner for 2008, Senator Clinton, as well as other possible contenders such as Senator Bayh of Indiana, Governor Vilsack of Iowa, and Governor Richardson of New Mexico.

..."The tension dates back to the last presidential race when council officials threw cold water on the populist, Webdriven campaign of Howard Dean. Dr. Dean, who is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, derided the council as the "Republican wing of the Democratic Party." A sharp-tongued aide for a Dean rival told the New Republic that the Vermont governor's Internet-savvy backers resembled the grotesque denizens of the "bar scene from �Star Wars.'"

Now wasn't that nice? To call us grotesque denizens of the bar scene from Star Wars.

Seriously, we should not be surprised that we who are against the wars continuing, who are pro public health care plans, who are adamant that Social Security will be fine, that people who plan torture should be investigated, that gays don't deserve the DADT policy, that women should have the right to control every aspect of their health decisions......we are the ones who are being ignored.

The agenda was set long ago.