Road Map to Defeat
...what are the Democrats doing? The Clintons are running around with flamethrowers, gleefully trying to incinerate the prospects of the party’s leading candidate, Barack Obama. As Bill Clinton put it last month: “If a politician doesn’t want to get beat up, he shouldn’t run for office.”
Senator Obama, for his part, seems to have lost sight of the unifying message that proved so compelling early in his campaign and has stumbled into weird cultural predicaments that have caused some people to rethink his candidacy.
While some of those predicaments raise legitimate concerns (his former pastor, his comments in San Francisco) and some do not (stupid questions about wearing a flag pin), he has allowed them to fester unnecessarily. The way for a candidate to eventually change the subject is to offer policy prescriptions so creative and compelling that they generate excitement among the electorate and can’t be ignored by the press.
Voters want more from Senator Obama. He’s given a series of wonderful speeches, but he has to add more meat to those rhetorical bones. He needs to be clear about where he wants to lead this country and how he plans to do it. That’s how a candidate defines himself or herself.
Instead, Mr. Obama is allowing the Clintons and the news media to craft a damaging persona of him as some kind of weak-kneed brother from another planet, out of touch with mainstream America, and perhaps a loser.
...The big issues of our time are being left behind as pettiness and mean-spirited partisanship carry the day.
Voters across the country seem disgusted with this state of affairs. George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson of ABC News are being pilloried for the way they conducted Wednesday’s debate. Hillary Clinton’s disapproval ratings have climbed into a zone that makes it legitimate to wonder whether she could defeat Senator McCain. And much of the excitement and enthusiasm surrounding Mr. Obama’s candidacy has cooled.
That raucous laughter you hear in the background is coming from the likes of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, President Bush and Senator McCain. They can’t believe their good fortune.
The issues still favor the Democrats. More and more Americans are losing their jobs, and many of those still employed are working fewer hours and cashing smaller paychecks. Vacation plans are being curtailed because of declining family income and sky-high gasoline prices. The value of the family home is eroding.
Instead of capitalizing on the political advantages presented by these issues, the Democrats, with their increasingly small-minded approach to this election, are squandering them...
It’s not too late for the Democrats to pull this off. But there’s already blood on the floor from the nomination fight, and the fight ain’t over. The G.O.P.’s fondest wish is that the Democrats keep doing what they’re doing.
Absolutely agreed. From a reality-based perspective, every time the Republicans open their mouths about policy they drive more voters into the Democratic camp. The Republicans have to keep trying to catapult the Company propaganda, even though they try very hard to seem as vacuous as possible.
Most would be Democrats are hampered by the sense of the Unthinkable. It's unthinkable that the United States is an imperial power. It's unthinkable that the Shock Doctrine really defines the face of Amerika to the world. It's unthinkable that people who wear flag pin lapels should be mostly concerned with dismantling the Constitution, or that the last thing the republicans or democratic leadership want is Republican Democracy.
The sense of denial in the American people, the tendency of Democrats to fight about trivial ego, and the willingness of the republican corpocracy to simply lie will lose this election yet.
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