…if anyone is interested, lol.
- I will never vote for Martha Coakley again, for anything.
- I was at Deval Patrick’s victory rally at the Hynes in ’06 and remember hearing speeches from all the big Dems. Martha’s AG victory speech was flat, dull and could not end fast enough – Dems should have remembered that. Brown, although far from a polished, top-notch political orator, is the far more likable candidate.
- Coakley’s ad strategy sucked. She would run two ads that said “Scott Brown will defeat health care in Washington”, then on the same channel Scott Brown would follow her with two ads that say “Scott Brown will defeat health care in Washington”. Genius!
- Brown, in general, was a class act. He ran classy ads and had a classy victory speech (with a few notable exceptions). People respond to class (see Obama, Barack: 2008)
- Democrats are sucking in Washington right now. They’ve sucked for a long time. I’m beginning to suspect that Scott Brown’s victory is irrelevant to my future because p***y Democrats were just gonna cave and give away the house anyway. I’m not saying that I would passively accept an influx of Republicans into congress, I’m just saying that I am not getting too worked up over one Senate seat. Even if it used to be held by Ted Kennedy.
- I am an unenrolled voter with liberal and progressive values. I have in the past flirted with the idea of registering Democrat. And I do understand and respect the argument that I can’t improve and impact the Democratic Party from the outside and that my participation is needed to make the party more progressive and such. But how do you all keep dealing with the disappointment? The party leadership in Washington is awful. Reid is repulsively bad. Pelosi needs much improvement, to say the least. Dean was replaced with Kaine. Health care was gutted. Little if any progress has been made over the past year. And then we, the left, blow the election to fill Ted Kennedy’s vacant Senate Seat. Why would someone like me ever want to identify myself as an enrolled Democrat?
Please share widely!
Join the Democratic party, and then work on your Town Committee. Get your Town Committee to be more progressive, and to support more progressive “minor league” candidates for the legislature. More progressive legislators means a more progressive leadership on Beacon Hill.
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p>My two cents…if you are interested, lol.
…I think.
I have been trying to do this for nearly six years now. Any tips?
1) Show Up
2) Bring Friends
3) Repeat.
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p>The main thing that I think helps is looking at history. All progressive movements throughout American history — all of them — experienced severe disappointment and substantial setbacks at one stage or another. These setbacks sometimes came in the form of opponents’ unexpected victories. They sometimes came in the form of poor leadership from partners in either of the two main parties — though I think American history indicates, for better or worse, that progressives who work within the party structure have been more effective than those working outside of it.
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p>But despite all of these disappointments, progressives soldiered on. They are the reason we have things like child labor laws, women’s rights, regulation of monopolies, Social Security, Medicare, the Civil Rights Acts, environmental protection statutes, and so on. If progressives just threw up their hands in frustration at key moments, these things wouldn’t have happened. The history — and substantial successes — of various progressive moments in America is what keeps me dealing with all the inevitable disappointments.
I don’t think Coakley, had she been elected, would have made a difference, the way the leadership has acted over the past year.
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p>Whether Reid could have brought an HCR bill to the senate floor with a PO is moot, but for the sake of argument, had that happened, and the republican filibustered, then at least politically, I think we’d be better off. People had accepted the idea of a PO, and with enough pressure applied by democrats, eventually republicans could be blamed for going against the will of voters.
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p>Dems need to get op-eds in red state mewspapers (working on that), buy air time in their media markets while all this is going on, and as we’ve seen with Martha Coakley’s campaign, we need to connect with the voters in that market in a gut wrenching way. It’s not impossible at all.
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p>The only thing that makes what I’ve described above impossible is if party leaders refuse to take a stand, because they, above anything a blogger or activist can possibly do, set the agenda and tone of the debate.
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p>This is just the first round in the HRC process. I’m not giving up.
party leaders who do the right thing.
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p>I don’t donate large amounts but when I do, it’s always to individual candidates, never to party committees.
Your question:
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p>My answer:
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p>So that people of similar convictions will respect you.
