Blarch explains the Democratic party

I need to clarify something here, some have jumped on me for my views, and I need to clear a few things up.

The democratic party is the 'big tent party' ...and many are just barely in the party to begin with.

What I mean is that there are different wings of the party...The spectrum goes from the liberal left wing democrats to the right wing democrats ...with moderates in the middle.

Examples of left wing democrats...

Kucinich
Boxer
Durbin
Kennedy
Obama

Examples of right wing democrats...

Fienstein
Clinton
Lieberman
Murtha

Examples of moderate democrats ...

Kerry
Biden
Pelosi
Feingold

The party members are also structured in this way. Even on DU we have left wing, right wing, and moderate democrats, and this is where we part.

Many left wingers are barely in the party ...as are many right wingers....and these two extremes is where the problem is ..they usually butt heads over issues.

Myself...I am a liberal left wing democrat ..barely in the party, I would consider myself a Bernie Sanders democrat, If there is such a thing. And I rarely agree with the right wing of the democratic party ..and they rarely agree with me.

This seems to be the consequences of having a 'big tent party' ...many end up here by default.

In this campaign we have seen the right wing of the party attack the left wing of the party...and vice versa.

Where do we go from here ?

I see the party moving left ..and the right wing is fighting it. But as it turns out..the activists of the party are mostly left wing, and this is why they were attacked by Hillary and Lieberman, and this is why the left wing fought back.

I guess what I am getting at is that we will never heal the wounds we have...it's just a consequence of having a 'big tent party' ...we shouldn't be trying to get the wings to accept each other...it just won't happen. And forcing them together like two opposing magnets will only make them push back harder.

Rant off:

but I think most of us are "some of each". I consider myself left-left wing except when it come to one issue (that I can think of) and on that I'm a right-left wing.

Thanks for the pictures.

:7

I'm not trying to highjack this thread, thats why I didn't say to start with.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment02/

We'll see.

Obama did on MTP last week is

NOT

"Left" wing.

hillary supporters would ignore the point of the thread and attack Obama.

How very predictable.

The left and right can't even agree on who is left and right.

I DID notice that nobody is claiming "hillary isn't right wing"

IWR = FOBs and PNAC
anti-Invasion and Occupation of Iraq = Us

Similar political calculations, different constituencies.

(Leiberman excepted)

But I agree. Individual voters also more likely than not have aspects of right and left on various issues, without even being very aware of conflicts. Strife and disagreement and conflicts are what politics are made of, and there has been and will be no stable resolution of things.

On the liberal scale, I am off the charts. Michael Moore is way too conservative for me. Hugo Chavez -- now we're getting close.

My liberalism is not the problem. I am aware that I am not solidly in the mainstream, and I don't expect the Party to cater to my every wish.

However, the real problem is that the people like Lieberman and Clinton have taken the Party (or allowed the Party to be taken) so far into conservative territory that it completely lost any sense of bedrock principles. And here's where we really differ. When you take to the average person about the issues, they do not support the conservative positions. On a policy-by-policy basis, the average person is far more progressive-minded than where this Party has gone.

It became a self-fulfilling prophesy. The DLC-ers kept moving farther and farther away from core values. Their underlying support kept getting weaker. And with each loss, they argued that we needed to move even farther to the right. And the support kept getting weaker until we finally lost the White House and BOTH branches of Congress.

That is just fundamentally wrong. It is the mass of DLC-thinkers that have created the chasm here. The problem is that the majority of Americans haven't believed the Democrats actually had any driving principles, and the were largely correct.

And what we are seeing with Obama is a correction that is long overdue. He (and ESPECIALLY DEAN) is offering us an opportunity to put the Democratic Party back on course to represent the bedrock principles of the Party that are just as relevant today as they were when FDR was the man -- probably more so, actually.

I certainly agree with you that there is a spectrum within the Party faithful. But that is not the problem. The problem is that the Party leadership lost faith with the faithful. And we're on track to fix that this year.

:applause:

I've been saying stuff like that about "the Third Way" for a couple of weeks now. The Clintons mistook The Third Way for becoming more and more like the opposition, thinking, probably, that at the "right" opportunity they'd be able to presto-chango "do the right thing" for the other half of the equation. Problem is that their ability to recognize the "right" opportunity and the "right" thing to do was becoming progressively more warped by everything in their Rightward momentum, so even if they DID happen to pick the actual right opportunity, all of the factors were already so warped that the "right" thing to do wasn't actually the right thing to do. As it happens, HC didn't even recognize the right opportunity, i.e. the IWR, nor the right thing to do, i.e. vote No.

People think their minds, and hence their ability to think, aren't affected by what their actions - WRONG.

I have no idea whether the Clintons even believe in the core principles very much. I'm willing to give them some benefit of the doubt on that, although they haven't demonstrated it very much.

An equal or greater problem is that if the DLC philosophy (keep being more and more Republican until we actually get enough power to change things back) ever were to put Democrats in control (it only did for two years 1993-5), the people who are "on our side" are the product of that twisted philosophy. Enough of them are lost causes that you can't actually turn things back.

The only way is to get them out of the system and elect people who clearly believe in the Democratic core principles and put their beliefs into action. Putting Dean into place was the first step. The last election cycle was enormously successful, electing a fair number of real Democrats. This year we elect bedrock values Democrat as President and get even more Representatives and Senators into place.

Some of the DINO-looking objects in Congress may not be completely lost causes. Put them beside some real Democrats and we could see the changes we seek. Hopefully most of them will come back to the good side as we reawaken their distant memory of why they got into public service. And a few others will play ball with us because they now realize it is a new game with a whole lot of grass roots power going on. It ain't just a few wackos at MoveOn.org anymore. It is fundamental change.

Let's not kid ourselves. The "half-life" of a beltway politician is about 10 years, so it may take us another 5 election cycles to really put the Democratic Party back on a footing of progressive values, but we are on our way.

Republicans.

The trick is to get folk to think in new ways, stop insisting on over-simplified mutally exclusive "opposites". People are NOT objects; they are events, in process. Our task should be to dance together.

I do not agree with your characterizations of the candidates. It is very interesting that Obama has been portrayed as more liberal, more progressive, despite any real evidence to back that up. This is in no way a criticism, just an observation.

I think the divisions are based much more on personality and style. Obama and Clinton have appealed to different kinds of people. Because there is so little to distinguish them in terms of record or platform, it became necessary to dramatize the differences in style. A result of this was that Obama somehow became more progressive in the minds of his supporters while Clinton became portrayed as conservative. This was even taken to the ludicrous extreme of painting her as a racist neo-con.

This graph from politicalcompass.org gives the real story about those that ran in this election, both Democratic and Republican. You can also take the test on this website that will show you where you land on this graph.



BTW, I am nowhere near either one of them.

Kucinich. It feels like he has one foot planted in each camp, the question is now is which way will he move when he becomes President. He will not be able to sustain this position throughout his Presidency. He will have to move one way or the other.