Please Listen Carefully as Our Menu Has Changed

[marmar]

from CommonDreams:


Published on Thursday, February 1, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Please Listen Carefully As Our Menu Has Changed
by Paul M. De Marco

To continue its resurgence in 2008 and beyond, the party of Franklin Roosevelt not only must distinguish itself from the current version of the party of Herbert Hoover, it also must distinguish the new fare Democrats are prepared to offer the country from that which they offered it in the not-so-distant past. To hold onto recent Congressional gains and retake the Presidency, Democratic candidates must be able to say to voters those now familiar words, "Please listen carefully as our menu has changed." And Democrats must offer this new fare simultaneously to their traditional base and to the pragmatists who comprise the reemerging center of American politics.

No issue demands new fare from Democrats more than Iraq. It brings into sharpest contrast what the Party has been and what it must become. If the way Iraq played out in the 2006 midterms proved anything, it was that, when necessary, voters can tell the difference between political calculation and personal conviction. Nineties-style triangulation meets its match in the Iraq debate. Voters want candidates who come straight at them with reality-based positions and solutions. Democrats must demonstrate they get this. Iraq provides the most obvious platform for doing so.

Voters understand intuitively that, in 2003, it was political calculation that drove nearly every Democrat who ever harbored presidential ambitions to pretend to favor going to war with Iraq. When it became clear their support for the war would dim their presidential chances, the same Democrats chose a second, equally inauthentic tack, pretending President Bush had duped them into favoring war. Not only hasn't all this make-believe made believers of the voting public as a whole, it has underscored how dramatically out of step these "pretenders" are with their own Democratic base.

The "Zero Tolerance Democrats"

A core of Democratic voters, larger than any pundits have recognized or any pollsters have quantified, already have eliminated from consideration any presidential candidate who voted to authorize the Iraq war. Maybe for the first time, a significant portion of Democratic voters will choose - or, more accurately, disqualify - presidential candidates based on a single Congressional vote. Call them the "zero tolerance Democrats." ......(more)

The rest of the piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0201-22.htm

[derby378]

1. I may wind up a "Zero Tolerance Dem" until the 2008 national convention

Come November 2008, I'll vote for whomever our nominee is. Unless it's Joe Lieberman, in which case I'll probably already be dead from laughing and crying hysterically.

[ClassWarrior]

2. Sorta like the abortion voters across the street.

NGU.

[tom_paine]

3. He forgets what may be a significant voting force: The Constitutionalists.

MANY people, including myself, many moderates & independants especially, are aghast at the extreme disresepect the cabal has for the Constitution, and how they have essentially nullified most of the Bill of Rights and probably a third of the rest of the Constitution.

The Constitutionalists are comprised of everything from strict constructionists to Jeffersonian "evolutionists" and all in between. We all share one thing, though: The belief that our Constitution more than anything else, our beautiful System of Checks and Balances, is what makes us what we are, with all our flaws and imperfections (but up until Bush, said flaw and imperfections were damned few than most anywhere else). It is our Strength, our Honor, and it is the gift which the Founding Fathers (again, with all of their faults and human imperfections) bestowed upon the world by reviving small 'r' republicanism from the ash heap of history.

Tom Paine once said, at the time he wrote Common Sense, there was no place on Earth that people weren't used and abused by the Aristocracy.

Jefferson said that it was not intended that the majority of humanity be saddled and a priveleged few "booted and spurred". And he WAS a Privileged Few! Which makes, to my mind, the Founding Fathers some of the best people ever in positions of power anywhere up until then and maybe since, because they actually believed Regular People should have a hand in deciding our own fate.

My point is that The Constitutionalists are a lot bigger than people think, and there is a lot of passion driving us. A Bushevik SAYS he loves America, but how can you love something you do not understand and mostly oppose in your actions? For 90% of them, ignorance of any knowledge of history seems to be standard issue (I guess that's what makes them easy to fool), particularly among the followers.

But a Constitutionalist, no matter that we may agree on interpretations or "judicial activism" or anything else, draws a certain line in the sand when it comes to disgracing that finest of human endeavors (with all it's faults and flaws).

And the Busheviks have crossed that line so many times most Constitutionalists, even if they were inclined toward Bushevism once, by now are just sickened by their repeated actions.

[havocmom]

4. Lad, ya still got it!

:thumbsup: