Liberals v. Conservatives....
Dems vs. Repubs.
Must we define ourselves by being the 'opposite' of Bush?
It's questionable if 'the average voter' realized that
A: Communisim is a form of government, like Deomcracy. They are not opposites, exactly, and there are many other forms as well. Nobody is or has ever practiced an effective form of Communism. It will fail itself over time, and very rarely needs much outside help. See: USSR, China and North Korea.
B: Socialism is NOT a form of government, was NOT practiced in reality by the Soviets and is practiced in some form in almost every type of government across the world , including the good ol' USA. See; Social Security, Health Insurance, Car Insurance, Utility Co-ops, FEMA, etc.... Socialism is only the opposite of capitalism in theory, but in reality both models co-exsist to varying degrees.
I say all this to mean that Democrats will have to do better than the 2004 strategy of "I'm not Bush' . There are no 'opposites' anymore. The Democrats cannot define their foregin policy by undoing everything that Bush did , for the pure sake that Bush did it. Here's what I mean:
- Pull out of Iraq. Fine. We can do that. But are we committed to putting those resurces back into Afghanistan ? If the Democrats don't have an anti-terrorist plan that includes going after Bin Laden, the neocons win in 2008 in a squeaker. The party can lean liberal all it's wants, but until you have a Democrat that is about getting out of Iraq AND redeploying American troops to destroy the terror threat abroad, we will lose every time.
AMericans want the boys home. But that's because every death in Iraq is a needless death. If they were dying in Afghanistan trying to find Bin Laden, and Bin Laden was making videos every other week laughing at us, this country would have all the resolve that it had in World War II.
- Israel - It's real interesting how Isreal went from being a Democratic re-election windfall to a Republican device for stealing Jewish and other 'US vs. the world' votes. How did we let this happen? Because as soon as Bushco hopped onto the 'Save Isreal' bandwagon (to get some votes) Democrats hoppped off to show distance. Forget the fact that Bush got a sizeable amount of the ARAB-AMERICAN votes in 2000 because of ONE STATEMENT he said in a debate about how he was 'against racial profiling of Arabs'.
You want to know why Democrats lost the last two elections ? Because the Repubs have appealed to enough DIFFERENT subsets of these voting blocks, that when Democrats do their traditional 'I'm not Bush' routine, they ALWAYS wind up alienating large chunks of their core groups.
SOLUTION: Don't be "notBush'
Be better.
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