Reply #24: "Obama seems to agree, in much the same vein as you, that it is useless to try"

[BzaDem]

I'm not claiming one way or the other that your solution is "useless to try" in the abstact. I'm just saying that a prerequisite to your solution working is a large number of people that agree with you, and that is not the case right now.

Furthermore, if it were the case, these people would be a powerful voting force, and allow a Democrat to win without having to get the votes of certain independents who would disagree with you on most of your policy remedies.

In other words, to have any change, you need to get people to agree with you. Your solution without people agreeing with you won't get you anywhere.

"In other words, what is YOUR solution? What other chance for saving our country for future generations is there, given that influence?"

My solution is to attempt to get people to agree with progressive principles and turn that agreement into voting for progressive candidates -- as much as possible. There are large barriers to this besides Fox news. Many people get their political views from their parents, and aren't about to change their views just because the media changes.

Others have very strong views on certain specific issues (but not others), and this in many instances determines their vote. For example, one way to jump across this barrier is to field candidates that agree with us on as much as possible, but are able to vote their district on other issues that are important to most in their district. But as soon as the Democratic party does this and these people are elected, those on DU go wild at the thought that they might vote against the party platform in any instance.

The truth is, for a party to convince a majority of the voters that they should agree with much of its party platform, it first needs to show these voters (over a long period of time) that it can competently manage the affairs of the country. That often requires compromise with the status quo.

If Obama were to declare "NO COMPROMISE" like many here, there would be no healthcare bill, there would be no additional financial regulation at all, there would have been no stimulus (and we would be in depression), taxes would have gone up significantly for those who could least afford it (including multi-thousand dollar reduction in tax credits for people at the poverty line). But even beyond all that, it would have convinced voters that Democrats cannot competently manage the country, and it would have turned off the middle to our whole party platform for years (if not longer).

As a President/party accomplishes a record of running the country competently, he builds up more long-term political capital, and will have an easier time convincing the country that progressive solutions are correct (and that they should elect more progressives to Congress and future presidencies). This is not the kind of short-term, transient political capital that comes simply because voters got tired of Bush in 2008. (Most people here FAR overestimated Obama's political capital on day 1.) The capital I'm talking about is the kind of political capital that comes after many years (if not more) of governing the country competently and convincing the country that your actual issue positions are correct.

So if your goal is to immediately get all of your favored policies enacted (now or within a few years), you are always going to fail. If you think that means the country "won't be saved for future generations," than the country won't be saved for future generations. If you think that means we are screwed, then we are screwed. etc etc etc.

However, if your goal is to maximize the progressive direction of the country's policies (to the extent possible given our Constitution's extreme structural limits on the magnitude of change) and gradually build a governing coalition to achieve greater and greater things as time goes on, that goal is eminently achievable.