The problem with politics

D.C. "Strategists" Panic As Dems Ignore Them & Fight Back

I was wathcing The Daily Show with John Stewart where he made the quote below and also saw this piece by David Sirota in the Huffington Post Blog and it really resonates.

Living out here in Montana, it has become very easy to spot storylines from the national media and Washington politicians that have positively no appreciation for the textured political views of the American public. It was John Stewart who said this week in a Daily Show interview with consummate Washington B.S. artist Fred Barnes that while people in Washington see things only in terms of Democrat vs. Republican, and "liberal" vs. "conservative" the rest of the country sees things at a much more gut level.

Too many politicians and Washington insiders are more concerned about Republican or Democrat and making sure that everything is a partisan issue. This applies all the way down to local finance and school board elections. No one is focusing on the way real people think or react. I am certainly not a conservative, nor do I support the Democratic party, so am to believe that politicians cares about my position, even though I still vote?

Sirota then goes on and give a pretty lengthy and detailed account of Washington Democratic strategistsand why they are responsible for the the dramatic Democratic loses in the past few years:

...that class of professional election losers quoted regularly trying to prevent just about any courageous Democratic lawmakers from actually doing much of anything. Just look at yesterday's piece in Roll Call where you had this same Democratic cabal saying the party shouldn't mount an aggressive lobbying/ethics crackdown, or look back at the Iraq War where you had the Democratic strategic class saying it was good politics to just blindly follow the Bush administration's lies (incredibly, they are still preaching this kind of acquiescence on Iraq even today). These "strategists" are the Washington, D.C. parasites who are far more concerned about protecting their own tiny rackets of DCCC contracts and candidate consulting gigs than actually helping the party take back the majority.

Today, these "strategists" are publicly worrying that Democrats challenging the President's illegal behavior "could threaten the party in this year's elections." The first quote in the piece goes to an unnamed Democratic "strategist" who says "If Democrats want to be the party of people who think [the government] is too tough and the Republicans are the party of people who are tough, I don't see how that helps us."

This is a yet another perfect example of the insiders influencing how our elected officials think and act, which is often counter-intuitive to their own beliefs. I doubt that 44 Democratic members of the Senate believe and support everything that their party does and say, ditto for the Republicans. However these machines have effectively been able to herd these cattle into line, and there is often harsh retribution if an individual attempts to go outside the party line.