Jane Galt has a nice post on the “message-vacuum” of the Democratic party. Here’s a piece:
Democrats have been blaming the candidates: the wooden Gore, the hapless Kerry. But it seems to me that the problem is that the fissures on the left are so deep that it takes a political genius like Clinton, who zeroed in on symbolic wedge issues with the daring precision of a World War II ace, to cover over them long enough to get elected. Neither Gore nor Kerry were particularly good candidates, to be sure, but it’s not like George Bush is a stunning rhetorician or a dazzling political strategist. His main skills (and weaknesses) lie in dogged determination and keen administrative abilities. Yet he defeated Al Gore, who should have walked all over Bush, given that he was running as the incumbent’s successor in the sunset year of America’s longest postwar economic expansion. Kerry couldn’t beat Bush even though the guy had been caught in bed with a naked economic recession, suffered through a subsequent jobless recovery, and got the country into an enormously expensive, and prolonged, conflict in Iraq. Is that really a problem of the candidates, or the party?
Gil, that was a mess. What did you like about it? I’d say half of her statements are strained assertions without much support, and the other half are selectively argued.
I mean, the left’s only point of agreement is raising taxes? What is that, a straight quote out of the Lee Atwater Student Republican Guide to Understanding the Opposition, 1987? That would be as dumb as someone writing in 1996, “The right’s sole idea they can all agree on is taking your rights away.”