Nancy Pelosi vs. Howard Dean - Nancy deserves the credit.

[Andreus]

t-rexx

i respectfully disagree with just about every point you made.

Pelosi's money keeps the members of congress in line, not the voters. if the democrats hadn't been organized they wouldnt have been an attractive alternative.

 

[NW007]

I don't know how many of you caught the CNN political analysts talking about the election results the other night.

They were discussing how many of the newly elected Democrats are far to the right of the party's leadership. They were discussing how big a challenge Nancy Pelosi will have holding the elements of her party together. They said they may be able to do it if they don't bring up the three G's : " Guns, Gays, and God". The newly elected Democrats are to the right of their party on these issues.

My hope is that both parties will get back to resolving issues and stop yelling at each other. Solid results will depend on both sides compromising.

 

[Andreus]

i dont understand what you mean by saying that the democrats are to the right of their party on these issues. Democrats are the democratic party.

i know that the Freshmen democrats are largely moderate and that is a discrepancy with the old lions of the party that are going to be taking over the chairs of all the committees.

is that what you mean?

if it is what you mean then I agree. it will indeed be a really big task to keep them organised, but i think being out of power for 12 years is a pretty big motivator for not acting up publicly. most of their arguing goes on behind closed doors now, an idea that Pelosi admits she stole from the Gin Grinch.

 

[NickCole]

Doesn't matter, Andreus. NPR was reporting two days ago that the people who won the election for the Democrats were fundamentalist Christians, who voted for Democrats in record numbers on 7 November. It's possible that these people suddenly saw the light and will now forever after vote Democratic. But it's doubtful. They were voting against the war in Iraq and against gay Republicans, not for Democratic ideals. That's why the anti-gay social legislation around the nation passed everywhere except Arizona (where it only barely went down to defeat), even as Democrats were being elected all around.

So it doesn't matter how the Democrats spend their money or how much of it they've got. They merely happened to benefit this one time from GWB's phenomenal incompetence and mismanagement of the nation. For the past six years, the Republicans have given us quite possibly the worst administration in the history of the nation. And still, they came very close to retaining a majority representation in the Senate. That would not have happened in any other Western democracy, and it is an ominous sign.

Saying any one group or any one element "won the election for the Democrats" is too simplistic. And it's just not true.

Still, I agree with a lot of what you say here, T-Rexx. But it wasn't only Republicans losing that vote, it was Democrats going after and getting some of it. To some extent that's good, but I fear to a larger extent it may not be.

The Financial Times reports:

While most evangelicals voted Republicans, Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said they had made inroads by broadening the issue of values beyond abortion. “To the extent that there was a fall-off among evangelicals, that was a Bush problem, the morality, the scandals. To the extent that we got roughly a third of the white evangelical vote, that was our values message.”

We all know what "values message" means and I think the Democratic Party is just as hypocritical as the Republican Party when they talk up that stuff, which they're doing more and more. There was a "pro-life" Democratic candidate -- and he won. Bill Maher, in that same Larry King interview where he outed Ken Mehlman, said gays have to let go of "gay marriage" because opponents are stuck on the word "marriage," they want to own it, yada yada yada. He's trying to be practical and helpful but the truth is, yet again, someone who's sympathetic to gay rights is willing to sell out gays because equality simply is upsetting to others. Those same people would never have said that about blacks. That's not good and gays are making a big mistake if we let stuff like that pass.

But I guess ultimately it's a numbers game. As long as gays stay in the closet or vote against themselves, evangelicals will remain a more valued constituency.