Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Advice for Democrats

What follows needs to be knocked into every Progressive and Liberal head (and especially keep it in mind during the upcoming ongoing neverending immigration debate [my paragraph breaks]):

Alterman: Believe it this time, buster - Altercation - MSNBC.co
m: "Correspondence Corner:

Name: Dave Jones
Hometown: Minneapolis, MN
For being opportunists, we sure miss plenty of them. Example: Confronting Mike from Idaho and beating him to dust over his views is a very poor way to attract him as a supporter. I vote Democrat and agree with almost everything fact-wise and policy-wise the correspondents say, but I disagree with their confrontational approach toward our new friend, Mike from Idaho.

It took a lot for Mike to turn sour on Mr. Bush, someone he believed in. It's rough sledding to be disillusioned, to have trust betrayed by faithless incompetents. Yet, all of the correspondents who made print stepped on Mike's pain and ignored the subtle overtures. They merely attacked his statements without caring what was behind them.

'Which Democrats have attacked Christians, huh? What were their names, what were they wearing? Well?! You don't know!! Ha!' Nice. We win on 'Jeopardy!', and all Idaho votes for the GOP in '08.

Look, if Mike and others believe that Democrats are unfriendly to people of faith, then maybe we're doing a crappy job of communicating. For whatever reasons, Democrats ended up frustrating and offending Mike and others.

I don't pretend to understand their whole life, but we might understand better if we really listened instead of just attacking non-conforming statements with our trademark pettiness. Someone in Democratic authority should take some ownership for driving people like Mike into GOP arms; it wasn't inevitable or necessary.

It's inconceivable to me that we would do anything but welcome Mike into the tent. He's who we need to add to the party, not me of Minneapolis, not Jim of Madison, and not Bruce Springsteen of Greater Freehold, NJ; we're already in. Idaho can be a blue state, as can any other where we're willing to put in the time to listen."


Maybe I'm no longer howling alone in the wilderness. We have two people to blame for our current political situation-- thee and me.

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