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p>But if you don’t care about the respect of other people of conviction, and rather your goal is to always be able to pull back and say “This latest setback was the doing of those guys, not me,” then keep on hanging out as an unenrolled progressive.
I can’t see a future where I’ll ever be a Republican again. To me they’ve permanently become the party of homophobia (and yes, I know Charley Baker is pro-gay.. he still has to get through the primaries).
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p>That said, I’ve never been an enrolled Democrat in this state because so many of them are socially conservative. My first election here, i was presented with a choice of Weld or Silber… the choice was obvious.
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p>All of which is to say, tblade’s argument really resonates with me.
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p>If you enroll today, fewer Democrats (as a percentage) will be socially conservative. You’ll help pull our party leftward.
I look at registered Democrats on this site with whom I routinely interact, like KBusch and lightiris, who respect me and tell me as much. I, in turn, respect their beliefs that them being registered and active Democrats is the correct way to approach things. Additionally, I am not placing any blame on the every-day enrolled and active Democrat. My point is that looking at the way the Democratic Party acts on the whole, I don’t want to be a part of that. I just don’t want the Democratic party, as is, being a representation of me.
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p>Bottom line: there are very few organizations/institutions that I feel I need to “join” in order to earn respect from people of similar convictions.
Repeated from top:
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p>Your first question – how do you deal with the disappointment – sounds like an honest question that can be asked and answered legitimately.
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p>Your second – why would someone like me enroll as a Democrat – we could go on and on about, but I think fundamentally you need to to flip the question back on yourself in light of the following. All of the reasons you listed above apply equally to others you mentioned (KBusch, lightiris). People who are enrolled Democrats take all these factors in stride every day, and you have shown no reason why you are in different circumstances from them. You say “someone like me” but what makes you “someone like you” as opposed to someone who chooses to enroll as a Democrat? What makes you different from KBusch, lightiris, etc?
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p>You know that, perhaps. I certainly don’t. I can throw out a bunch of reasons to enroll, and you can shoot them down one by one and say you are not moved by them. Ultimately though, if you are really going to ask this question to this community, you need to explain what exactly your situation is and what feedback you’d like to help you make a decision.
They believe in earnest that being enrolled and active in the party will better reap the results they want than if they were not. And it may be (and probably is) true. I am different because I don’t believe that my enrollment in the Democratic Party would better reap the results I want.
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p>I feel (perhaps erroneously, I am open to being wrong) that me being an enrolled Democrat would do far more to support the machine Democrats who are more interested in job security and power retention, the weak and horrendous Democrats like Reid. I think by joining the Democratic party I would be fueling the machine-side of the party far more than pulling it progressive. If my Democratic membership card was somehow a different color to indicate that I belonged to the progressive wing of the party and that I reject much of the center-right and capitulating wings of the party, I’d do it. But right now I don’t want to be lumped in with what is now the Democrat brand.
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p>People who are indeed registered Democrats are honorable people doing God’s work. Geez, I have a TON of respect for many of registered Democrat friends here on BMG. I admire the advocacy and action of people from people like Amber Paw, stomv, Kate, all the way through to the BMG Editors and others. But perhaps it is a question of identity – I just don’t see myself as a Democrat. Today, I see that as a restrictive label. Since I am left wing in my politics I feel like I am in the Democratic family, but I don’t see myself as a proper Democrat.
they ain’t perfect to be sure, but they’re arguably more progressive than the Dems.
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p>You’ll give up your right to vote in the Dem (or any non-GR) primary, but in exchange you’ll be giving a registration boost to a fledgling third party, and they’ve got to maintain sufficiently high numbers to be relevant — to get their party as a checkbox on voter reg, etc. Relevancy begets relevancy. If the G-R started getting more power, the state Dems would move leftward to gobble it back up… and that’s exactly what you seem to want.
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p>Move the center of gravity for the Democratic party leftward by joining a party more left than the Dems.
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p>Whaddya think?
