IWhy Gore (or Kerry if not Gore) should be the leader of the party.

[Mass]

I see a lot of people here saying that, once somebody has lost once, he should leave the place to others. While I can understand that for somebody who has been badly beaten, it makes little sense to me. So can somebody tell me the rational of it?

Having a rookie gives them a power that they would not have with experimented players like Gore or Kerry.

First of all, how do we know? The last time a Democratic nominee was nominated twice, I was not even born and I am not a kid. So how do we know it does not work? Have we tried or cant we just think out of the box once in a while?.

More importantly, we complain a lot about Washington Democratic strategists being too fond of polls and focus groups and not letting the candidate express themselves enough.

Guess what! This is all good for these strategists. The less experimented the candidate is, the more powerful the strategists become. No wonder many of them are playing down Gore and Kerry as candidate. The men are too experimented for them.

(In the next sentences, I am dismissing the fact that Gore should be president to make my point - Dont flame me. I am trying to deal with reality here. Gore should be president, but he is not) In any other countries, Gore would be the leader of the Democratic Party and would be teaming up with the DNC to rebuild a strong party. If not Gore, it would be Kerry. Here, it seems as if the Democrats do not want to build anything for the future. During the 12 years before 2004, the DNC did not bother building strong grassroots that could help future nominees to win the elections. Since 2004, Dean is trying hard to do that, but he seems to be doing that alone, and it is largely because we deny our nominees the right to be a strong leader.

We need to look how other progressive parties in other countries work or we will continue to deny ourselves strong progressive leaders who work for the long term.