Sometimes It Feels Like We Have Left The Party-Or Is It That The

Party Has Left Us?

I posted this to Obama's comments about Iran and thought this would be a good topic to hear from those out there who feel like our party is letting us down..

a long time ago, and treat ordinary working people like something they scraped off the bottoms of their Italian loafers after a walk in the park.

Contrast that with the GOP, who learned a long time ago to speak the lingo of the working class churchgoer and who offered them (bait and switch) tax cuts.

The DLC offered us nothing but the business as usual that has been killing us.

It's sad to see somebody who started out with so much promise get sucked into the DLC inner circle. I sincerely hope he wakes up. I also doubt his ambition will allow him to.

The Dem leadership will have to return to the roots of the party or die.

The wealthy already have the Republican party doing a good job of stealing, lying and worse, to enrich them further with less effort.

They really, really don't even want the Dems, other than keeping them close enough to fold into the R party, or to actually weaken the strength of the Dems.

I don't like everything the Democratic Party does, and I don't expect to. I grew up in such an overwhelmingly conservative place that in 1984 in my government class at junior college there was a discussion of how many people knew someone who was voting for Mondale. I'm not kidding, literally there was me, and there was another woman someone swore they knew somewhere on campus--and that was it. Two people, out of, I'd guess, 800 students that this group would have known.

So when I first moved to Dallas, it seemed more liberal, and when I moved to Austin, I felt like I was in the land Shangri-la.

Because of that, I'm just happy to meet anyone who is a Democrat. To me, we may all disagree on the nuances of the issues, but we agree on what we DON'T want.

And this feeling carries over to the party. I don't expect the party to agree with me on everything. That's undemocratic, with a little or a big d. But I know where they want to go, and it's the same direction I want to go (excluding Zell Miller). They may not want to go as far as I do, but as far right wing as we are, even a group heading towards the middle is heading the same direction as me--left. I'll ride with them until we get to the middle, then I'll pass them up.

So I don't hold it against the party that it has different agendas on some issues than me. I don't hold it against the party that it has to win to have any power. I don't hold it against them that they have to compromise on some issues to get even a little bit of their agenda done somewhere else. I don't hold it against them that they try to convince moderates to vote for them--we will never get anything we want if we don't get moderates to vote for us. It's the overall goal of the party I'm interested in.

And that's where I feel a lot of Democrats let me down. 2000 was it in microcosm. Nader (I'm not after a flame fest, I'm using him to prove a point) convinced some Democrats that it was better to vote for Nader, knowing this could put Bush in power, than to vote for Gore, who only agreed with Nader on maybe 90% of the issues. I don't believe Nader cost us the election (yes, I know the numbers), but it's his attitude I despised. I had worked long and hard to get to the point we were in 2000. We had come off the horendous conservative era of Reagan. We had had a moderate, left-leaning president who would have leaned more left given the chance. We had turned back the best the Right could throw at us, from impeachment to slander to Newt Gingrich, and we had not only defeated them, but we had shown the nation that we could move to the left and prosper. Gore was the payoff. Gore was the one to take us out of the middle and off into the wonderful, happy land of Left. He might not have gotten us all the way. He might not have gotten us very far at all. But he would have gotten us CLOSER than Bush would have, and did. And still, that piece of shit Nader wanted Bush instead.

The people who abandon the party because they can't get their way are the ones I feel betrayed me and my ideals. The Democrats in 2000 had to move closer to the middle to make up for the liberals who threatened (though really didn't in the end) to abandon them. In 2004, the liberals came through. We were all united for that one. But again I see us splitting apart.

To me, what we oppose is bigger than what we stand for at this moment. We need to beat Bush. Everyone has different ideas. I give a lot of leeway, until someone proves they have a different agenda. That's a short list for me. When someone disappoints me on one or two issues, I chalk it up to constituency pressure, and let it go.

Now, if we were in control, I would choose sides within the party. Until then, though, I'm more a Democrat than a liberal.

And I've heard all the speeches about there only being one party and the DLC is really Republican and both parties are slaves to corporations. I'm way beyond that.

and the sheeple who follow them have driven the rest of us out

the Democratic sheeple are just as bad if not worse than the Republican sheeple

at least some of the Republican sheeple can fall back on their excuse of their fundie faith

It's time for each of us to vote for what we believe in. The politicians chase the votes. Every time we give them a vote after they betray us in the name of holding on to their precious seats we should withhold our votes. Hence, if you're against the "war" in Iraq, or the "Patriot Act", or whatever else, vote against those things and against the politicians who support them.

Until then they will continue to follow the course of least resistance as they have done to date.

Politicians don't lead. We, the voters, do.