Why American's Hate Democrats

Wow.

Read this.

Wow some more.

Let's start with the obvious-- it would be completely wrong, of course, to accept that this vitriolic assessment of red state citizens could describe all Bush supporters or even all Republicans. Lumping all Bush supporters in with the Christian Right (which is obviously who Smiley has a beef with) is a mistake. There are plenty of social progressives that I know of who supported Bush and who made well reasoned arguments for doing so. I simply cannot endorse such a sweeping and harsh characterization of millions of people like this. And I cannot believe she's suggesting (as are these guys) that we go back to the civil war era to get at the ancestral roots of supposed Right-wing cruelty. Let me ask you this-- if they're so stupid and evil and hate us so much, why do they now have Democratic governors in Montana, Arizona, Wyoming, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Maine, Louisiana, and Kansas? For that matter, if they're so stupid and evil, why did we elect Republican governors in California, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maryland?

Additionally, although the fact that we Democrats lost five of the last seven presidential elections does seem pretty bad, it's just patently ridiculous to suggest the party's over. Since there's so few of them, let's go through and look at the elections case by case. Reagan vs. Carter was pretty close, and it's not like our guy was a stunning success in the White House. In 1984-- yes, we got our arses handed to us. We're still recovering, apparently. In '88, let's face it-- Dukakis was pretty lame, and it still wasn't exactly a sweep. But in 1992 we learned our lesson and beat an incumbent president with a centrist, inclusive, issue-focused candidate and campaign. Who knew? 1996 went our way very handily with the same themes. Some would argue that we didn't actually lose in 2000-- the election was botched and the presidency snatched by the more aggressive campaign. Regardless, we had the bad fortune of having Nader running full force that year, which, quite simply, lost us that election. And in the last election we saw unprecedented party unity against an incumbent, war-time president, and we lost by a mere 100,000 votes or so. Meanwhile, things in Congress haven't been great, granted, but the Senate has been split pretty evenly, with some recent losses favoring the Republicans, but those were all in areas that favored the Republicans a whole lot, anyway. Next time, it'll be our turn. The point is, it's been close, and it's still pretty close. The sample of election results is way too small to be of value, and I see no reason at all to panic. So a better question to ask might be, "why are Democrats such self-pitying, hate-mongering losers?"

Here's the bigger problem-- even if this wildly over-the-top characterization of the Christian Right has some elements of truth to it-- do we really want to go there? After all, these are our neighbors, our countrymen, our own family members-- genuinely good people, often-- do we really want to collectively write them all off as a blight on humanity? Is there any chance at all that abandoning reason, taking sides in a culture war, alienating Christian moderates, and insulting the opposition will help the Democratic party? The answer is clearly no. Instead, we need to apply a little more reason and get back to the issues, deliver centrist candidates, and fight them harder on their own turf. If we go Smiley's route, we will most certainly succeed only at fanning the very feelings of hate towards the Democrats that she seems so stressed out about. She isn't offering a "dialogue" at all-- it's the end of dialogue. Come on, folks-- rise up to the occasion.