Red-State Blues
After slogging through the drenching Seattle rain yesterday morning to vote, I caught a flight to Tucson and an engagement with a new client. Today, instead of the pity-parties I’m reading about that others are deriving comfort from, I had to endure the smugness of the “it’s a great day in America” crowd. The weather’s nice, though.
I haven’t really had time to settle my own thoughts, other than to delve a bit into the sort of despair that Christopher Key is imbibing. I considered, on a long drive from Tucson to Phoenix, whether I could continue to live in and be a part of the America that I postulated would exist in 2 years.
I really feel that we’ve been disserved by the Democratic party in its current form. I mean, Kerry was sort of a Frankenstein of a candidate, but it could easily have been Gephardt or Daschle, guys who have fumbled the legislative leadership of party for 8 or more years. On our local front, we have a guy, Jim McDermott, who, as I’ve said before, is a virtual voting machine for me, but, given his “representative for life” status in our district, has not developed into a leader with any stature. Instead, he buffoonishly stumbles from stupid stunt to stupid stunt. Recently, a judge ordered him to pay Ohio Republican John Bohner something like $600,000 in damages and legal fees over his bungled handling of a taped cell phone conversation. The Party leaders in Washington want donors to step up and bail him out, but I say let him hang. If we can raise that kind of money, we can buy a legislative race in some Republican district. The Party needs to jettison the scions of its failed leadership and, in safe districts such as ours, start running folks with some giddy-up and fire in their eyes.
If we all decide to stay here instead of colonizing Canada, I think we need to start with a serious makeover of the Democratic party, or by fashioning a new party to our liking. I’m thinking the Dems will take a serious look at veering right, reacting to exit polls of yahoos braying about “values”. Which part of the red-state electorate do you want to bed down with? We need to pay attention to what tectonic shifts begin to occur in the Party, and not wait 2 years for it to be set in stone.
