Reply #22: it's not your leaders in Washington that matter - [View All]

Once again - elections are won and lost district by district. Do 70% of Americans all agree on the same timetable? The same set of circumstances? It doesn't matter if 90% of the people in, say, Queens, for instance, want to pull out in a year as long as 51% of people in, say, Colorado's western slope, don't.

"Morality" has little place in politics - why else do you think crooks like Karl Rove have had such success? Politics is war - in fact, in the House of Representatives, it's 535 separate wars. And the terrain is different for each one - what gets a candidate elected in one district could very well lose in another.

I don't know how else to explain this. It isn't cowardly to not charge a machine gun (to continue with the war analogy). It's smart. Especially when you're leading in the polls.

There are three races in Colorado this fall that will be very close. We could win all three - or lose all three - and I would much rather the national party remained ambiguous on Iraq than say the wrong thing and possibly lose all three. Two of them are Republican right now and the third was, until 2004, held by Scott McGinnis (google him) - the very definition of right wing fundy nutcase.


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Why don't I like David Sirota? Well, this article is a good example. Sirota spends way to much of his time attacking other Democrats for my taste. And doing it in an incredibly divisive way.

Another reason -

Sirota is more than willing to bend the facts to fit his arguments - and that makes him a hack in my book. Example here - and be sure to read his original article... which is linked.

http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/12/debunking_debun.html

Please note that Yglesias is not particularly a defender of the DLC - he just found Sirota's article so full of shit he felt compelled to respond.

From my own POV - Sirota lost all credibility when he used the CO western district race (won by John Salazar - D) to justify his "economic populist" theories on how to win elections. It was just such absolute horseshit. John Salazar won that race because of water rights issues - a big thing here in Colorado. His Republican opponent had supported a ballot initiative in 2002 that would have sent western slope water to Colorado Springs (eastern slope) - Salazar had opposed it. That's why he won. Any pundit here would tell you that. It was a very conservative district then (McGinniss's, in fact), and still is now.