I am getting sick of the DLC!

I am sick to death of the DLC and those who still think we should play at the middle. I really am. It is astounding that there are still people who think that Kerry and the Democratic leadership were right to play it safe. And it's been a couple of days since the election (!!!). The only time the DLC was useful was when Clinton was president but now that Clinton is gone and now that we have lost the last three elections, it is time for a new direction for the Democratic Party.

Don't you middle of the roader DLC types get it? Because of your tactics ....WE LOST! It is time to move aside and let the fighters take over the party. Otherwise, the Democratic Party will no longer exist!



John

because we weren't liberal enough?

CO, Ohio, definitely NV, for example.

on the marriage amendment.

Think. We won the 18-30 age group, this is good and we want to keep doing that. We're going to do it by getting more conservative?

If all that it takes to zoom up turnout is to have a real liberal candidate, Kucinich should have swept the primaries.

young voters have to be brought into the Dem party, and I don't mean by having Bruce Springsteen on stage. I'll probably take heat for this, but Kucinich is not the most appealing candidate I've ever seen, nor was he really considered to be a heavy hitter politically. There is more to gaining support than having positions - charismatic he is not. Dems overall have little credibility as true liberals, and if you take away Kucinich's anti-war positions, I'm not sure he is what the young want - which is libertarianism and leftover generation X issues (overgeneralizing of course - there are also many RW kids).

Dean is not a good case. The Iowa caucus is not a good place to expect a raft of first-time young voters, primaries in general are not where you going to see people breaking their political cherries - and after that he was reeling politically. If he had risen to the frontrunner that might have changed.

Work has to be done, and I just don't see much room left for movement to the right. Ya, I see the exit polls, and we don't have to be stupid about it and just go all-out radical left. I'm not talking tetonic shifts here, much of our message is fine. But if we stay moving right and compete with the big bad Repug machine that we can't and don't want to out-God we will lose, while their repressive social agenda creates discontents that currently fall into the cracks.

Libertarianism, economic populism, and a meaningful social safety net.

mainstream media blackout.

Dean supporters complain that their guy was shafted by the media. That may be true, but he was at least mentioned and actually received a lot of favorable press in the summer 0f 2003.

I heard about Kucinich's first visit to the Twin Cities through a poster on a telephone pole. Eight hundred people showed up and were blown away. I was sufficiently blown away to join the volunteer committee, which was headed by people who had never been politically active before, although we received a lot of good advice from experienced DFL activists.

Before the second visit, we nagged the Minneapolis Star-Tribune into covering his appearance at a local high school. We also tried to get TV coverage for the rally, which attracted anywhere from 1600-2000 enthusiastic fans, and although TV cameras showed up, none of the local stations ran a story. Instead, they led with a story about a scandal involving a small town sheriff.

The third rally atttracted 2500 people. In the end, with almost no mainstream publicity, our group of volunteers (and I was among the least of many) managed to win Dennis 17% of Minnesota's caucus votes, 27% in Minneapolis. He even won a few precincts in the Twin Cities.

Wherever he was able to get well-organized local volunteers, he did well: Hawaii, Maine, New Mexico, Washington, even Utah, where he got 7%.

In none of these places did he get any respect from the mainstream media. Even during the first ten-person "debate," he received only 5 minutes to speak, compared to an average of 9 minutes for the other candidates.

The New York Times was one of the worst offenders. Even before a single vote was cast in the Iowa caucuses (where Dennis broke the 15% threshold for delegates in many precincts and got significant but lower numbers in an unknown number of cases), he was dismissed as "unelectable." In its comparative articles on various issues, the NYT would offer detailed comparisons of what Kerry, Lieberman, Gephardt, Dean, Clark, and Edwards said about health care, the military, taxes, the environment, and every other conceivable issue, but they would leave Kucinich, Sharpton, and Mosely-Brown to the last paragraph, where they would give one-sentence summaries of their positions. "Dennis Kucincich favors single-payer health care." "Dennis Kucinich wants to cut the Pentagon budget."

Even when listing candidates' schedules, they left DK out.

