What do they have to do with each other?<\/p>\n
Quite a bit.<\/p>\n
Part of the blogging hiatus was a camping trip with TG and Littlest Guy and several other family-units to the Isthmus on Catalina Island. Kayaking, hiking, snorkeling, sunscreen, more kayaking.<\/p>\n
The other families are from my West LA days, and they’re wonderful, rich West Los Angeles Democrats almost to a BMW-driving dad and Mercedes-driving mom. We talked a fair amount of politics :^)<\/p>\n
One of them is a lawyer and was lamenting the Robert nomination and what he perceived as the even worse second appointment Bush was likely to make…with the possibility of one or two more before his term is over.<\/p>\n
“What can we do?” he lamented.<\/p>\n
“Well, we could win some f**king elections,” I replied.I pointed out the secular shift in power toward the Republican Party as the Democrats pull up the ladders for the working class who aren’t in big, money-donating unions and as they embark on a culture war designed to make Main Street in Omaha feel a little more like Rockridge Avenue in Berkeley.<\/p>\n
As the party’s center of mass – its ideas, plans for the future, and credibility about performance in the past – get hollowed out, it appeals less and less to mainstream voters and more and more strongly to a smaller and smaller “committed base.”<\/p>\n
The fantasy, of course, is that as soon as the vanguard speaks up and is heard by the lumpen proles, they will understand the inalterable truth of the vanguard position and rise up marching to vote. Mercedes George Galloway is a “probably literally” card-carrying member of that aggrieved vanguard. And by supporting him – hell, by not running him out of the country in tar and feathers on a rail – the Left and the Democrats are sending a clear message to those suburban housewives and husbands about where they stand and what they expect. They stand with bullhorns waiting for the masses to follow them to the polling places.<\/p>\n
Hasn’t happened yet.<\/p>\n
Middle-class, middle-aged, middle-valued voters keep driving away from the Democrats.<\/p>\n
They are driving Bush’s numbers down…but their numbers are falling as fast or faster, and to win elections, the GOP don’t have to beat the bear, they just have to beat the Democrats.<\/p>\n
So the party has a choice. It can embrace passionate opposition to the powers that be – Kerry’s deeply amusing “speaking truth to power” – or they can decide that as one of the two national parties in the most powerful nation in the world, they should be the power and explain what exactly they would do with it.<\/p>\n