Many reasonable Dems are trying to save their party. I fear they'll fail.
In an "open letter" to their party last month, 17 DLC members led by Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana said Democrats had "to make clear to the American people that winning the war on jihadist extremism will be the Democratic Party's first priority this year and every year until the danger recedes."
Although they acknowledged that for many anti-war Democrats "Iraq remains a difficult issue," they said, "It is essential that partisan enmity not obscure America's vital interest in helping the newly elected Iraqi government succeed."
But party liberals last week dismissed the DLC's advice as warmed-over Republicanism. "I can't tell the difference between the positions the DLC puts forward and Republican policy," said Jack Blum, counsel for the liberal Americans for Democratic Action.
"I've read this before and I am not carried away by it. Nobody in the Democratic Party, and that most especially includes the liberals in the Americans for Democratic Action, opposes fighting the terrorists."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Don't forget the great conservative crackup!
Gil Smart, Lancaster County (Pa) Intelligencer
In the immediate aftermath of the November election, this newspaper did a story on a curious phenomenon.
President Bush, of course, won Lancaster County by a wide margin. But John Kerry did fairly well, and did very well in some areas that the average observer might have thought a tough sell for any Democratic candidate.
Specifically, the difference between Bush and Kerry in the School Lane Hills neighborhood just outside Lancaster was a mere 35 votes. And our story, done by my colleague Helen Colwell Adams, identified why this might have been; the demographics of the area have changed; the age makeup is evolving as well.
But the one line that I think got closest to the truth was this:
Observers suggest that School Lane Hills, dominated by country-club Republicanism, is a neighborhood more willing to vote Democrat when the choice is between a moderate Democrat and a social conservative Republican.
I’ve thought of this often in the months since, as social conservatives have sought to wield their reinvigorated clout, the culmination of which, of course, was the Terri Schiavo standoff.
Schiavo died Thursday, but the moralistic outrage of the cultural right, stoked by nearly two weeks of media saturation, guaranteed that neither she nor this issue would go quietly into the night.
Terri’s body was not yet cold before ethics-challenged Tom DeLay said that “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.” The Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition vowed to force Congress “to deal with out-of-control judges who rule without proper legal authority or ignore the law” \150 an interesting concept, in that the judges in this case specifically upheld the law, and it was the likes of Sheldon demanding they ignore it.
And this was but the tempered edge of the extremism.
Prior to Terri’s death, a North Carolina man was arrested after offering a $250,000 bounty on the head Michael Schiavo, Terri’s husband. Michael Schiavo’s family, in Levittown, Pa., got death threats.
Limbaugh, O’Reilly and Scarborough committed the usual verbal atrocities, saying that liberals “wanted” Terri Schiavo to die. Conservative radio babbler Hal Turner did them one better, saying that “I advocate the use of force to rescue Terri Schiavo from being starved to death. I further advocate the killing of anyone who interferes with such rescue.”
And what I want to know is this:
What do the Republicans who live in places like School Lane Hills think about this?
Because this is what conservatism has become in this country. No more is there a dedication to the traditional principles of limited government and fiscal restraint; as John Danforth, a former Republican senator and an Episcopal minister, noted in the New York Times last week, the Republican Party “has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.”
“As a senator,” wrote Danforth, “I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.”
And in this, I suspect we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the conservative movement. For American politics is cyclical; what goes up comes down. And the descent generally begins when extremists start calling the shots.
The Schiavo case was wrenchingly complex, with no easy answers. But to the extremists, the answers were easy. They always are.
And it’s only going to get worse. Danforth-esqe calls for moderation will fall on deaf ears. Which means moderates have a choice:
They might realize how little they have in common with those who would extend federal power into the very rooms where their family members lay dying, who would attack the very basis of constitutional liberty in order to achieve their “moral” ends.
Or they can cede the driver’s seat to the extremists, sit back and watch as they stand on the gas and aim the party, and maybe the country, for the cliff.
Neither portends well for the current Republican coalition. But in light of what’s happened the past few weeks, maybe what’s needed is a new coalition based upon reason and respect, rather than theological certitude and threats.
Post a Comment