They gave him detailed coverage on two occasions: once when he unwisely accepted a blind date that some supporters had arranged for him (leading the public to believe that this was HIS publicity stunt) and on another occasion when a reporter, whose name wasn't but should have been Muffy McShoppingmall, followed along on one of his spins through rural Iowa. The whole tone of the story was, "Oh, look, he's talking about family farms and the environment and peace. My God, I thought hippies were out of fashion."

Yet most people who actually saw and met Dennis just loved him. When I explained his ideas to people who hadn't seen him, they were almost always impressed, unless they were DLC types. However, what I heard over and over was, "I love Dennis, and he most closely matches my own views, but he can't win."

As I have thought about this, I'm convinced that Dennis had to be marginalized and tagged as a loser because his ideas were too threatening to the establishment. You can't give publicity to a candidate whose ideas are going to piss off the health insurance companies, the Pentagon, big agribusiness, and big oil.

It doesn't matter that these ideas make ordinary people stop and think. It doesn't matter that their faces light up and they say, "Hell, yes!"

"We don't dare piss off the corporations," is the motto of the media establishment.

Otherwise, it's difficult to explain why the mainstream media tagged Kucinich with the "fringe candidate" and "loser" label during the spring and summer of 2003 when none of the candidates had really gotten started yet.

You're right, there was a deliberate passing over of Kucinich by the media, and that played a big part. I guess that's what I'm saying is we need to get rid of that and allow the Kucinich's of the world room to breathe. In some paralell world where his positions were more generally in line with the overall party platform, that would be less likely to happen.

But at the same time, Kucinich did lack the gravitas to command support. Not so much on the ideas front or as a person, but having never won a statewide election makes you a bit of national question mark.

Plus bringing in young voters is tricky. They are fickle and apolitical - you still have to fashion your message at the whole of the voting public unless you feel like getting only 12%. Trick number two is once you have young voters in the Dem party you have to keep them as they grow up - voters get more conservative as they age.

Why "finge candidate" and "loser"? Get Kucinich into the Gov chair and watch those monikers disappear. More to it than positions and hand shaking.

support for a liberal candidate.

-----------------------------------------------------------
FIGHT! Take this country back one town and state at a time!
http://www.geocities.com/greenpartyvoter/electionreform.htm

If the DNC was not 100% positive they already had the election won, they MUST go after 9/11 and close the "terra" gap.

9/11 happened on Dubya's watch, an attack of this magnitude hasnt happened on our soil since Pearl Harbor. The Democrats did not bring this up, even when there was absolutely GOLDEN footage of this
"strong leader against terra" reading a children's book for 7 minutes after the worst attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor.

I also suggested we use the clip of Dubya calling the rich elites "his base" from the Michael Moore movie. "Oh no, we can't use that" Ridiculous.

We get our ass kicked because we lose the media game. How many incredibly outlandish ads did the Bush campaign run? Where were the same ads from the Kerry campaign? Occasionally we replied to a nasty ad, but we were NEVER on the offensive.

That stategy flat out sucks...unless your absolutely convinced you are FAR ahead in the polls.

candidate. The WORST president in history with the WORST record ever and we don't discuss it, confront it, 24/7. 'This preisdent lied to the people and now it's time he apologizes and admits his lies'...presto we win. 'Mr. President you lied to the American people' Calmly stating it every day. 'This war was wrong and I should not have voted for it and will work every day to BRING OUR TROOPS home' presto!! we win. Instead Mr Kerry refers to Bush as 'a good man trying to do good things' in the last 48 hours 'I like him'

Kerry & Crew COULD NOT make this a referendum on the last 4 years because they ARE NOT SMART ENUFF TO DO THE JOB.

Sickening...just sickening

Did we see the same campaign?

Now the same idiots who supported the Angry Man are going to try to spin this into "Kerry took the high road and lost." You people never stop spinning the same record, even when you have to break it to get the sound you want.

'moral values'.

So the Dems will then be anti-abortion and anti-gay?

I'm tired of this "we're the me too party: shit.

Yes, we can spend properly.

Yes, we can sanely manage the military.

