The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

John O'Sullivan learning from defeat, Democrat-style.

This part was interesting:

So when Senator Edward Kennedy charged out to defeat the reformers [at the Democratic National Committee] last week — issuing the clarion call that the Democrats could not win with "pale issues and timid voices" — the old liberal war-horse found that the battle had been won before his arrival. He trumpeted away gamely enough, advocating a quite unrealistic expansion of social programs, and sat down to modified rapture. The Democrats were nervously realizing that, unless something dramatic happens, they will remain firmly committed to policies and attitudes that have lost them the last three elections.

It was reminiscent of the liberal judge who announced from the bench that although he had recently been mugged, he would nonetheless continue to impose short sentences — at which a passer-by yelled: "Mug him again." What the Democrats need is for someone to shout "Mug them again."

Someone's been doing it - millions of them, in fact.

Think about it. If every person that voted Democrat in 2000 had stayed Democrat last November, and the 2/3 of the Nader voters that deserted Nader and the Greens came back to the Dems from whence they came, John Kerry should have won.

So where did they go?

Naturally, it's not people voting with their feet that get the attention. I liked this part...:

Unfortunately for them, that will be neither the media nor the other cultural elites in American life. Indeed, they will continue to mislead the Democrats about the relative popularity of Democrat and Republican policies, in part because they mislead themselves on the same topics.

You might say that there are two political spectrums in America today — an elite spectrum and a popular spectrum.

...which is something another commentator noted last fall.

The elite spectrum has the Democrats in the center, the voters on the center-right, and the Republicans on the far right. Thus when some judicial appointee is discovered to have criticized racial preferences, he is described by the New York Times or CBS News as "out of the mainstream" even though about two thirds of the electorate is opposed to preferences too.

Democrats are enamored of elitism. It goes well beyond Hollywood; how many times have you heard Blue-staters carp about the relative purported levels of education between the Red and Blue states (while ignoring that illiteracy is much higher in Blue states as well)?The same dismissive treatment is meted out to public figures who criticize the U.N., call for more defense spending, advocate "workfare," express pro-life views, oppose gay marriage, and so on [Don't even get me started on gun control - Ed.]. All are marginalized as extreme or wayward in the establishment media. As the example of racial preferences suggests, however, these judgments reflect elite opinion rather than the views of the American electorate.

When we look at the latter, a very different arrangement of political players begins to emerge. The popular spectrum of political opinion has the Democrats and liberal elites on the Left, the Republicans in the middle, and the voters out to their Right. Worth a read.

Posted by Mitch at January 26, 2005 05:33 AM | TrackBack