A couple of weeks back I asked you folks to send me your burning questions and I’d try to answer them. Bet you thought I’d forgotten about them, eh? Anyway, one of the first questions came from Master of Puppets who asked a very good question: What in the fuck happened to the Democrats?
Here’s the short answer: I’m not entirely sure myself.
I don’t have it on the sidebar any more, but I used to have a small summary about me over there that listed my political affiliation as “independent” because I’ve never registered with any of the various political parties out there. I’m often just as unhappy with the Democrats as I am with the Republicans and outside of those two parties the rest of the offerings aren’t all that appealing even if I thought for a moment that they’d ever have much influence on American politics. A lot of folks assume I’m a Democrat because I do tend to favor them over Republicans, but it’s really more along the lines of choosing the lesser of two evils in my mind. A sure-fire way for the Democrats to ensure I don’t vote for their candidate in the next Presidential election, for example, would be to nominate either Joseph Liberman or Hillary Clinton. In contrast I would vote for John McCain in a heartbeat.
In all honesty I don’t claim to be particularly politically astute. I tend to approach politics (and politicians) like I do most everything else in my life. Look at the issues, listen to the various proposals being offered, consider the source of the proposals along with how likely it is to actually come to pass, and try to pick people and policies that seem to be the most fair and even-handed. Because of my liberal-libertarian leanings I tend to vote Democrat, but not by a huge margin as there are plenty of Republicans as well as some of the lesser-popular party’s candidates that have received my vote. I’ve never voted straight party line on anything and I probably never will as I consider each issue/candidate individually before making a decision on them.
Having said all of that I don’t know that I can offer any significant insights into the problems the Democrats are having other than stunningly obvious ones such as the fact that they seem to lack any kind of a cohesive vision to sell to the voters. Overall the Republican’s approval ratings are taking a beating right now so there’s not a lot of point in flogging that horse much harder when they should be presenting to the public how they’re going to fix the fuck ups handed to us by the Republicans. What are they going to do to deal with the high energy prices, the burgeoning health care problems, the war in Iraq, etc. if we hand over the Congressional majority to them? They haven’t said much about what they’d do differently and to me that’s a large part of the problem.
Like I said, pretty obvious.
For the most part, democrats don’t play the dirty games republicans do. The more fantastic and degrading a story, the more apt people are to believe it, too.
I see the machinations of key republicans as opportunistic, dishonest and petty and given the amount of control the party has, it makes little sense that they act as they do: They’re like an invading party enjoying the spoils of war.
American politics in general is more about power and reward than anything else and it’s our faults. We seem to value negative traits for the shock values they afford. We prefer soap operas over self-improvement journals.
I can’t help feeling I’m living in an alternate universe these days.