What’s wrong with the leadership of the Democratic party?

[Originally published on a weblog called “What Is Liberalism?”]

Anne Zook sums up a bit of history:

There was a lack of vision after the Watergate years* and what passes for leadership among the Democrats been playing catch-up ever since. Unable to believe in or trust the liberal roots of their own successes, they’ve adopted, instead, a stance of being a kinder, gentler Republican Party.

Liberal voters, disillusioned by the same scandal and worn out by the work behind the legislative successes they had achieved, took a few years off to rest and tend to business at home. Distracted by personal concerns, they failed to identify the lack of vision at the top.

In the meantime, the Republican Bull raged in, full of fury over the unmasking of criminals at its highest levels, and pounded the landscape with a carpet bomb of old fears (the Cold War), old prejudices (coded references to minorities, gays, and women who threatened to turn the entire country into a mongrelized Sodom), and new money (the increasingly euphoric industrial-defense industry, later joined by the increasingly ecstatic oil and gas industries and Big Pharma).

After Watergate, the Democratic leadership simply wasn’t prepared. Many of the Party’s major goals had been, or seemed to be, won, from a legislative perspective. Economically the country was in trouble. Fallout from the Vietnam War was still raining down around our collective ears. Socially, the new reforms were still butting head-to-head with the entrenched systems.

Sometimes, in politics, you need a visionary. Sometimes you need a workhorse who just buckles down and gets things done. The Democrats were in need of a workhorse, someone to solidify the social progress and take on the sweat and labor of getting the economy running again. I think they just couldn’t identify that someone.

Anyhow, the disorganized Democratic leadership, having lost sight of their real function, which was to represent The Peepul, because they lacked a platform for consolidating their gains and lacked the vision to know what should come next, began to salivate at the sound of corporate money clanging into Republican coffers. They told themselves that they couldn’t do their jobs if they weren’t in office.

And, like so many, they let themselves believe that the ends justified the means. They could take money from defense contracts but still be anti-war. They could take money from Big Oil but still advocate Green energy policies. They could take money from Big Pharma but still support affordable health care for everyone. (While they were taking corporate money and pretending it helped them to protect the little guy, the Right snuck in and grabbed for itself the label of “individual rights” but that’s a different rant.)

And it was all so stupid. If Democrats wanted the South, they could have had it. It was there for the taking and still is.

Today’s Democrats aren’t “losing” the South. They’re just refusing to win it.