Get off Your Duff
Ivins, Molly
Small Favors Molly Ivins Get off Your Duff I have by now taken part in a round dozen election postmortems and stood stoutly for bowling over suicide or Canadaatallofthem. The Democratic...
...The good news is, the ground is where we are strong...
...In this, the shrewd may find just a hint of what our problem is...
...Everybody else hates the DLC and blames them and their stupid, anti-human trade policies...
...That, friends, is political incompetence on our part...
...And where is headquarters...
...I know MoveOn and Americans Coming Together (ACT) and the other new activist organizations are getting criticized, too, but I think they were tremendous...
...We did a good job and they did a better one...
...Also interesting are the number of things people came up with that Kerry never mentioned...
...We don't do well at sticking to talking points from headquarters...
...That he should have won on national security is close to obscene...
...This Administration took no political hit whatever for its obdurate, willful blindness before 9/11...
...Except if you're a real populist, and then you say, "If he was to give away...
...Nobody could do it: They promptly insisted on at least ten things, then twelve, and then proceeded to fight over the order in which the twelve should be listed...
...Because Bush and Rummy are so "resolute...
...I never get them-not that I want them...
...Unbelievable...
...I'm no Pollyanna, but people are out here-even in the reddest of states-finding solutions, doing great work, showing us where we should be heading...
...We can learn from Karl Rove without having to be like Karl Rove...
...No more than two or three things...
...On the other hand, we lost to George W. Bush, a man with a record so pitiful, so ugly, that losing to him seemed a political impossibility...
...The Democratic Leadership Council blames everybody else in the party for Kerry's loss...
...Initially, I had little sympathy for those suggesting that this was our equivalent of the Goldwater slaughter of 1964, and so it is time for a complete rebuilding program, from the ideas up...
...This could be an extension of the "We Gotta Have at Least Twelve Things Syndrome," but some of them were startlingly basic...
...Or maybe it just means we're Democrats...
...And you will feel much better...
...That is a landslide...
...The question nobody could answer was, "What do we stand for...
...Even after we went in, having pissed off most of the world, maybe we still had a shot at doing more good than harm, but this bunch is so arrogant, so divorced from reality, in such an ideological straitjacket, they blew the whole thing...
...Coordinating and organizing better will not turn us into Republicans...
...And we have the perfect disaster that is Iraq...
...The environment, for example...
...Here's one true thing I know: If you sit on your duff thinking about all the things we did wrong, you will feel worse and worse...
...It is not even a mandate...
...And it may well call for rebuilding from the ground up...
...Trying to organize liberals is like trying to herd cats...
...Molly Ivins, co-author of "Bushwhacked," writes in this space every month...
...Whereas, if you get up off your duff and go out and try to fix something, anything, you will be contributing to new strategies for all of us...
...And the populists helpfully point out that John Kerry couldn't connect to a working class American if he were to give away cases of Bud-weiser and packs of Slim-Jims...
...Lyndon won with 61 percent in '64...
...Are there talking points for Democrats...
...The interest-group liberals refuse to cede an inch, each pointing out that if only their group-women, blacks, browns, Asian Americans-had gotten a little more attention, we could have won this thing...
...Bush and his aides weren't just wrong, they lied and lied and lied...
...But for us, this was an impressive display of unity...
...And paid no political price...
...Quick...
...51 percent is not a landslide...
...The best question I heard asked on any panel was by Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times who, after holding forth quite eloquently for hope, inquired, "Am I full of bullshit...
Vol. 69 • February 2005 • No. 2
