Whistling past the graveyard at the Democratic convention - Right Turn - The Washington Post: "If you had been dropped from outer space into the Democratic National Convention, you would have thought that we enjoyed full employment, reduced poverty and stared down Iran, leaving us with deeply important issues like paying for birth control for grown women. You would have thought that a large majority of Americans weren’t sympathetic to Israel and weren’t religious. You’d have thought that the federal government had money to burn and no looming debt crisis. You would never have thought that Obama had signed a “historic” health-care bill. And you’d have thought that the political heavyweight in the Obama household was Michelle. (Well, you might have been right about the last one.)Yup. RTWT.
But knowing that the America of 2012 is so very different than the convention portrait, it’s worth asking how the Democrats’ convention became so divorced from reality.
We saw a party in which the inability to tackle the monumental problems of our time ( entitlement reform, fiscal crisis, endemic high unemployment, a nuclear-armed Iran) has left a large gaping hole where its core should be. As our problems have gotten bigger, the party has gotten smaller, angrier and less grown-up. The house is burning down, and the Democratic constituencies want free ice cream.
So, how does it happen that days are spent on abortion on demand (which we essentially have anyway until the Supreme Court decides differently) and contraception, while big-ticket items are ignored?
The answer is twofold, I think. The current state of the Democratic Party is both the natural consequences of a longtime trend and the reflection of a president who is tragically unequipped to do his job.
Constituent politics is nothing new to the Democratic Party, of course. Ever since FDR strung together an alliance of urban blacks, Southern whites, labor and immigrants, the Democratic Party has been collecting interest groups like a girl collects charms for her bracelet. The groups have multiplied (gays, Native Americans, public employees), but the concept has been the same for 70 years. In exchange for votes the Democratic Party will give you lots of “free” stuff. To get free stuff you have to pay a lot of taxes and idealize government as the font of good deeds, so that citizens won’t mind an increasingly intrusive and expensive government. The point is not to solve problems or even measure success; the point is to keep the swapping (votes for free stuff) going strong."
But I disagree with her happy talk conclusion that voters will in the end want to fix the big things and be willing to forego free stuff to do so.
It ain't happening -- we are already far on the downside of the slide where the voters have discovered they can vote themselves money:
When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. -- Benjamin FranklinIt won't stop until mass destitution and violence -- the exact opposite of what these rocket scientists think they are achieving...
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