In a post at Battlepanda, Democrats are characterized as "craven": http://battlepanda.blogspot.com/2006/03/cowardly-cowards-d-cowardland.htm
This is dead on. The GOP screws up monumentally or works some egregious evil every single day, and the Democrats can't seem to take advantage of it. Sure, the President and the GOP have bad poll numbers, but is this helping the Democrats?
Folks I talk to (who aren't all that bright, by the way, but they're all I've got) have a couple of explanations for Democrat wimpitude:
1. They're letting the GOP beat itself up. This makes no sense as long as the GOP is still also beating up on Democrats, and the GOP beating would be a lot worse if the Democrats landed some blows. Also, letting the GOP frame the issues is not helpful, and letting the GOP repeat the mantra that its evil and incompetence are not significant next to the terrorist threat just insures that more folks will believe it.
2. They're afraid negative politics will backfire. As far as I can tell, this has never happened before in the history of the world. The GOP is all negative, all the time, and this got them control of the government. The negatives don't even have to be true to work, the GOP has shown. Nobody is ever held accountable for negative politics, and Americans like their politics mean and dirty. Positive message? Who cares? Go negative while you still can.
My explanation is that the Democrats are playing not to lose. If they get the GOP on the ropes, all the GOP has to do is start another war or allow a big terror attack in the US. Suddenly, Americans rally behind the ruling party and blame the Dems for being obstructionists. Dems want to look tough on security and to characterize the GOP as bad on execution rather than being wrong on fundamentals. This may be a good strategy, but it doesn't do much for the country. If we get Dems in power, it may be just more of the same of everything with no recovery of freedom. The Democrats of 2006 are showing how meaningless the notion of opposition is in this country and that we really are a single party system in all but name. Fortunately for both parties, we Americans are too stupid to notice.
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I think the big problem is that the GOP has been really good at getting the Dems to drink the GOP Kool-aid...they'll say something like "the democrats are alienating the country because they're so extreme...if I were the democrats I would certainly tone down the negative attacks", and lo, the dems think to themselves..."can't let the GOP paint us as extremists...we'll just shut up now".
Amazing that a whole political party can fall for this. But there you go.
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