But we need to refute repuke points and out them in the process. Kerry could have wiped up the place with Bush's bald two-facedness but didn't even begin to. That's a reason why he lost.

:wtf:


This is too much to bare. If that happens, then all of those progressives and lefties in the party should just pack up and leave the party.


Hell. They might as well merge the Democratic Party with the GOP if they do that. I am sick as it is.


John

stand its relationship to the DNC. Who died and appointed it God anyway?

but the Dem pollsters should be run out of town on a rail. Who collects information that would have us not responding to SBL and talking about Mary Cheney in two debates?

What did we do in influence the electorate other than rally speeches, some ads in specific markets, and an occasional TV appearance? It's like we were electing Truman.

Bitching about them isn't going to make them go away. They're the corporatist wing of the party, and they're awash in dirty, sweaty corporate money. Bags and bags of it.

Want to marginalize them? Organize! Support local and state progressive candidates. Organize grassroots supporters. Become a bigger force within the Democratic Party than the DLC is.

Bitching about them will accomplish none of this.

and the dems have to also. I say bullshit.

attempts (successful as they were) to bring down Howard Dean. We don't need them. Never have. Go away DLC.

Within a week, From, Marshall and the rest of those neocon pieces of shit will have some article up claiming that this fraudulent (whether it can be proven or not,it was) election was "good" for the Democratic party, just like they claimed the 1994 fiasco was.

The DLC have done their jobs well. They have now officially destroyed any power the Democrats had on a national level and the next 4 years, if not the literal end of civilization itself, will definitely be a right wing fascist nightmare which Hitler and Stalin would be proud of.

Thanks a lot, you traitorous fucking cowards.

exterminated!!!!:nuke:

They always love to point to Clinton winning in '92 and '96 and claiming it was because of his "centrist" politics and his being a southerner.

Clinton won in '92 because of Perot draining votes from Poppy.

Clinton won in '96 because the pugs ran a centrist corpse that turned off the conservative base.

In reality, the "centrist" stance promoted by the DLC has led the Democratic Party to be a party without principles or ideals. One that stands for nothing but the ambition to win at any price.

The DLC should either go home to the Republicans where they belong, or just go away. They are destroying the Democratic Party from the inside.

The DLC is bunk. We're running right AND losing ground in the South. Best that strategy gets us is some one term people while the Repugs change faces.

Time to say fuck that and start running on liberal principles. We'll lose some races for a few years, which we're doing anyway. We need to be more libertarian and present an option to fundy RW control your life, people issues (health care, education) and above all run on economic populism, reign in the corporations.

who would ever heard of it???? And the DLC acts as though IT made Clnton.

Besides, Kerry wasn't really the DLC candidate anyways, Lieberman was.

Gore and Clinton won.

Plus, you can't name one state where we would have won by being "more left" or whatever you think is opposite of the DLC.

The thing I will agree with is that they are condescending and dismissive, and need to get some tact and help people understand where they're coming from. But then, when's the last time you've read ndol.org.

...in the polls that were coming out during the primaries.

I don't have to read www.godhatesfags.com more than once to know Phelps is full of shit, do I?

:hi:

how did they get to somehow serve as spokespeople for the Dem party?

WHo knew?

They control the purse of the Democratic Party. Party money was spent to torpedo Kucinich and Dean during the primaries. The DLC/DNC collect the money from the BIG BUSINESS Corporate donors, and set the Party agenda to accommodate BIG CORPORATIONS.

The Democratic Party solution to the jobs crisis and NAFTA was more Corporate Welfare!

If you are tired of a party that values Corporate Contributions over Human and Worker Rights, go here:

http://www.pdamerica.org/

I will be working for reform within the Party with these guys! I no longer send money to the DNC/DLC. My time, money, sweat, and blood will go ONLY to the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party!
An alliance between the Congressional Black Caucus and the Progressive Democrats of America could be an agenda setter for the future of our Party!

by attacking each other. Clinton was great because he unified the party. We need a populist who unites the party. We need to talk about how our policy are rooted in moral values. This doesn't mean moving to the right. This means talking in language that appeals to the small towns as well as the big cities.