"Five Reality Checks For Democrats: Dump Kofi, Moore, Dopes"

A blockbuster by Tish Durkin at The New York Observer, yesterday:

.... Bush is not an idiot. Kofi Annan is not an oracle. Michael Moore is not Everyman. Women are not ovaries with feet. And to be an American is not an embarrassment.

Lest this sound like gloating, I confess to having a pronoun problem here, and will hereby switch from "you" to "we." I voted for John Kerry. As a liberal separation-of-church-and-state type, I don’t like the idea of a President who owes his political life to a conservative religious base. I can’t fathom George Bush’s policies on the economy and the environment. As for Iraq, while I find nothing of genius in the Democrats’ prescriptions at this point, I find astonishing the idea that the administration’s performance there is, on balance, something to reward rather than something to punish.

Curiously, then, it is not the party I voted against that is driving me nuts right now. It is the party I voted for. It’s the same feeling that I got about the Democrats after 2000: I agree with them, but I can’t stand them, in the exact same way I can’t stand anyone who would rather whine than shine.

Now as then, Democratic partisans seem to be more interested in coming off as wronged rather than defeated. We have lost an election — and so far, we are acting as if we have lost a contact lens, crawling around the red parts of the map in search of the speck of strategy that would have turned it blue. We are all set to keep on ridiculing the President’s syntax, when it is our message that no one can make sense of. The party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. has turned itself into the political equivalent of the woman who responds to her husband’s leaving her by living in her bathrobe for years: It’s O.K. for her to be miserable, so long as enough people around her know that he’s the bad guy.

In short, the Democratic Party is losing the American people — and so far, we aren’t even looking for them....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/16/04 07:07:59 AM
Categorized as Political.