Give Me A Break! Stop The Party Infighting, Today...Right Now! [View All]

After 6 years of Bush and his authoritarian republican partisan practices, I thought it would be a no-brainer that Dems would come together for the good of the country and work together to take back the White House and this government.

Evidently some Dem candidates and their supporters, many on this site, did not get the message.

There is not a single announced Dem candidate for President that I cannot support if they get the Democratic nomination, and every one of them is preferable to any Republican candidate. Period.

However, I am old enough to remember past campaigns in which party infighting leading up to the selection of a Democrat nominee did a great deal of damage which Republicans used in the General Election to win.

Do we want another 4 years of Republican rule after Bush leaves office? If your answer is yes, then go ahead and attack one another. Candidates and their supporters.

Candidates, we all know the value of campaign dollars in the coming presidential election, but we must put the needs of the people and the Dem Party first in our common goal of winning in 2008. Stop the sniping and start putting out your ideas for our consideration. Nothing is more important in this time of great peril. And BTW, winning the Dem nomination at all costs is not the same thing as winning in 2008 --remember that.

Candidate supporters, we know you are committed to supporting your particular preference for the Democratic nominee. However, if you cannot commit to supporting in the general election any one of the presidential candidates who gets the Dem nomination, then there is something terribly wrong.

I prefer John Edwards as my choice for the Democratic nominee for President. That does not mean I will not support Clark, Clinton, Obama, Kucinich, etc. if they get the nomination. And I do not need to tear down any one of them to make my choice more likely to win.

Recently I have noticed a concerted effort to spread attacks against one or more Dem nominees on this supposedly progressive site. Some posters here have wrongly alleged Edwards is another Bush who wants to be 'another f****** dictator', and that he is promoting an attack on Iran. Hillary Clinton has been referred to as a republican in Democratic Party clothing. Obama has been alleged to be a liar, about his family, name, religious upbringing, etc.

You can have an opinion, and expressing it is protected under the Constitution we all prize. But if you want more of what Bush has given us for the last 6 years, then go ahead and make erroneous and unsupported allegations like these against the Dem candidates who do not happen to be your first choice. Hear that?.... THose are Republicans and their supporters applauding your efforts! And the MSM is ready to repeat it over and over again.

We need to stop this right now. We need to present the American people with a united Democratic Party, and we need to rally around ideas for fixing the mess Bush has given us. Yes, we need to actively debate ideas and solutions --that is a far cry from attacking one another because their ideas are not the same as our ideas, or the ideas of our preferred candidate.

A full and hardy debate within the Democratic Party over the best ideas to include in our platform is good, and the public will reward us at the polls with their votes. If we keep up these attacks WITHIN the Democratic Party, the American public will wonder if there is any difference between the 'real' Democratic Party and the picture that Republicans paint of it.

So stop it, and stop it right now. Before you post your next uninformed unsupported opinionated attack against another Democratic candidate for President, stop and think. Did the candidate being attacked really say or do that which I am accusing them? Am I relying on someone else's unsupported opinion? Will it help Democrats take back the government of the people in 2008?

If not, then don't do it. Let's all commit to changing things for the better through positive action, and quit the practice of handing our opponents the most damaging ammunition they could never acquire on their own --a record of Democrats attacking Democrats.

It is not 'what can the Democratic Party do for a candidate and their supporters?' but rather 'What can the Democratic Party do for our country?' The people deserve nothing less, and we will never stand taller in their view if we keep this in mind during the upcoming primary season.