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The real story of the last few years, at least in a political perspective – is that the Democrats seem to have lost their sense of direction. That factor is going to play very large in this next election, as it has the last few.
The increasingly nasty attacks on fellow Democrats and other parties alike, combined with a lack of direction reminiscent of headless chickens, leads one to understand just how desperate the plight of today’s Democrat has become.
But what brought them to this state of affairs? The reality of the results of liberal polices combined, ironically, with the triangulation politics of Bill Clinton.
To fully understand their plight, one needs to go back into the history of the last 50 or so years. … A history during which they dominated the American political scene..-when they WERE “The Man” that so many leftists were protesting against.
The claims of the Democrats superiority of foreign policy built at so high a cost in WWII, ended up taking it on the chin in Korea and Vietnam, ended utterly in the colapse of the Soviet Union under Ronald Reagan.
Their domestic policies as well, have been seen by all but the far left as an utter failure. Their claims of superiority vis-Ã -vis equal rights, sank into nothingness when Republicans started noting that the majority of those who voted for them were not Democrats… in fact that the majority of Democrats voted AGAINST the 64 civil rights act.
The Great Society unintentionally but inevitably exposed the Democrat’s mantra of using government handouts to lift all people as the fallacy it is… and this is a point we’re reminded of frequently as we pay for the loons used to create great society programs.
The Demand management that is Keynesian economics was exposed as fraud when it had it’s biggest impact under Jimmy Carter’s stagflation.
And finally, the claim to moral authority disappeared under the criminal behavior of Bill Clinton, and the all-out defense of his actions by the Democrat leadership.
Ironically, it all started really falling apart for Democrats as Bill Clinton was running against George Bush. Clinton and his advisers, (most notably Dick Morris) understood clearly that the Democrat’s traditional ideas and ideals had all been disproven in the public sphere.
So, what was needed was a mixture of their traditional stands on things, and some of the more moderate, and indeed, conservative ideas. Failure to so so would have certainly meant a loss for the Democrats in Bill Clinton.
That point, I think, contains the seeds of failure for the Democrats since Clinton left office. That’s because it was the point at which the Democrats began to understand that their positions on their traditional bread and butter issues no longer resonated with the voters. Most of that being because of the failures I’ve gone over above. Of course, the Democrats blaming the American people for the failures didn’t help them much either.
In any event, the Democrats at this point found themselves being moved away from their baseline, just to stay in the running at the voting booth. This has resulted in a split in the Democrat ranks, that has been more pronounced the last few years. This explains to a large degree how nasty the Democrats are getting with everybody, including each other.
That split between the comparative moderates like Joe Lieberman, and the Dennis “Moonbeam” Kucinich crowd, has resulted in the Democrats appearing that they don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. Which, in turn, results in them losing elections.
The result, then is that the Democrats are more desperate, and more shrill… increasingly so. Even John Kerry has publicly acknowledged the situation:
“I think the crowded field allows the most shrill, conflict-oriented, confrontational voices to be heard, and not necessarily the person who might make the best candidate or the best president. They’re very superficial.”
That fits. So are the candidates.
Of course the American people, if we can take recent polling data, and the California Recall as any indication, finally see all of this. And in the end, will give Republicans the reins, in record numbers, this next election.