Talkin' politics & bad 80's videos
Forgive me if I seem a little wired; my bloodstream consists of 67 percent chocolate chip cookies, 26 percent blue cheese, and seven percent actual blood. No, I did not eat healthy today, but damn...the Girlfriend makes fan-fucking-tastic chocolate chip cookies.
As the Girlfriend promised at the end of an earlier blog posting, she hosted a small political soireé this afternoon. I was nice enough to interrupt my traditional Sunday viewing of professional football to clean the bathroom and the living room sofa to accomodate our guests and fool them into thinking we were not slobs, no sir. The three guests who showed up - asetwoman, RubberNun, and her lovely husband, the lovely jima - joined the Girlfriend and I for the aforementioned cookies, banana bread, crackers & cheese, and an invisible neon sign over our heads that read "SCREW THE SOUTH BEACH DIET."
For the first couple of hours, we discussed the election and its implications. Liberals all, we expressed our shock over how badly the Democrats fared this election year. It was never supposed to be like this; we had passion, we had organization, we had...a lot less than we realized. Sure, there was likely a lot of vote fraud, but I don't think it would have changed the results much, and we all agreed that moping about it would be a waste of the energy built up over the past two years. We bemoaned the election results but also the useless ideological backbiting our fellow liberals have trapped themselves in for the last thirty years, as well as mainstream Democrats' depressing tendency to drift to the right in an insane attempt to attract more conservative voters. Democrats, in choosing this direction, ignore not only American political history, but their very own. The Populist Party of the 1890's failed as a political party, but its political philosophy was picked up by both the Democrats and Republicans, leading to several changes in the way the nation was run - a progressive income tax, women's suffrage, the labor movement, electoral reform, etc. - and infused a liberal streak in both political parties that didn't completely dissapate for nearly a century. Likewise, Barry Goldwater's wildly right-wing presidential campaign in 1964 was a complete disaster for the Republicans - in 1964. The seeds of that defeat, however, led directly to the Reagan revolution and a rightward swing so extreme that even Goldwater himself attacked aspects of the movement as going too far.
The lesson for Democrats is simple: all liberal ideas require to succeed is time and opportunity. Elections come and go, but ideas prove more durable, remaining in the national consciousness until an opportunity arrives for a political movement to sprout and become part of the political landscape. Hell, I could point to Howard Dean's political movement, which led to a dead end in the primaries but also to an electronic political network that was very effective in galvanizing liberal participation in the election. I doubt John Kerry would have succeeded as well as he did had that network not been in place. Running a hard-core, no-excuses liberal in a presidential race is not necessarily a losing proposition, even if the candidate comes to grief on Election Day. Pandering to your opposition's partisans, even if it works in the short run (see Bill Clinton) will ultimately fail in the long run. It only means the party has to resort to stealing ideas because they lack their own.
When we tired of the political talk, we moved to more important affairs, such as quoting Ren & Stimpy and making fun of the videos on VH1 Classics. This proved to be a lot of fun, but it was the opportunity to vent our frustrations out in the open that proved therapeutic. I think we came out of the "meeting" feeling revived and hopeful, which was what the Girlfriend had in mind, and I thank her for coming up with the idea. We certainly plan to hold another one in the next couple of months, and we promise if more people come, the Girlfriend will make her almond cookies, just as soon as I inform her that she made this generous offer.
So you don't subscribe to the Hillary conspiracy theory over why Dean imploded so badly?
Posted by: pwuh | 08 November 2004 at 11:43 AM