Apparently things are not all sweetness and light at the left end of the spectrum. Who’d have guessed it, huh?Donald Lambro Identifies at least part of the problems:
“The argument apparently began when the DLC declared war on former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean early last year and helped to defeat him, while the NDN eventually embraced Dean, despite his antiwar, pro-tax-hike, trade protectionist agenda.”
However, Duck Dean wasn’t the breaking point; it was in fact Bill Clinton, as I predicted in my column in 1992. Lambro says:
“Dean’s insurgency, seen by most New Democrat strategists as the anti-Clinton candidacy, was the event that split the two groups apart. “A serious rift has opened between the two groups,” political pundit Joe Klein wrote in Time last week.”
But despite the left’s best efforts, or perhaps because of them the Democrats know they’re in hot water.
“To his credit, Rosenberg is brutally honest when discussing his party’s present problems.
“Our standing as a party today is objectively much weaker than when we began this (New Democrat) reinvention 20 years ago,” he told a recent NDN conference. “The Republicans have more political control today than any time since the 1920s. They control the presidency, the Senate, the House, more governorships, more state legislative chambers and more legislative seats.
“And our standing with the American people has continued a several generation-long decline,” he said. When President Kennedy was elected in 1960, nearly half of all voters “considered themselves to be Democrats. In the last year, in one poll more Americans identified themselves as Republicans — 33 percent to 32 percent. This means that since 1960 we’ve lost one out of every six Americans from the party.”
Encouraging reading.
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