Electionism
There’s this obsession with a certain breed of Democratic supporter or pundit that the Democrats need to expand their voting base by courting some distinct group of voters at the moment firmly in the Republican camp. Amy Sullivan is a reliable shill for this idea. On Lawyers, Guns and Money there’s a swift deconstruction of her latest plea and in comments, Julia (of ) provides the ultimate takedown of Amy Sullivan and her ilk, arguing they do not provide any special insight in “flyover voters” but only in their own prejudices:
The Times does this all the time. They’re supposed to be broadening their parochial world view, so they periodically uncritically present the most ignorant and hidebound flyover Elmer Gantrys as if they’re the tip of a great cultural iceberg. It’s not that the middle of the country is stupid. It’s that the usual suspects genuinely believe that most of the country is stupid, so they’ll won’t even fact check the shit they’re fed if it sounds to them like the kind of shit the rubes would believe.
Honestly, the woman writes for the Washington Monthly blog. Do the math.
There is however more going on than just that. Amy Sullivan is the quintessential example of the mindset in the Democratic Party’s establishment, nutty as she is, which images that the only thing the Democrats need to do to win elections again is by finetuning their election strategy, nothing else. They have no clue why it is the Democrats seem on the verge of winning back Congress and if they did they would be horrified.
The Democratic base has been screaming at them for years now to move to the left and become, if not a leftwing party, at least a liberal party again, but the leadership
a) is neither liberal nor wants the party to be liberal and b) is deeply convinced that only a centrist, pandering to the rightwing party can win back the vote of the elusive southern white male, because in their hearts of hearts that’s the only voter that counts.
Thge thing I worry about is that if, four days from now, the Democrats do win back Congress they won’t have learned a thing from their years in the wilderness. That they will be just as centrist and useless as they were in the Clinton years, bumbling along making compromises with the only improvement being that they’d implement Bush’s policies more competently.
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