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Monday, December 04, 2006

What's happened to the Democrats?

When I was growing up, my image of the Democrats was Dan Rostenkowski and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Rostenkowski always struck me as a man of the people, the kind of guy you could see getting faced on Imp and Irons (yes, I once lived on the south side of Pittsburgh) on Friday night. Driven by his intimate knowledge of the immediate concerns of his district, the kind of guy who could motivate spending for widows and orphans, knowing what winter could be like north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Moynihan, on the other hand, was the pure intellectual. The guy who could look at the current solutions, extrapolate to their ultimate ends, and make predictions - good or bad - about where a given government program might take the country.

So, working class guy and intellectual guy. Those are the Democratic archetypes I grew up with.

Where are they now?

John Kerry, for example, is more familiar with wind-surfing, form-fitting cycling gear, and Quiche Lorraine, than he is with, say, manual labor. Hillary Clinton is a power-hungry barracuda. While Teddy may be happy to get faced on Imp and Irons, I doubt he's done an actual day of work in his entire life. Nancy Pelosi? She could buy and sell any thousand Americans.

Samuel Beckett once remarked of the students at Trinity College Dublin that they represented the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick. I say the same of today's Democrat party.

The riches are given (even if they required some dodgy cattle futures trading, a couple of useful marriages, or a bit of whiskey smuggling). The thickness? Well, take recent remarks about the troops. According to Rangel and Kerry, if you're serving in the military, you're dumb and poor. No thought that people might join the military in a time of war out of a sense of obligation and patriotism. And no recognition of the fact that the average enlisted person is smarter than the average man on the street. No, to Rangel and Kerry there's no such thing as duty, honor, country. There's just dysfunction and the handy out. How 1968.

Like the Bourbons, they've forgotten nothing, and they've learned nothing either.

This is a sad state of affairs for a party that's aboiut to take power.

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