Reply #135: I know you don't mean to

[Two Americas]

But that is the effect.

I have never in 40 years said "I refuse to vote for the Democratic candidate." Never. Very, very few ever do, and most of those were either not very committed to voting Democratic to begin with or wind up voting for the Democratic candidate anyway once they get their frustrations expressed - and more importantly, heard, and respected.

Nevertheless, criticism of the Democratic leadership gets met with "whaddya gonna do? Vote Republican?" or "how'd that Nader thing work out for you last time, hmmm?" and other obvious attempts at ridiculing, trivializing and dismissing critics of the party leadership. That is an attempt at silencing debate. No way around that.

Let's look at the last election. Once Kerry was anointed by party insiders, no criticism was to be permitted, even about tactics or rhetoric. "Right now we have to get a Dem elected, and we can deal with all of that other stuff after the election." OK, great. I worked my ass off for Kerry in a very conservative district - if that isn't the ultimate sacrifice and an almost impossible task, trying to sell a pedantic erudite professorial New Englander to rural people - I don't know what is. But I made a personal commitment to a goal of getting 100 Republican voting neighbors to at least not vote for the top of the Republican ticket, and hit that goal. I could never have achieved that result by selling Kerry - it just wasn't going to happen. I waited 'til after the election to do anything other than cheer lead for the party.

The what happened after the election? Did everyone dig right in and tackle the serious problems within the party? Was the left wing of the party heard and respected? No. Right away - and I mean the day after - we were talking about "Hillary in '08" while serious issues, such as the mountain of evidence pouring in that showed that the election had been stolen were buried and those who wanted to talk about that were attacked as “conspiracy theorists” who were “hurting the party” by “making us look bad.”

So between elections is not the right time to criticize the party, during the campaign is not the right time, after a devastating loss is not the right time, during the primaries is not the right time - at what point do we face the fact that the calls for loyalty are really a tactic by one wing of the party to shut down the other?