I’m a little sketched out with their whole Palestine/Israel thing a few years back. Also, feel that G/R does not fit my identity, either.
but I also think that they are viewed by others as being very strong environmentalists, and very strong on civil rights and liberties, and they take a strong anti-war stance.
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p>The drug war stuff is less clear to me, as is their foreign policy viewpoints. I suspect that it’s less clear and less important to most G-R party members as well.
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p>No party will be a perfect fit, but if your objective is to make the Democratic party more progressive, remaining an unenrolled voter does nothing to accomplish that objective. Enrolling as a Dem might, enrolling as a G-R might.
At the least, I do feel liberated.
Try coming here as a gay man. I’ll never forget or forgive Bob’s explanation of “faggot” not being a violation of the Rules of The Road. In many ways it killed my faith in the progressive movement.
Were I to have responded to that question, I’d have said pretty much the exact same thing (or I like to think I would have; as I had to take medication earlier today that has left me still somewhat groggy, my version would probably have been less articulate and more profanity-laden).
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p>It’s interesting…I took this question:
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p>…not as “How could I ever call myself something as low as a Democrat”, but more “For what tactical or emotional purpose would I make the decision to identify as a Democrat? What would that allow me to do that I can’t do now as an unenrolled progressive & general troublemaker?”
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p>A number of years ago I stopped identifying as a feminist. That doesn’t mean I ceased to care about women and my own place as a woman in our society; it means that for various reasons, I no longer felt that the priorities, values and actions of the mainstream feminist movement sufficiently resembled those that made me want to take that identity in the first place.
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p>I don’t run around town crowing that feminists and Democrats are [insert pejorative here]. I certainly don’t lose respect for people who call themselves either (or what the hell would I be doing on this site?). I DO lose respect for people who for whatever reason decide that my own decision not to take on either of those labels means that I have less of a commitment to progressive ideals than they do – or less intelligence regarding how to fight for those ideals.
I always tell them I am an active member of my Democratic town committee. Then I push them to take a progressive position.
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p>The implied (I hope) message is that my help at election time is not automatic. It is always dependent on their performance.
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p>I spent many years as an unenrolled voter and would sometimes write to officials about issues. When I call an office now I think I get taken more seriously.
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p>The other thing you can do as a party member is to vote on and even propose resolutions at the local committee level or at the state convention. By doing this, you compete with the special interests for your official’s attention.
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p>I don’t have a problem with the identify stuff. I always think of myself as a citizen first and a Democrat second.
The Democratic Party is a big tent that includes the Mike Capuanos of the world as well as the Harry Reids and the Blanche Lincolns. I feel your disappointment with the party leadership, and think they have decided on some bad strategies, thinking that Democrats act in lockstep like the Republicans. They don’t. The only way the Party can survive is to embrace the progressive wing, because obviously putting up a lukewarm, milquetoast DLC-type candidate in MA doesn’t win elections.
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p>I understand ‘why you don’t want to be a part of the Democratic Party as a whole’, but identifying yourself as a Democrat is not as cut and dried or one-dimensional as identifying yourself as a Republican. I voted for Bill Weld (RINO, pro-choice) over John Silber (DINO, anti-choice, a*hole) and made the error of voting for Nader over Gore in 2000 (to my great embarrassment). We’re a big tent with many different viewpoints. BMG is a reflection of this.
Now, I like to play dump-on-the-candidate as much as anyone after a loss, but I don’t think you can call Martha Coakley a DLC-er. Her campaign was terrible and she is not what anyone would call charismatic, but that doesn’t make her a New Democrat.
Especially if you’re gay….
and so do the rest of our party.
all voted against it in 2009. Saying one thing and doing another. Go figure.
stomv, you are better than this. STOP taking small morsels of fact and embellishing it into someone’s true feeling. That’s as absurd as someone telling a joke and turning that into a person’s core beliefs (As in Does President Obama have a phobia or feel “better than” kids from the special Olympics because he made a joke on Jay Leno’s show while he was campaigning? Of course not.)
