General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Ralph Nader: 'Cowering' Democrats face defeat [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)were the ones who stayed with the party when its candidates weren't the safest and blandest. Clinton, Gore, and Kerry sent those voters the message that they not only DIDN'T matter, but that they were actually to blame-that we lost for not being contemptuous enough of, well, let's just say it... activists, gays, unions and impoverished women of color.
I respect the base...it's just that I disagree with you as to what they want. They stayed in, as I see it, because they had nowhere else to go. That doesn't mean its ok for the party(as you seem to think)to ignore the needs and interests of labor, the Rainbow, the poor, feminists and progressive activists.
And I dislike Ralph personally as much as YOU do...it's just that I reject the notion that personal dislike means you should automatically disregard what someone has to say, or the larger point that that person might make(especially since people were making the point prior to Ralph's emergence as a political figure in the Nineties.)
My bias is towards mobilization and enthusiasm-based campaigning(the kind Paul Wellstone and Russ Feingold proved to be workable). Yours, from what I can read here, is towards reassurance-and-repentance based campaigning, the idea that the mythical "swing voters" can only be won to our party by a promise that our most loyal supporters and activists will be disregarded and left out in the cold.
I'm not talking, in my posts, about people who were never going to vote(or campaign) Democratic or never had in the past. I'm talking about people who were there for us throughout the late Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, and were then intentionally driven away by the party leadership in the late Eighties(many of whom were working hard, for example, in the Rainbow Coalition and on voter-registration drives). If we kept THOSE people believing that they mattered, we'd hardly ever lose.
And the true way to win swing voters isn't to distance the ticket from the base(as Rahm Emmanuel and his ilk STILL want the party to do) but to nominate people who convey a sense of leadership. That's how FDR won. That's how Truman won when it looked like we faced certain defeat in '48. That's how Harkin and Paul Simon took U.S. Senate seats from the GOP in 1984, when Reagan carried their states by double-digit margins.
The true path to victory is for the party to have a backbone...not to keep acting like we've permanently lost the argument and that all we can ever do is tinker around the edges. Contrary to the delusions of our "strategists", the U.S. is NOT "a center-right country", and it serves no purpose to campaign as if it is.