It doesn't matter how great your marketing campaign is. You can't sell your dog food if the dogs won't eat it.So here we are once more. Another electoral drubbing at the hands of the most cartoonishly evil, corrupt, inept gang of thugs politics has served up since the days of Mark Hanna. And we're all shocked. How could this have happened? How can we possibly have lost to these freakshow escapees yet again?---Old Madison Avenue proverb
It must be the fault of the voters, for being stupid. Or the non-voters, for being too lazy and stupid to show up. Or the media, for always being in the tank for the Republicans. Or the purist progressives, because they said bad things about Obama. Or Ralph Nader, for who the fuck knows anymore. Yeah, those guys are to blame.
Ahem. Sorry, Democrats. It's a basic truth in life that when everybody you meet is an asshole, it's time to look in the mirror. Stop looking for people or groups or institutions to blame, and start looking at yourselves. We here are Democrats, and we love to pour scorn all over the Republicans, because it's easy. It's time to pour scorn on the Democrats, because we are Democrats and it is our responsibility to do so. Who the hell is going to fix this party if we don't?
Scapegoat hunters in our ranks are the Democratic party's worst enemies. We'll never fix a comprehensively broken party until we acknowledge that it's broken, and start figuring out what's wrong and what we can do about it. Ralph Nader didn't get us in this mess. Faithful Democrats, supporting the lies and the empty promises and the bait-and-switchery of our party, bear the greatest responsibility for the mess. If you follow the leadership off a cliff, don't be surprised to find yourself falling. We need to form up our own parade and march in a different direction. If the "leaders" want to lead, make them scramble to the front of our parade.