Reply #7: Try Science. It Works.

[MannyGoldstein]

You sound like one of those Harvard Kennedy School guys - you know, the place which Tip O'Neill proclaimed the place to go to learn how to lose elections?

Here is the way Science works:

1. a hypothesis is made.
2. attempts are made to disprove it
3. if disproved, it is abandoned. If not disproved after serious attempts, it becomes a theory.

Let's start with the hypothesis that "embracing DLC priniciples wins elections". Anyone with an eye and a brain can see that this hypothesis can be tossed into the trashbin - the Democrats have continually and broadly gotten their asses kicked since embracing the DLC's strategy and tactics.

After reading your exhaustive (and exhausting) tract, I can only surmise that you're doing your best to say that without the DLC, things would have sucked worse. Can you confirm that is what you're trying to say?

If that is the case - you might be right.

If we feed a substance to a bunch of lab rats and they all die within a day, it is certainly possible that the lab rats would have all died anyway, and that the substance actually lengthened their lives for an extra hour or two. But would you bet on it?

Self-fulfilling post facto prophesies do not "cut it" in science. You write: "An article in the Boston Globe took up the issue of Democratic losses a week before the last presidential election. When a party holds power for too long, Adrian Wooldridge, reporter for The Economist, said in the article, “it grows fat and happy, it also grows corrupt.” The classic example, he pointed out, is the Democratic Party of the 1970s and `80s, which, spoiled by generations of congressional power, “became a party of insiders and deal makers without any sense of the principles they stood for and eventually collapsed” when they were turned out in 1994" Your argument is, in essence, that that they must have been "fat, happy, and corrupt" because they were turned out. Scientific proof works the other way around: what you need is some quantification that shows that the Democrats became more fat, happy and corrupt than in the 1940s through 1980s, and that some quantifiable threshold had been reached. Otherwise, you have bubkes.

Finally, I believe that Harry Truman had enough of a grasp of the language to allow his own words to stand without interpretation. If he meant something different than what he said, he would have said something different.