Reply #10: I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you,

[Philostopher]

I'm just talking from logistics because, sadly, logistics are where the rubber hits the road, not actual personal commitment. I don't think the problem is that Dems don't care -- I think it's an articulation problem. I hope it is, anyway.

One problem is that even when Dems have good ideas, when the GOP controls the senate and congress, those ideas inevitably get perverted into some economic Darwinist wet dream. What Clinton wanted as far as 'welfare reform' and what actually was enacted were very different things, for instance. Once Clinton uttered those words, Gingrich took off with the ball and 'welfare reform' became 'kick the poor.' I don't have any illusions about Bill Clinton, he disappointed me in many ways, but it wasn't all because he didn't care or didn't try, and that goes for many Dems holding office right now.

Instead of offering policies and programs that would benefit everybody on the lower end of the economic spectrum, not just those making $50K a year or more, Dems have allowed themselves to be pushed out onto a ledge where they're fighting for small blocs of white, homeowning voters. That's their own damned fault, and it disgusts me, too. It's not where they perform best, and it ignores the 40% of people who don't bother to vote because they think nobody cares what happens to them. I'm disgusted that such a large number of people think nobody cares, and disgusted that anything offered to help them gets mangled on its way through the machine to the point it still isn't sufficient.

I don't know -- everything gets pushed to the right for myriad reasons, some of them that corporations determine what news we get, some of them that corporations fund campaigns, some of them that people are uninformed and can be easily led. That Democrats have abandoned the populist message is part of the problem, I just don't know if it's so much that they no longer care or that Republicans have gained control of the tiller and narrowed the dialogue.