"I was so naive...I had no clue so many Democrats hated Democrats"

[Major Hogwash]

71. 21

Recommendations for your thread, that is.
I've been busy lately, so I don't have as much of a chance to post at DU as often anymore.
Or to read what is being said here as much as I used to.
Life got in the way.

I don't think it was actually a waste of time to start that thread.
I'm sure that somebody will link to that thread 10 months from now and say, "see, this is why we should ALL vote for the Democratic presidential nominee".
That's always how it seems to work here at the DU, with members linking to other member's old threads.
Sometimes, they'll even dredge up something really old that was said years ago on the old DU forum.



I'm not so sure that Skinner is correct when he said " . . . so many Democrats hated Democrats.", however.
A lot of the anger that was displayed here back in the early years of the DU was not directed at Democrats -- the elected Democratic officials they were talking about at that time -- as much as it was the particular DU member's perception of those elected Democrats appearing to be willing to compromise with Bush when Dubya was in the White House.

It really pissed some people off when Democrats like Ted Kennedy or John Kerry said anything that somehow seemed to help President Bush at all.
A lot of threads were started here in the early 2000's that developed into huge discussions back then about how the agenda of the Democratic party should change since we were no longer in control of the White House.
Since we were not in control of any of the 3 branches of federal government in 2001, many DU members felt that we should start acting as the opposition party . . . that our elected Democratic representatives in Washington should oppose Dubya as much as they possibly could, in fact, every single chance they got.

Some members of DU were disgusted whenever one of our Democratic representatives seemed to be willing to work with George W. Bush.
The truth is, we hated Bush, not those Democratic officials that were serving in Congress in Washington.
However, after some time had passed with Dubya as the President, some of that anger got misdirected.
And it was aimed directly at those elected Democratic officials because they didn't always have an immediate knee-jerk reaction opposing whatever Bush wanted to do next.

And that's because they were Democrats.
They wanted to think through the proposals that Dubya had made to see if they were good for Americans, or not.

Democrats do not march in lockstep fashion like the Republicans do.
And it is true that for a lot of those Democratic representatives, they did what they could to slow down or stop Dubya Bush from screwing up America even more.

However, sometimes it wasn't possible for them to do very much after September 11th.
Because of the feelings voters had back home for Dubya.

People can opine that those feelings of the voters shouldn't have mattered much to those Democratic officials, but those people simply don't understand the intricate nature of politics.
"All politics is local" ~ Tip O'Neill.

Which means that anything they did in Washington had an effect on them back home.
It affected their chances of being re-elected.
And every single Democratic representative in Washington realized they couldn't do a damned thing to try and stop or slow down Dubya if they weren't still serving in Washington.
They couldn't slow Dubya down while he began his agenda of destruction of the social safety nets that the Democrats had spent the past 65 years building and refining, if they weren't there to vote against Dubya's policies.

And that's what caused the gridlock in Washington after 2001 to become so partisan here at DU.