Rice sticks to your Colin

-The prospects of a reconciliatory second term for President Bush are mixed at best. While Ashcroft is set to be replaced by a less zealous (and less white) Alberto Gonzales, Secretary Powell, once thought the Spock to Dubya's Kirk, has been asked not to ask to ask to be asked not to leave and is set to be replaced by the more hawkish (and more black) Condy Rice. While Rice has a lot of things going for her, I can't help but think of Andrew Johnson replacing Abe Lincoln at the table with the confederates, of Clement Atlee subbing for Winston Churchill at Potsdam, of Ben Affleck stepping in for Harrison Ford in The Sum of All Fears. . .

AND ANOTHER THING. . . We may like Ryan White's blog, but I can't help take issue with some of what he had to say about "Why Kerry Lost". Now, I am not picking on Mr. White (and I'm sure that even if I were he would be more than capable of defending himself), but I think his pathos is emblematic of much of what's going on in the Democratic party right now. White's analysis, though in his own words "half-assed", is still as good as any unpaid pundit out there blogging. But what worries me isn't the analysis, it's the ideology, or rather the strange quasiology that seems to occupy an awkward space between pragmatism and utopianism.

White says one of the factors contributing to Bush's victory was the surprising salience of 'Value' issues among voters, but that "moral issues does [sic] not necessarily translate into gay rights, abortion, et. al., so there's no need for Democrats to move to the right on these issues." That the first response White ponders is a shift in stance is very telling of the Democratic condition! White goes on to say "we can't simply run away from moral issues. When we use doublespeak and beat around the bush when asked a question about this, we look like we're hiding something. We need to adopt a consistent stance and stick with it." Look like you're hiding something? Look? And does the need to adopt a consistent stance and stick with it imply that hitherto the Democrats have had an inconsistent stance (or no stance at all) that they have not stuck with?

The troubling implications continue, as White bemoans the lack of a "reliable" Democratic base, and considers labor unions, minorities, Hollywood, and college students among the available options. What a motley crew, indeed. It seems the only thing these potential bases have in common is the general inclination to like happiness and sunshine (and, of course, scab-busting).
Maybe the debasement (if you'll forgive the pun) of the Democratic party has something to do with another problem White mentions, namely the Dems' complete and utter lack of message. White's got a solution, though: "We shouldn't be defending the status quo and government programs when we're shut out of them." Instead "We need to say we're the outsiders, like "the people," fighting against those fat-cat bureaucrats."

I'm going to let that one sink in for a moment...

And then ask, without further comment on the almost inexplicable disingenuousness of those comments, exactly what there IS to the Democratic party that's WORTH saving?

I'm inclined to think very little. The Party revealed this election year is shallow, aimless, cannibalistic (just look at the job they did on Dean), and worst of all spiteful. Even assuming there is any progressiveness or substantive idealism remaining in the American Left, I find it difficult to see how it can be reconciled with these, the lesser demons of your nature. Mr. White puts the "sharp" in sharpton on this point. He recognizes acutely that the punditnistas and backpackerazzi who spoke for the Left in 2004 are condescending and alienating. It's like my uncle Richie told me when I was twelve, something I've never forgotten: "Dan," he said. "Nobody likes a smartass." The widespread unpopularity of this blog can attest to that fact, but so too can the "impact" of the Michael Moores and Jon Stewarts of the world on Kerry/Edwards 2004.

What's needed is that the Democrats do more than just "say" or pretend to be the "insurgent" party, but for fuckssake actually BE the insurgent party. Too risky, you say? Too marginalizing you say? Impossible to do while surviving in the two-party system, you say? Maybe so, but either way the Democratic party is dying, bleeding to death not from the heart, as conservatives may have suspected, but from the balls, or rather, where the balls used to be before the Blue-Dogs and New Democrats blew them off. When will LIBERALS learn that the Democratic party is NOT your party, that your party has been TAKEN from you by the likes of Harold Ford Jr.? When will DEMOCRATS learn that Bill Clinton was the exception and not the rule, that your "centrist" rhetoric has failed to pick up control of any branch of the federal government since 1992? (Even in 2000, with the notoriously stellar American economy and jizz-stained coattails of W.J. Clinton). The third-way was a hoax, Mr. White. The method of either swallowing Republican issues as your own, or else defining your agenda as vaguely opposed to what the Right supports, is not going to cut it anymore. And a party that believes only in its own survival is no party at all.

Mind you, all this comes from an embittered quasi-libertarian Bull-Moose perspective that, for all its fervor, is less-than thoroughly grounded in pragmatics. But perhaps an excess of pragmatism is the Democrat's greatest problem. I am no happier than Mr. White about Bush's victory, but when I looked to Kerry I saw little more than a rough outline of a man and a curious blurriness where the convictions were supposed to be. I can respect Howard Dean, Al Sharpton, and Ralph Nader, about whom the fact that they actually believe in something does little to mitigate the capital-crimes of "unelectability" and "spoiling". What is there to respect in most of the Democrats on the hill? Oh yeah, they're not Bush.

-Publius Fosterius