Regular visitors will know that I’m a huuuge fan of Ann Salisbury’s. She’s smart, committed, cute (and AFAIK, all you Orange County guys, single!), and a rabid, serious Democrat who in a better world ought to running for office.
But even the best of us sometimes step in it.
Ann points out this strip from Frazz (a personal favorite comic BTW):
There is a bunch wrong with this, sadly. My comment to her points out one side of it:
and you know, I have to wave a hand here. The redneck truck-driving, Kid Rock-listening, reality-TV-watching guy you’re happy to see off the polls is the same guy or girl who’s sitting on a ship headed to the Gulf right now, and their redneck, know-nothing grandparents won WWII as well.
Until the Democratic Party figures out how to trust and reach them, we’ll be the party of the coastal elites.
I don’t want to pile onto Ann, but those two points need a bit of elaboration.
If I’m a Hispanic minimum-wage worker at a resort hotel in Santa Monica, the Dems might have something to say to me. But if I’m a furniture factory worker in North Carolina…white or black…the Democratic contempt for my gun-toting, pickup-truck-driving, country-music-listening ways is as loud as the Eminem song I’m playing in the CD player as I drive by the local latte shop.
The Democrats will never win unless they find a way to reconnect with that voter, and they will never reconnect with that voter until they find a way to treat him or her with respect.
And, bluntly, they may not deserve to win unless they find that reconnection.
For all the sympathy that the liberal core constituency exudes for the working class, they always seem awfully uncomfortable when they have to deal with real, breathing examples.
[Update: A Shot In The Dark shows it in another light:
Garrison Keillor illustrates in this Salon piece why the DFL not only got clobbered last Tuesday, but probably hasn’t learned its lesson.
Contempt? He’s got it!To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich.
That’s right – going to a steakhouse and ordering tuna, to escape a friggin’ Lutheran church basement lutefisk social.
Yeah, because the lumpenproles just don’t get it That’s why the Dems lost this cycle…]
Here’s what I posted in the comments at my place in response to your comment:
Hey! I said “kind of.”
And I don’t know about LA County, but out here in the Big Orange the folks with the fake Calvin’s defiling something, isn’t limited to “The redneck truck-driving, Kid Rock-listening, reality-TV-watching guy.”
And that Ashcroft guy who’s all bashful about the partially nude statutes? Yeah, I’m sure his party is rather attractive to “The redneck truck-driving, Kid Rock-listening, reality-TV-watching guy.”
And, I could be wrong here, but the Labor folks, they pretty much uniformly vote Democratic and I think quite a few of them are “The redneck truck-driving, Kid Rock-listening, reality-TV-watching guy [or gal],” and we’ve reached them rather well. (Although we had to suffer a big spanking awhile back to get the picture.)
And don’t talk to me about military or veterans. No one in my party called multiple amputee Sen. Max Cleland unpatriotic.