Shorter Krugman: Get your thumb out of your ass Senator Carper
Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking positions that satisfy their party’s base and appealing to the broader public…. But a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party’s base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party’s leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions.
Iraq is the most dramatic example…. It took an angry base to push the Democrats into taking a tough line in the midterm election. And it took further prodding from that base — which was infuriated when Barack Obama seemed to say that he would support a funding bill without a timeline — to push them into confronting Mr. Bush over war funding. (Mr. Obama says that he didn’t mean to suggest that the president be given “carte blanche.”)
…
Health care is another example of the base being more in touch with what the country wants than the politicians. Except for John Edwards, who has explicitly called for a universal health insurance system financed with a rollback of high-income tax cuts, most leading Democratic politicians, still intimidated by the failure of the Clinton health care plan, have been cautious and cagey about presenting plans to cover the uninsured.
But the Democratic presidential candidates — Mr. Obama in particular — have been facing a lot of pressure from the base to get specific about what they’re proposing. And the base is doing them a favor…. There’s no conflict between catering to the Democratic base and staking out positions that can win in the 2008 election, because the things the base wants — an end to the Iraq war, a guarantee of health insurance for all — are also things that the country as a whole supports. The only risk the party now faces is excessive caution on the part of its politicians. Or, to coin a phrase, the only thing Democrats have to fear is fear itself.
– Directly lifted from Daily Kos
“but a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party’s base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party’s leaders”
I couldn’t agree more, the media whines and bitches that the “base” gets their way, maybe it’s because the base on the left is more in touch with what people want.
Politicians continue to drift where the money is and it is our job to drag them back to where the people are.
The media is operating under the fallacy that the “truth” is basically the average, or the mid-point between the “conservative” position and the “liberal” position.
The fact is that there is a liberal consensus in this country, so the “conservatives” gets undue weight in the press AND the notion that “the truth is somewhere in the middle” is complete BS.
The end result is that politicians like Tom Carper listen to the Ron Williams and Celia Cohens of the world more than they listen to their constituents, so you get this phony “moderation” held up as if it is some kind of virtue.
I’d like to point out that all the good things that have happened for Democrats and the country happened after Democrats started acting like Democrats and stopped acting like DLC pussies and imitation Republicans.
Pardon my French.
Amen to #3. I just hope that this lesson sinks in, and now that the Dems are a dominant party, they don’t immediately start imitating the policies that put the GOP’s asses (and our contry’s) in a wringer.