GW, <The Democrats were then forced to try and get out their own message while at the same time trying to appear cooperative with the popular president.>
This was impossible precisely because the Democrats lacked an agenda. All they could do is run as the "Anything but Bush" party, which could have worked pre-9/11, but obviously can't work now.
It's not like the Democrats had little material to work with. In fact, they had a TON of issues that should have gone their way, from the economy, to budget deficits, to corporate scandals, to America's international image, to the environment, etc. Had they took strong stances on all of these issues while at the same time support the war on terrorism, they would have won it big time last November. Instead, they waffled and tried to please everyone with their poll-based politics, but ended up pleasing no one.
This mentality was perfectly illustrated by Daschle's quote below:
cnn.com (near the bottom)
But Daschle dismissed calls to redefine the party in the wake of defeat. He said the range of liberals to moderates in the Democratic party makes it hard to clearly define.
"Our party is who we are. You know, we're a very diverse party. That's been one of the strengths, I think. It's always been that way. I don't think we've ever been as uniformly consistent philosophically as the Republicans," he said.
<Being reactionary is a lot different. ... What does Pat Buchanan have to do with anything?
We were talking about isolationism. That's a lot different from unilateralism or reactionism. By the way, Buchanan is the biggest isolationist of all.
Tenchusatsu |
