Please read the following excerpt which I posted as a reply in the Michael Moore giant thread in GD
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/07/0082562 Barack Hoover Obama:
The best and the brightest blow it again
By Kevin Baker
skip
More frustrating has been the torpor among Obama’s fellow Democrats. One might have assumed that the adrenaline rush of regaining power after decades of conservative hegemony, not to mention relief at surviving the depredations of the Bush years, or losing the vestigial tail of the white Southern branch of the party, would have liberated congressional Democrats to loose a burst of pent-up, imaginative liberal initiatives.
Instead, we have seen a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places stepping forward to tell us what is off the table. Every week, there is another Max Baucus of Montana, another Kent Conrad of North Dakota, another Ben Nelson of Nebraska, huffing and puffing and harrumphing that we had better forget about single-payer health care, a carbon tax, nationalizing the banks, funding for mass transit, closing tax loopholes for the rich. These are men with tiny constituencies who sat for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note, who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not concentrating enough on reducing the budget deficit, or for “trying to do too much,” as if he were as old and as indolent as they are.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—yet another small gray man from a great big space where the tumbleweeds blow—seems unwilling to make even a symbolic effort at party discipline. Within days of President Obama’s announcing his legislative agenda, the perpetually callow Indiana Senator Evan Bayh came forward to announce the formation of a breakaway caucus of fifteen “moderate” Democrats from the Midwest who sought to help the country make “the changes we need” but “make sure that they’re done in a practical way that will actually work”—a statement that was almost Zen-like in its perfect vacuousness. Even most of the Senate’s more enlightened notables, such as Russ Feingold of Wisconsin or Claire McCaskill of Missouri or Sherrod Brown of Ohio, have had little to contribute beyond some hand-wringing whenever the idea of a carbon tax or any other restrictions on burning coal are proposed.
President Obama, with a laudable respect for the separation of powers, has left the details and even the main tenets of his agenda to be worked out by these same congressional Democrats. This approach looks like an exercise in democracy drawn from his days as a community organizer, the sort of strategy that helps a neighborhood to decide whether it wants, say, a health clinic or a youth center. What he doesn’t care to acknowledge is that, in the case of the U.S. Congress, he’s dealing with a neighborhood where maybe half want a health clinic and the rest are holding out for grenade launchers and crystal meth.
**********************************************************
Credit for bringing attention to this article goes to n2doc here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph... ***********************************************************
Anyway, we can't get anything done in our Party. Days after President Obama was elected Harry Reid announced he didn't work for him, who knows what message that was designed to send and who it was aimed at, but that was the opening volley to Democratic chaos. In the Excerpt above, it's pointed out how the conservadems keep kneecapping the rest of us and driving the party farther and farther right until they have literally given us no real reason for our own existance.
The Democratic Party has somehow morphed into Republican Sane - same policies as the Republican Insane, just without the overt drooling xenephobia and finger pointing religiosity.
Let me say that for me, that's not enough. I have come to the belief as I said in my OP that the divides may just be too big to overcome. I simply cannot support a Party that is giving me the legislation and the policies that are coming down, or should I say trickling down. There's almost nothing in them that I recognize as being Democratic and for the People as opposed to being Republican and Pro-Corporate. I simply cannot believe that the Senate Healthcare bill is purportedly a Democratic bill.
I will be just another person changing their voter registration to Independent if it doesn't affect my ability to vote in Primaries (I'll have to check - I don't know what Virginia Law is). I'm filing separation papers and serving them on the Democrats. I don't know at this point if the final result will be a complete divorce or just a trial separation. I'm just an average American in search of a Party or persons who will represent ME.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
