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I found an article written by a liberal that I thought was extremely insightful and instructive. (I know- go figure 
I usually don't find that. Usually they are too busy condemning conservatives and the message gets muddled in the pomposity of protecting their own views).
The author points out some things rather clearly. We have been dancing around much of what she says in the article here on the forum. Maybe she’s a better writer than some of us (she's clearly better than I am), but she clears things up nicely.
She voted for Obama- she had high hopes he would do as advertised. She also hammers Republicans, but her points ring true when she does. That's something the Republicans already know- their party is broken. However, she explains that the Democrats may very well have broken theirs also.
Some pieces and parts:
The Democrats made the whole thing worse by the way they addressed it. But she is on point about the Republicans shooting themselves in the foot. I could see that happening again.
She is smart enough to know the healthcare plan will increase the deficit (a major issue for the opponents of it) and that if major cuts are made it can only be achieved by some form of rationing. She understands what will happen. Few on her side will admit it.
Again, she nailed it. The recent political movement was created by Americans. Average everyday Americans. The Democrats were not able to recognize that. Their inability to do so did a lot of harm to their cause.
She’s right. I am a product of the 60s. Democrats didn’t want anything from the government back then. They hated the government. What happened?
I usually don't find that. Usually they are too busy condemning conservatives and the message gets muddled in the pomposity of protecting their own views). The author points out some things rather clearly. We have been dancing around much of what she says in the article here on the forum. Maybe she’s a better writer than some of us (she's clearly better than I am), but she clears things up nicely.
She voted for Obama- she had high hopes he would do as advertised. She also hammers Republicans, but her points ring true when she does. That's something the Republicans already know- their party is broken. However, she explains that the Democrats may very well have broken theirs also.
Some pieces and parts:
By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done. At this point, Democrats' main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the GOP's facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen.
But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration's strategic missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have -- from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama's plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)
Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy -- I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were watching staged, manipulated TV shows.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.
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