Victims of our own success.

[gulliver]

We often talk about how the Republicans need an enemy. "The loss of the cold war hurt them" and so on. Luckily for Republicans, terrorism is on the rise, gays want to get married, minorities want an equal education for their children, women want to have the option of abortion, etc. There is no shortage of enemies for Republicans to cluster around. The enemies are easy to identify, caricature, symbolize, and dehumanize.

But what about Dem enemies? We Dems need enemies too, and we've just about killed off all the good ones. Old people don't have to eat dog food any more. Minorities can vote now and don't get lynched for it. Gays can live out in the open without too much hassle.

The rest of our enemies are just too damned abstract or derivitive to sink our teeth into. The Dems have no Saddam Hussein. (And we aren't the types to make one up like the Republicans did.)

I don't know. I fully expect Bush to steer Luxury Liner America further off course and into a few more icebergs. We are definitely sinking right now thanks to the gash in the hull called Iraq. The trouble is, we are sinking too slowly for the attention spans of most people.

People as an aggregate are too simplistic to work together without a fairly concrete goal or enemy. A whole bunch of them don't understand concepts like "our children paying our bills" or "a future where people can't see living tigers in the wild." Rather, they understand, but they just don't appreciate the gravity of it all. There is no bottom line; no clear bright line of demarcation as there is with say "Blacks can't vote or they can."

We Dems need to find something to fight for that "looks and sounds" worth fighting for to the average Joe. Of course we have good issues. Of course we see the future coming. We know that desperate, anger and fear filled pieties and patriotisms are symptoms of decline. But knowledge and forecast are not enough to dissuade the masses from more bloody trial and error.

Bush is going to give us more blood and error. Will that turn the majority back to us? I don't think so. We don't have the symbols. We've put such a dent in our main enemies, they look weak. To the narrow minded we look like we are obsessed with remnants and dangers from a forgotten past.

[meow2u3]

1. Need an enemy? Try the greedy rich!

You know, the criminal executives who stole our manufacturing jobs here and gave them to slaves in China; those who stole our IT positions and farmed them out to suckers in India.....

[gulliver]

2. Got one?

Too abstract. Which greedy rich? Which jobs? Not my specific job.

Lou Dobbs had the right idea naming names on this issue. We've bled gouts on outsourcing and exporting of jobs because of the greedy rich. You are right. But bleeding to death (which is what we are doing) is a slow process. An enemy knifes us in the back. Who did that?

[Progressive420]

3. Couldnt have said it any better myself

we should be taking on NAFTA and the WTO more none of our candidates except for Kucinich would even really mention these thing in the primary a lot of people realize what NAFTA and the WTO do to our economy and lots of people have seen their effects because they have lost there job to outsourcing we really need to champion this issue we need to make it a central theme in our party

[OrwellwasRight]

4. Building on StopthePendulum's Idea

Corporations.

They are more concrete than the "greedy rich," have no souls or social conscience and are the direct cause of the decline in real wages, decline in living standards, and reduction of union membership (and, along with union loss, comes benefit loss, primarily nealth insurance and pensions).

The bonus of the corporate enemy is that polls and studies show that most poor Repub voters already hate the corporations. They know that corps take advantage of them and make them feel powerless, they just don't know why.

And when the Dems dropped our populist rhetoric to become the "me-too pro-business party," that left the door wide open for the Repubs to take advantage of the vacuum. Most poor and lower middle class Repub voters think that it is the Repubs that are saving them from rich elites and evil corporate purveyors of filth.

We need to take back the economic fairness argument. We win on it, when we try.

[gulliver]

5. Who is the corporate equivalent of a "welfare queen?"

I am completely in agreement that some corporations, particularly some divisions of some corporations are bad guys. Enron was a bad guy. For my money, any corporation that buys a Republican to help with some business issue is a bad guy.

But some corporations are good. Most are.

Which ones are the enemy? Pick a couple by name and point to their dirty deeds. Make them a symbol of all that is bad. Ostracize, boycott, shame... Make an example of the worst behavers and win elections with them. Give the others pause...