Reply #666: That is the type of thing I keep hearing

[Lydia Leftcoast]

A lot of people are in terrible economic pain, and there is no indication that anyone in Washington cares. If they do care, they aren't making enough noise about it and they're not saying, "The hell with what the Republicans think. We need to do something--and fast."

I've used this example before as an instance in which the Dems fell down on the job, but when I lived in Minnesota in the early 1980s, farm foreclosures were in the news every night. Family farms that had been in the same family for four or five generations were being lost to a double whammy of low crop prices and whopping interest rates, the highest interest rates ever seen outside the Mafia until that point.

So what did the Dems do, even though they still had a majority in Congress?

Nothing. They did nothing.

What could they have done? Offered up a system of low-interest refinancing for troubled farmers. You may or may not know that farmers borrow against the value of their anticipated crops and livestock sales every year. They know how to pay off loans. They would have paid off the new low-interest loans--AND they would have loved the Democrats for another generation.

Yes, Reagan might have vetoed the bill. And then the Dems could have shouted from the rooftops that they wanted to help the farmers but the Republicans were preventing it.

Instead they did nothing, and now the rural areas are solidly in the hands of the Republicans, who at least give lip service to conservative social issues.

Doing nothing when people are suffering is not only immoral--it comes back to bite you. Ask "New Labour" in Britain how being "moderate" helped them.