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Edited on Thu Sep-08-11 04:33 PM by Ken Burch
There really aren't that many people whose views are truly "middle-of-the-road", truly equidistant between the Right and the Left. There are just people who are naturally politically attentive, on the one hand, and those who haven't felt the need to be as attentive, on the other.
The way you win the less-political is by nominating a candidate who looks like "a leader". One of the best ways to demonstrate leadership is to actually HAVE strong convictions and to defend them, damn the cost. Our party never really tries that, for some reason. And that's why we usually lose the presidency.
Mondale didn't passionately defend any core values. Neither did Dukakis. Clinton won mainly on personal charisma and a willingness to stand up to personal attacks(which strongly suggests he could have been elected as a progressive if he'd defended progressive ideas or the rights and interests of those who aren't rich with the same intensity with which he defended himself against attacks on his defects as a human being). Gore didn't look like he had core values in 2000(I think we all know now that he'd have won solidly if he'd sounded as "Inconvenient" on the stump as he later did in the movie). Kerry didn't sound like he had core values(he had sounded that way when he ran for the Senate in Mass.)
The other way you win the less-attentive is by making a case for why they should be attentive...or working with the case that reality is making for us. The post-2009 behavior of the corporate class is causing the scales to fall from the eyes of millions. Our party needs to trust in that trend, and use it to our advantage.
The issue now is...who are the winners in the status quo and who are the losers. None of the "winners" are going to vote for us, no matter what...they simply aren't interested in the tiny number of things they might be liberal on to put their precious tax cuts at risk)...but we COULD win if we mobilized the ones who've been the victims in the current set-up and actually committed to fighting for a society in which they wouldn't be disrespected, disdained, and discarded... This group includes a larger and larger number of people who might once have regarded themselves as "centrist"-if we sent the clear message "we will fight for a society in which you aren't just cast away and left to die...a society in which you matter as much as any CEO" we could win. Why not try? Is there some reason this party shouldn't embrace a NON-masochistic, non-defeatist politics?
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