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p>Many Republicans, myself included, voted/spoke against a bill which would have created thousands of frivolous lawsuits, a practice that already is clogging our courts. We have procedures in place to handle discrimination and we should enforce them.
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p>You’re either being disingenuous or worse, but that has become the way of most Democrats so I’m not surprised.
Racist Republican song
and EXACTLY my point.
…is not as big as you think it is.
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p>As soon as Republicans get behind stuff like gay marriage, shrinking military spending in favor of giving Americans at home adequate health care, ending DADT, not torturing people, progressive tax rates where the wealthy pay their fair share, reforming the penal system, reforming drug codes, affirmative action, and other things I believe in, I will sign up.
I don’t understand your first question. It sounds like you hold policy positions that are consistent with progressive/liberal/leftist Democrats. So you want the same results at the polls and in legislation that progressive/liberal/leftist Democrats want. How are you immune from disappointment now?
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p>Honestly, I avoid disappointment by participating and organizing people. Action is the best antidote to cynicism and despair.
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p>You can do that with or without a Democratic-party affiliation at the voting registry. You need to be a registered D if you want to work with a town committee, and in many towns that’s where you’ll find organized liberals. But not always.
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p>Dem. town committees fall into roughly three categories:
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p>1. Vibrant, active, effective organizations which welcome new members and ideas.
2. Neither good nor bad, with potential for improvement or stagnation.
3. Closed, lifeless, ineffective which shun new members an ideas.
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p>If your town committee is in one of the first two categories, it’s probably worth joining the party and going to some meetings. These people are organized (at least a little) and interested in putting Democrats in elective office.
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p>If your town committee is in the third category, it’s better to work around them, even if it means going to neighboring communities, to get involved in political organizing.
I am not immune to disappointment, I just express my displeasure with the current Democratic Party by remaining unenrolled.
I’ve been trying to feel comfortable with my town committee, ever since I switched from unenrolled to registered Democrat right after the Dean campaign. I am an elected member, have attended more meetings than any other member and have served as an officer. If the committee in my town were any less active or creative or self-motivating, they would be pronounced dead. There is a closed shop thing going on. New members are not cultivated or made to feel a part of things. And by new, I am including myself, because I’ve been a member for a mere 6 years. The chair (the vice chair rarely attends meetings) seems to prefer to keep meetings very small (average meeting, about 8 people) and familiar (people he has known since high school). Anyone showing any signs of life or energy gets little support and usually lasts about 2 or 3 meetings before disappearing onto a mailing list. It could be my imagination (but I don’t think so) there seems to be an old boys thing going on – calling it sexism may be a bit strong, but it’s close. Sometimes the “boys” like to meet at restaurants all by themselves to discuss the things they want done. There is very little discussion of issues at official meetings. It’s more like rubber stamping a pre-determined agenda. Progressive? Hell, that’s not even democratic.
tblade: I can’t argue with what you said, but the response has to be that you work to get liberal candidates that would better represent your positions. That has to begin well before talk of the next election. It doesn’t mean that you go extreme, or purge the party of those not ‘pure enough’, just that you want people who will stand and fight for their beliefs, and not cave at the first threat. Once you’re past the primary, candidate choosing phase, then if you are still not happy, what choice do you have? If not the Democrat standard bearer, your only choice is the Republican. Do you feel that a Scott Brown is a palatable alternative to a Martha Coakley you don’t care for? I didn’t vote for her in the primary. Mike Capuano was my choice. However, once the finals rolled around Brown and his policy beliefs was unacceptable, and I supported Coakley.
I voted for Coakley and phoned my family and network and mobilized maybe 12 people to GOTV for Martha. Make no mistake, I wanted a Dem victory. But Martha “I take vacations to the Caribbean mid-race” and “screw holding signs outside of freezing Fenway” Coakley turned out to be a fiasco.
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p>She got exactly what she deserved. We all did, and I include myself. Additionally, Charley said it best, “People elect Democrats for a reason, and when they don’t deliver … this is what happens”.