Dems are out of touch with the poor/working class.

My letter to Massachusetts state party chair Johnson.

Dems are out of touch with the poor/working class.

My US representative has not held a town hall meeting in my area in months. However, during this time I have been invited to several fundraisers.

Damned if I am going to pay $100 for breakfast and access. My rep has not responded to several offers to coordinate a town hall meeting in my area. He has not even responded to send a staffer to speak at a town committee meeting.

Damned if I can afford even more to attend the annual Roosevelt dinner where every elected Dem in the state will be attending. See the list of prices, it is outrageous. www.massdems.org/docs/replycard.pdf -

Minimum is $200 - maximum $5000!. Note at the $2000 & $5000 levls, one gets to attend a "special reception" -WOOHOO! What planet to they think we live on? Maybe rubbing elbows with Joe Kennedy will entice some, but that does not fit my lifestyle, thus these politicians are out of touch with my reality.

I have heard that the median income of dem presidential nomination convention delegates was higher than GOP delegates?

Get real, dems. Hold your high priced fundraisers if you must, but for every one you do, offset with monthly (or more frequent) open-access town meetings.

Your money-grabbing is driving the poor and disenfranchised away. Remember, those are the ones you will be begging for votes. It is much better to reach out through town halls throughout the year than through mass-media in November. Build personal realtionships and perhaps you would not need to be chasing so much money. Implement publicly financed campaigns and again you would not need to chase money.

p.s. I don't know about you, but as I cannot attend the even the minimum ($200), I will be joining many others from the grass roots at the Iraq teach-in at Faneuil Hall that same night.

between the repubs and the dems. Members of both parties are only in politics for themselves. They have nothing to offer us, the populace, and they don't see anything wrong with selling their bodies and souls to whoever is willing to pay. At least your ordinary hooker on the street takes on every customer who comes along, sort of an equal opportunity whore. Our 'representatives' in the government don't want a damn thing to do with the poor and middle class, but go for the highest bidder, the corporated john. I guess you'd call them special interest whores. And the special interest part can be represented by dollar signs.

didn't we?

isn't with the Dems, but the 'people' in the 'party.'

Lay the blame where it belongs.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. has two meetings here in the near future.

All are free/open to the public.

Enough said.

The whoring for cash from yuppies and corporations and their disdain for the traditional working class party base have just about killed the party. People are voting pubbie for those tax cuts. The Dems have offered them nothing but the business as usual that is killing them, and they know it.

The Dems need to hear from their base. They need to hear what offshoring is doing to us, what depressed wages are doing to us, what insurance company greed and lack of access to heathcare are doing to us. Until they hear this stuff and address it, they're going to stay an irrelevant minority party, deservedly out of power at all levels.

Pandering to yuppies and going "me too" to most of the destructive GOP policies are losing propositions for the party. Because the party movers and shakers are themselves wealthy men, they seem to have no clue that most of us are NOT benefiting from GOP rule and only focus on the idiotic GOP social issues.

Social issues aren't enough when your base has been under attack from the longest period of sustained class warfare in the country's history. If they don't wake up, they deserve to be relegated to the trash can of history.

However if they don't get the money from the wealthy, how are they going to advertise on tv? Obviously, we won't get any meaningful coverage from the Republican-owned media.
I guess all the concerned citizens are going to have to rise up, turn off their tvs, and their pcs, and have some community events which captures the attention of all those people who have given up on our democracy and those who are dissatisfied with the current administration. If one person says no, then call someone else.

After expenses, I'll bet the party doesn't get much from the $200 minimum. If the party can get people to attend at those prices that's fine with me. Getting the message out costs money. I think you really underestimate this crucial problem. The dilemma is that the Repugs can out fund raise us almost any time--they pander to the big money groups. Until we have publicly financed campaigns (don't hold your breath) we have to fight fire with fire.

I understand your point too. Your idea for more town hall meetings and time spent with the average citizen is great advice. What I don't see is how you get most average citizens to attend the meetings. What's your idea to get meaningful participation?

bushco has had a free ride..no real war opposition..dems are enablers and these punch drunk on power repukes will booz along forever..
then when the regime fails..repukes will blame those libral dems..

Truth is there are few if any liberals left in D.C. the pols hijacked both parties for their own GREED ..

Its time to coordinate with PDA, Act, MoveON etc and get them working on the same page otherwise it will take 50 years to fix this mess. Every Democrat member of Congress should put on notice that he or she will be challenged in the primaries.

Two points. First, it's important to distinguish between Democratic politicians (particularly DLC-types), on the one hand, and rank-and-file Democrats, on the other. There's no doubt that the former are, as a whole, becoming increasingly out of touch with the poor they presume to represent, but I don't think the latter should be painted with this brush, since many of the latter are the poor.

Second, I think it is a huge mistake to overlook to extent to which rank-and-file Democrats are at fault (at least indirectly) for the current state of affairs. Yes, many if not most Democratic politicians are becoming increasingly out of touch with the poor and increasingly in touch with their corporate paymasters, but that, I respectfully submit, is an inevitable byproduct of the fact that rank-and-file Democrats have been out of touch with each other -- largely because of TV-addiction -- for decades. Their lack of involvement between campaign seasons is what created a power vacuum in the first place, so it was simply a matter of time before corporate elites (in the form of the Democratic "Leadership" Council) took full advantage of this vaccum.

I have to get up early, so in the interest of time, and to give everyone a clear idea of what I mean, allow me to post the following two excerpts:

"In politics a person is not a citizen if the person's only function is to vote. Voters choose people who, in turn, act like citizens. They argue. They establish the forms within which people live their lives. They make politics. The people who merely vote for them merely make politicians. People who argue for their positions in a town meeting are acting like citizens. People who simply drop scraps of paper in a box or pull a lever are not acting like citizens; they are acting like consumers picking between prepackaged items. They had nothing to do with the items. All they can do is pick what is. They cannot actively participate in making what should be." -- Karl Hess, Community Technology, p. 10

"J. Hunter O'Dell, one of King's early lieutenants in the movement, recognized the fixation with media developing among civil rights activists and lamented the consequences.

"'We all recognize that technologically this is a media age,' O'Dell wrote. 'But it was disastrous for us to rely primarily upon these corporate forms of mass communication to get our message and analysis out to the public....In the end, it means a new kind of addiction to media rather than being in charge of our own agenda and relying on mass support as our guarantee that ultimately the news-covering apparatus must give recognition to our authority.'

"O'Dell's point is that the civil rights movement acquired its 'authority' to articulate large political aspirations, not because network television came to Selma or Birmingham, but from the hundreds and even thousands of meetings in black churches, week after week, across the South over many years. The dramatic spectacles that appeared on TV were the product of those mobilizing sermons and dialogues, not the other way around.

"The movement's organizing processes, O'Dell noted, contained all of the functional elements of a responsible political organization -- mass education and communication as well as continuing accountability between the leaders and the supporting throngs. 'The power of any movement for democracy,' O'Dell emphasized, 'is always dependent on such reciprocal relations between the mass of people and their leadership.'

"These elements are missing, it seems, from much of the irregular citizens' politics that tries to emulate King's heroic model. Activists hold press conferences or arrange dramatic events to prod the political system. But patiently built reciprocal relationships between leaders and followers, the laborious tasks of education and communication, are often not even attempted. To be blunt, there is a hollowness behind many of the placards and politicians know it.

"Succeeding generations of political activists, it often seems, copied the glamorous surfaces of the civil rights legacy -- the hot moments of national celebrity so well remembered -- while skipping over the hard part, the organizational sinew that was underneath." -- William Greider, Who Will Tell the People, p. 206

Todd Altman