Blog For Arizona

"I don't think we can be successful if we let ourselves go down that rat hole"

The DLC persists in thinking that they are the future of the Democratic party, when they are in fact, the past. A new piece on their national conference at which the mud was flying in only one direction, to the left. The DLC persists in disparaging and mischaracterizing our candidate. Their attacks assure me of one thing, they know fear. Dean should demand their fealty and support when he wins the primary. Then they will see how effective Dr. Dean's Virtual Doom Machine of Electoral Excellence is.

Most notably the DLC high muckitups did not have a Presidential candidate at their conference to tell them how wonderful they are. Just a little reminder to the DLC members, "You are not the Democratic party, you never will be." Those little people you denegrate as poor, less weel-heeled, colored, and culturally diverse are Democrats, too. If the DLC want to keep the name Democrat in their title, they need to support Dean once he wins the primary, no matter their misgivings; and cease their scare tactics and baseless attacks during the primary. If these irresponsible and false attacks on Dean's record continue into the General, the DLC may as well go join the GOP. Maybe we Democrats will take the much abused moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe, Lincoln Chafee, Jim Jeffords, and Main Street Partnership in exchange. At least they don't attack their own.

The DLC has plenty to blush about from a policy standpoint too, they support NAFTA, and the proposed FTA without union, wage or environmental codicils, which will accelerate the export of American jobs and depress real American wages ever further. People don't want it, but the corporations who pay the bills of the DNC in exile do. Or their support for WTO policies, demanding developing nations adopt austerity programs which touch off fiscal crisises that make it easy or Mulinationals to step in a pick up key investiments for a song. This, and other acts of corporate plunder are what the DNC has come to stand for. They wish to privatize Social Security, and retain many of the Bush tax cuts. Perhaps they really will be happier with Bush back in office. Prehaps that's what all these whiney attacks on Dean's success have really been about.

Dean wants to return the tax cuts from the weathiest americans to the least advantaged in the form a health care benefit. Dean would endeaver to control program growth vigorously to bring us back to fiscal health. He would fully fund Head Start, the Students with Disabilities Act, and kill No Child Left Behind in favor of local control. He would rework NAFTA and FTA to include minimum wages, organizing rights, and enviromental gaurantees. On most policies the DLC does not officially aggree with Dean. But they surely have many members who do. Let this be a plea to DLC members in and out of government. Consider what you really stand for, and see if you wouldn't rather stand with Dean.

Bush must be challenged on Iraq and terrorism, He is weaker than ever here and when his collapse comes it will be swift and terrible. The DLC says that you cannot have a viable candidate who cannot talk about security, but that is the center of Dean's message. Dean says "You can't be president without getting two things right; the economy and defence, and Bush has gotten both wrong." What I have come to suspect is that the DLC actually means, you cannot be elected unless you agree with Bush on security. That is exactly the position of the DLC's sweetheart in the race, Lieberman.

Dean can and will win this election, but with sniping from both the far-right and, unforegivably, from the less-far far-right DLC, he'll soon have no choice but to strike back harder at his Democratic critics. That could hurt the whole party. If the DLC pipes down and backs the nomination of the peoples' choice whomever he may be (or perhaps the DLC doesn't know that to have any influence they need people willing to vote for their candidates?), then Bush's self-immolation will be complete and any dogcatcher (so long as it's a dogcatcher with a strong defense policy...) could beat him.

BTW, "that rathole" is a swing to the left in the Democratic Party, that must make Dean's supporters and the majority of the Democratic party to the left of the DLC "the rats". That's how well they think of anyone who doesn't agree with them. The DLC have become the Right Wing of the Democratic party; weathy, well-organized, intolerant, distainful, arrogant, and unwilling to give on inch on whatever barely detectible and ever-shifting principes they stand.

We don't need the DLC anymore. Their electoral track record is unimpressive. Their candidates were a disaster in 2000. They lost the house in 1996 and their strategies lost the Senate twice, once in 2000, again in 2002. They are failures who have given away the entire government to the GOP within the space of four years. They won two terms as president at a time when the incumbent was ripe for the picking; big deal. They should save face by disbanding and packing it up before they do any further damage to the Democratic cause. It would be one thing if they confined their attacks to other parties, but when they attack their own, simply because he is doing well, they reveal that they are more concerned about their own power than the Democratic cause. They will, of course, argue that they are trying to save the party from itself; hogwash.

This is 2003, not any other date. This is Howard Dean, not any other candidate. This is a party turning against itself. If the other candidates prove themselves unable to beat Dean in the primary what makes the DLC think those candidates can beat Bush? Let the people decide who faces Bush, and let the DLC reconcile themselves to the fact that they DON'T know better than the voters.

Note: This post has been revised by the author. He was far too tired to be able to spell and form coherent sentences when he first posted it :P

posted by Michael Bryan @ 7/30/2003 05:04:00 AM