It really isn’t a lesson, but more of a reminder. Democrats suck at politics. To the Democrats out there acting shocked over the Brown win, all I can say is “wake up!”
We don’t need to turn back the pages of history more than a few months to remind us how bad Democrats are at politics. Last August they sat shell shocked as the tea bagger movement erupted. During the entire health care debate they were crap. They started negotiations low and just kept going lower. When someone like Lieberman threw a monkey wrench in the plans the leadership just blinked.
For the Democrats to remain a majority party they have to become the party people want, not the party that people resort to as the ‘they are better than the alternative” candidates. They need to remember what promises brought them to power in 2008 and deliver on them. Stop it with the dream of “bi-partisanship”. It isn’t going to happen. We are not going to pull this highly polarized country together over night. Hell we probably won’t be able to until some massive national disaster happens again, and a near depression wasn’t even enough for that.
Democrats also need to learn a thing called message control. This is something the Republicans excel at, while the Democrats fail every time. Health care is a perfect example of this. The Republicans had “death panels”, while the Democrats counter argument was “health exchanges”. Average Joe voter has no idea what a “health exchange” is and Democrats sure as hell didn’t try to explain it.
Things are not going to get better starting today. We now officially enter the mid-term cycle and Democrats have an uphill battle ahead of them. For Democrats to prevail they have to show their base that they are willing to fight for them. We need real leadership, especially in the Senate. Bill Frist never had a problem pushing through controversial legislation and the biggest majority he ever had was 55. Harry Reid needs to start standing up to the obstructionism. If Republicans want to filibuster, fine, make them do it, but by all means stop this pussy footing around and caving in.
Or maybe we should just listen to Mike Malloy, who last night reminded us that the Democratic Party is dead and has been dead since April 12, 1945 – the day FDR died.