A man without a party: being a liberal in late 2007

There is a storm brewing. Look around, you can see the dark clouds swelling up. The Democratic party doesn’t seem to see it, and they aren’t preparing for it. As a result, it may hit them a hell of a lot harder than they’re anticipating.

The storm is 2008. One of the things that has become increasingly obvious is that the Democrats are thinking they’re invincible. They’re high off of the 2006 victory and the disaster of, well, everything the president has been doing. You watch the debates and they generally talk about each other while making periodic potshots at Rudy or Fred Thompson. It wouldn’t be hard to watch a Democratic debate and think that they aren’t campaigning to get the nomination, they think that’s in the bag but they need to find out who gets it.

Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be picking up on the growing discontent at the fact that they aren’t doing what they got put into office to do, which includes putting a stop to the president. They rode Republican bumbling into Congress, but now that they’ve got a hold of the legislative branch, they take a large amount of the blame for what happens. They point at Iraq, it’s partly their fault for folding on the budget. The same goes for any of the various other things they should have done but relented on.

That leaves many of us poor liberal loons in a state of political limbo.

The greatest mistake that seems to be rolling strong is that the Democrats think there’s no way anyone would ever vote Republican. How could they? They’re all lunatics fighting over who’d bomb Iran first. Except for Ron Paul and no one listens to him anyway. The voters are going to be voting against Bush just like 2006 and to a lesser extent 2004.

Only, they won’t. I’ve often marveled at Bush’s ability to go from a 90% approval rating to under 30, but that’s finding itself some competition in the form of Congress’s drop to less than 20% from it’s post-election high.

There’s a big difference between Bush’s cataclysmic drop and the 110th Congress’s, however. Bush’s drop is more like roughly 20 points, since prior to the irrational spike post-9/11 he was barely cracking 50%. On his own merits, Bush was a sub-50% president, and now he’s a sub-30%. Congress’s approval shot up because people wanted the Democrats to take charge and do some good.

Did they? There’s a reason that number sank like a rock.

If there’s one thing the Dems can always be counted on, though, it’s their inability to figure something out that’s staring them in the face. We’ve seen it before and it’s sneaking up again.

There’s an old joke that Republicans have bad ideas and Democrats have no ideas. It ain’t true. The Democrats have plenty of ideas, they’re just so easy to kowtow that they never act upon them. They talk a tough game, obviously they have some values in there somewhere, we just have yet to see them follow through.

Republicans have no brains, Democrats have no balls.

I would love to see Ron Paul and Kucinich or Gravel take the nominations. At the very least, that would give us a true battle of ideals, a pair of men who honestly speak their positions and the voters would have the rare opportunity to look at two sets of ideals and get to decide which is better for the nation.

However, I don’t see that happening. Republicans aren’t going to pick a nominee that’s so vociferously against half of the neocon doctrine and the Democrats sure as hell aren’t going to pick someone that isn’t moderating. In all likelihood it’s going to be Rudy and Hillary, with a possibility of Obama, battling it out.

There is a distinct possibility that when we go to the polls in November of 2008 it’s going to be a choice between a guy who cheered Bush’s disastrous ideas or a lady who did fuck all to stop him. We’re going to have to decide if we prefer a normal rubber stamp or one that has a frowny face on it.

In a way, I can’t help but envy conservatives. Their politicians do exactly what they say they will. You elect some wingnut neoconservatives who say they’ll fight to turn back Roe v Wade and will put prayer back in school and by gum they’re gonna fight tooth and nail to do it. I don’t envy the fact that conservatives never seem to notice when their ideas fail miserably, but I envy the reliability of their politicians.

At the same time I’m angry about what the GOP is doing, I’m angry about what the Democrats aren’t doing. I holler about the opposite party’s idiocy and my own party’s complacency. The list of political actors for me to hold up in any regard is small indeed (Dodd, Gravel, Kucinich, Leahy, occasionally Reid but not often, Feingold).

What’s the solution? Third-party voting? Not likely. More campaigning, putting better politicians in? Maybe. Speaking out even louder, until the Democrats listen? Hopefully. I’d like to figure it out soon, though.