Here they come--America's Drill Team! Out front are the two high-strutting leaders, John McCain and George W, thrusting their drum-major batons and chanting "Drill! Drill! Drill!" Right behind them are the famous Marching Lobbyists of Big Oil, and--look!--prancing alongside are House minority leader John Boehner and the Merry Pranksters of the Republican caucus, doing a precision routine of call and response
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This seems to be as good a place as any to record some observations I've been making over the past few presidential elections. Ever since 1968, Democrats have found ways to lose elections almost regardless of the opponent. Something seems to come over them once they get the party nomination, and they turn into stiffs.
Consider:
1968: Hubert Humphrey hadn't a clue what was going on. While he was prattling away about the "politics of joy" (I ask you!), Daley's cops were beating heads a couple blocks away in Grant Park.
1972: I had a chance to see George McGovern up close at a mall stop in Burlington, Mass. He acted like a guy tanked up on Valium just to get through the season. No wonder he lost big time.
1976: Carter won mostly because people were sick of Nixon, but also because he ran against an even bigger stiff. He got shown up in 1980 because of something Ronald Reagan had discovered long before: a second-rate actor can make good because politics only requires third-rate acting.
Skip 1984---not even Moses could've beat Grandpa.
1988: Dukakis was a rouser as a candidate, but as a nominee, he was such a stiff (viz, the Ted Koppel interview), even Bush I could beat him.
1992 and 96: Clinton had two things going for him. 1) He got to go against two Republican stiffs in a row, and b) he was a bigger con man than Reagan. (aside: the Republicans hated Bill not because he couldn't keep his pecker in his pants, but because he was actually a Republican.)
As for the last two rounds, again, Gore and Kerry ran great candidate campaigns, then hadn't a clue how to be the nominee. Even then, Gore won; it took a lot of skullduggery to give it to W.
Given that all the current crop of Democratic wannabees are to a greater or lesser extent empty suits, I think the GOP can lose only if they pick someone other than John McCain.
---jmg
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WHY DEMOCRATS LOSE
Friends, it's time to take up a collection so we can seek a cure for a tragic disease. The disease is PTS -- Political Timidity Syndrome -- and it seems to be epidemic among Democrats in Congress.
The latest to show the tell-tale symptoms of this heart-breaking scourge is Hillary Clinton. The New York senator and Democratic contender for the presidency has announced that she's going to take on the issue that affects a majority of America's families, small businesses, corporate competitiveness, and our nation's very notion of the common good: health care. Good for her! This huge issue calls for America's boldest thinking and most principled politics.
But -- uh-oh -- suddenly boldness shriveled to meekness. Rather than a straightforward plan of universal care that would rally the public, a plan that would work and even be less costly than the corporatized system of profiteering we now have, Hillary succumbed to PTS. She is suggesting a cautious, convoluted scheme that would subsidize insurance policies only for low-income children who are not now covered.
It's an approach that still will leave some 40 million Americans without health care, that will do nothing about the low quality and high cost of America's system, and that will dump additional billions of our tax dollars into the pockets of the insurance giants. Explaining her business-as-usual timidity, Clinton says she can only "do what the political reality permits me to do...what the body politic will bear."
Hey, the political reality is that two-thirds of Americans believe it is the government's responsibility to assure health care for everyone! What the body politic will not bear are PTS Democrats!