I fear we are still doing the same things Dean warned about in 2004.

madfloridian

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Wed Jan-20-10 10:50 PM
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I fear we are still doing the same things Dean warned about in 2004.

This is not about Coakley or MA, it is about the reactions I have seen this week from major Democratic leaders. It is the mindset that if we just act a little bit more like the other party we will convince them to vote for us.

It is a mindset that is geared toward taking the party hard right, and expecting us to not to argue about it.

Howard Dean must be cringing a lot lately.

His words from Fall 2004 in You Have the Power:

He speaks of having worked with George Bush as a governor, and he saw the moderate side of him. Then he points out the things Bush was doing to the country...and further points out that the Democrats enabled his agenda.

The sheer stupidity of much of what came out of the White House surprised me, because I knew firsthand that George W. Bush was not, by any means, a stupid man.

I doubted that he'd really changed his views. It seemed unlikely that he'd gone, in a matter of months, from moderation to the far side of the dark side of the American political spectrum. No � I concluded that once he'd gotten into the Oval Office, he'd become so disconnected from ordinary people and the details of their lives that he'd let the Republican Party's ideology get the better of him. He was missing the fine points of how that ideology affected ordinary people because he just didn't care about the details.

He painted the broad strokes of his policies and then left the details to Congress or the political hacks in his administration. Letting the chips fall where they might for millions of children. And sick people. And elderly Americans.

We should make sure our party does not do that.

That lack of caring, that shrugging off of the details of ordinary Americans' lives, was every bit as enraging to me as purposeful, hateful extremism. It seemed to me, in some ways, even worse. It was callous and opportunistic. And it showed a willingness to put real people � real, ordinary Americans � in jeopardy.

Even more infuriating was the way my fellow Democrats went along for the ride, voting so much of the time to advance the president's perilous agenda. They approved his tax cuts, the Medicare prescription-drug act, the war resolution, and educational "reforms" � all destructive measures that wouldn't have passed without their support.

The Democrats were acting as though Bush had been elected with a 5 million-vote plurality and not, as was the case, with 500,000 fewer popular votes than Al Gore. They weren't acting like an opposition party. They barely stood up to the president. When he asked for his unaffordable and immoral $1.6 trillion in tax cuts, they lay down and died.

One-point-six trillion? they protested. Oh, no. Make it $1.25 trillion. And not a penny more.

The Democrats were sweet-talked, they were bamboozled, and they were afraid. They thought that by accommodating the administration, they were somehow going to be okay. In doing so, they helped the Republican Party pass its far-right-wing agenda.

I thought: Our people have to start acting like Democrats again.

I notice a tendency now to discourage anyone from pointing out that there is a danger in too much bipartisanship....that there is harm in trying so hard to negotiate with those who are extremists.

There is a fear now at forums to be too outspoken on issues that bear strongly on our daily lives. That is not a good thing.

I find myself being very cautious in my posts now, trying to not let too much outrage show about the selling out of education, about the fact that our own party is talking of privatizing Social Security by calling it something else.

I feel like we are afraid to act like we have the power to change things. That is not good.