Terry McAuliffe Must Go

Since my party just got whipped again, I wanted to lay some ideas down about why that is.

I'll not comment on what's wrong with a GOP for this post, since it seems they have a formula that resonates well enough for the time being with at least 59 million people.

The issue with the Democratic party right now is our inability to market a crisp message, our inability to control the vocabulary of the debate, and our mortal terror of being labeled "liberal". The truth is that the Democratic party is emphatically not "liberal",anymore. At the top, it's "progressive".

And progressivism makes a lot more sense as a political philosphy in it's original home (the GOP) and coupled with evangelical Christianity.

The fact is that the GOP is becomming classically progressive again. George Bush is a Herbert Hoover Republican, and the truth is that he shares more political ideology with Hillary Clinton than she shares with Franklin Roosevelt, or for that matter, Bill Clinton (who is a moderate liberal, but not really a progressive).

Since the Democratic party made the decision to largely abandon liberalism both in word and deed, we have no reason to exist, except to peddle corporate partnership with oversight, as opposed to without.

The reason why the Dean campaign ignighted the grassroots was because he was an unafraid, unapologetic Frank Capra liberal (and not a "radical leftist", regardless of what the media says and regardless of what you ignoramuses think). The problem was that he just wasn't presidential. Right campaign, wrong guy. Fine.

This debacle is a good thing, I believe. It is hopefully the last straw for those of us in the vast democratic majority who are tired of years of failure, and tired of watching our leadership simper and evade what we should be proud of:

that we believe that Americans can be both compassionate and free;

that we believe that government can help where it's needed;

that people who want to work should work, but nobody who can work should just get a check for nothing;

that we believe we should leave this campsite cleaner than we found it;

that Government stops at the skin;

that all men truly are equal in the eyes of the law;

that small businesses and corporations should play by the same rules;

that public education should be more than acceptable, it should be great;

that affirmative action of all kinds should address root causes first and symptoms second;

that our politcal system is the core of our civility and partisan tampering and sabotage is paramount to treason;

that we need to defend democracy where we can;

that we shoud feed the starving where we can;

that we shouldn't shake hands with the unjust, or grease the machinery of our economy with human blood; and,

that these are traditional American values, and we are proud to defend them from those who would rig the rules of society for the benefit of the few, because that's what liberals do.

That's where I sit, anyway, with the grassroots of the Democratic party, and there I will stay until the party comes to me.