Penn said:
Carville to NewsMax: Democrats Have 'Disease'
Democratic strategist James Carville recently talked with NewsMax's Paul Rodriguez. Carville says his party must change or it will continue losing elections. He offers some surprising comments on what the Democrats must do to win in 2008. Read the full interview –
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He's not convincing - it reads like a psycho on death row who suddenly got religion. He just doesn't sound like he means it; it just reads as though he feels he needs to package the Democrats better rather than actually change them. And they've always done that, to their detriment. They don't quite get the fact that their product doesn't sell, because people don't want it - not because they don't put enough American flags on the label.
We already have parties like the Green Party pulling votes away from the Democrats - all they need now to seal their doom is a more moderate version of the Democratic Party actually winning offices. You can't base your political philosophy on "not being Republican". When there are other options, you're sunk.
I read a great article years ago by the physicist Richard Feynmann, named "Cargo Cult Science". Among several things, he comments on how the cargo cults formed - native islanders during the Pacific War with Japan who lived on the islands where the Americans landed, set up air strips and left after the war. Being primitive people, they made bamboo and wooden versions of everything, including the radar and radio shack, complete with bamboo headphones. This was done in the vain hope that by mimicking the actions of the Americans they could get the planes to land again.
Of course, the planes don't land, because imitating the FORM of the items has nothing to do with why the planes do or do not land. You can't make a wooden radar, clear a patch of land and talk into a bamboo mike and make a plane appear from the sky. You might OBSERVE this happen, but there's more to it than mere appearance. You're just wasting your time going through the motions. But they keep doing it anyway.
That's the Democrat's problem. They think it's packaging. They think their message SHOULD resonate with everyone, but it doesn't. Carville at least got a couple things *RIGHT* - the messages are broad but innocuous - they don't actually mean anything practical or realistic. Newt's 1994 revolution wasn't smoke and mirrors - they didn't promise a new health care system - they promised a VOTE on a line-item veto. They promised things that could actually be delivered. Vote for us, and we'll vote on a balanced budget amendment - on term limits - etc. No pie in the sky promises of utopia - practical answers to things people actually said they wanted.
The far left could do a lot better if they could grasp the idea that they and the Republicans are a balancing act of opposing ideas that can both be valid. They won't do that, and I've commented on this before. They see their own ideas as mainstream, middle America - they speak for Americans - except for the right-wing nutballs. There's them, the mainstream - and those weirdos OVER THERE. Not right and left wings - us, and the screwballs that no one ought to listen to.
Do you know of a source of ideas that you think are just plain screwy and ridiculous? REALLY out there, like neo-Nazis or flat-Earthers? Imagine if someone claimed they were the flip side to YOUR ideas, the "balance" to YOUR crazy ideas, and they were just the opposite horn to what you propose. You'd answer, the hell they are - I'm normal, and they're just crazy. That's how Republicans are depicted in most left-wing circles. So when they WIN, it simply CAN'T be that their ideas are better - they must have packaged them better. It can't be that people VOTED for them - they must have cheated. It can't be that people believe what they believe - they must have duped them. They simply cannot legitimize the right's views, because they don't see them as legitimate. Since the right is actually just *crazy*, it doesn't matter if they're disrespectful of them, anymore than you'd be "respectful" of someone who believed in a flat Earth.
He's just not convincing me.
Carville, since when?
