Happy days are here again — or are they? claims that “Americans are fed up with George Bush’s Republicans, but the Democrats look far from invincible.”
The article cites Crashing the Gate, where Armstrong and Moulitsas complain that:
single-issue groups not only hurt the Democratic Party in its search for a common identity, but they help provide the Republicans with a treasure trove of attack opportunities. While the Democratic Party should be the party of people, it has become, with a lot of help from Republican framing, a party of “immoral” abortionists, “extremist” tree-huggers, “corrupt” labour officials, “greedy” trial lawyers, “predatory” homosexuals and “anti-white” minority activists. After all, these are the loudest and most influential voices in our party…so it’s not a stretch for demagogic Republicans to paint Democrats as a loose collection of selfish people who are fanatical about their specific cause and have no larger concerns — for the economy, the military, or the country.
On the Democrat’s strategy for “Real Security”:
This document would be more convincing as a call to arms if it did not read like a string of phrases chosen for their popularity with focus-groups and then crammed into one sentence after another. For example: “To Ensure Unparalleled Military Strength and Honour our Troops, we will rebuild a state-of-the-art military by making the needed investments in equipment and manpower so that we can project power to protect America wherever and whenever necessary.”Churchillian it may not be, but most of “Real Security” is sensible. The trouble is that its main hard proposals — kill Osama bin Laden, train more special forces, reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil and make 2006 “a year of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty” — sound awfully similar to Mr Bush’s plans.
Where the details differ, the Democrats’ suggestions are sometimes footling (create “a national tyre fuel-efficiency programme”) or daft (criminal penalties for energy companies that “price-gouge”). One throwaway commitment casually promises to reshape the world: the Democrats would “[e]liminate terrorist breeding-grounds by combating the economic, social and political conditions that allow extremism to thrive.”