Let us be clear from the beginning, we all want a big tent. Every last one of us wants to win elections. Every one of us aside from the freepers that may be lurking wants to get the Republicans out of office.
We must know however that while we want as many people as possible under that tent we need to have a clear set of values that we can stand for. And when people want to speak out against those key values we need to speak up and make it clear that we disagree even if they are standing underneath our tent.
Think about it this way, if everyone in the Bush Administration decided to become Democrats tomorrow would you allow them into the party? You would control the White House, but I am sure that most of you would agree that obtaining the White House that way would not be a good strategy.
We need to let the majority voice of the people in our tent to have precedence over the vocal minority in the DLC. I am not trying to be divisive here, but I find it offensive that when we speak out against the DLC we are often accused of not wanting a big tent and focusing on a few "pet issues".
Iraq is not a pet issue. It has cost us thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. It has left who knows how many more seriously injured in ways we do not want to imagine. I am with the majority when I say this was wrong and we need to get out.
According to Gallup "roughly 2 in 3 Americans urge a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, with 31% wanting this to start immediately." and "only 2% want to send more troops." (link:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002801550) The Democratic Party needs to make the message clear that they oppose the war, and people like Joe Lieberman and other Democrats who support the war are at odds with the majority of the party.
Universal Health Care is not a pet issue. There are tens of millions of uninsured Americans, and many many more millions of people who are struggling to pay their health insurance premiums even though they are under insured. People are getting sick and dying here, this is an extremely important issue. We don't want the insurance industry, HMOs, and pharmaceutical giants controlling our health. According to a ABC News poll "Americans by a 2-1 margin, 62-32 percent, prefer a universal health insurance program over the current employer-based system." (Link:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/living/US/healthcare031020_poll.html)
We need to stand up for the interests of the majority, even if the pharmaceutical industry funded DLC does not like it.
Sure the people in the DLC have the right to participate in the process, but we need to take a clear stand sometimes and sometimes that stand is going to have to go against them. One of the biggest criticisms of Democrats is that we do not take strong stands, and if we try to please everyone that criticism will still drag the party down.
This is not divisiveness it is democracy, it is standing up for the values that are important to the people. We want to end this long bloody war in Iraq, we want single payer Universal Health Care, and we want an end to corporate money corrupting the political system.
Yes we want a big tent, and in order to do that we need to make sure that we are standing up for the majority. We are not asking for ideological purity, we are asking for clear strong stands. We are perfectly willing to allow dissent, in fact we encourage dissent. Just don't expect that we are going to look the other way when someone who says they represent us tries to take right-wing positions.
(Edited for grammatical errors)
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
