A house divided

This archived article was written by: Mason Paur

Last week the democrats won a mandate from the American people.   Not so much because the democrats actually won … but more so because the republicans lost.   Let me explain:   on Nov. 14, former senator of Missouri, Dick Gephart, was questioned by reporters on Cspan and asked whether or not the democrats, now in power, were going to be able to get anything done, given President Bush still held the power of the veto.   His response, “As both Rep. Pelosi D-CA – presumably the new speaker of the House and Harry Reid D-NE – presumably the next majority leader in the Senate, know, a ‘new openness’ will have to be embraced.”
 Gephart explained what that new openness meant.   Within the Democratic Party there are two factions that get along almost as well as republicans get along with democrats; he was referring to moderates, who had just won most of the new seats in the House because of their moderation and the liberal branch, which is what Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid both represent.   What he should have said was the moderate branch of the Democratic Party which just handed over both Houses of the Congress to the Democratic Party, and the far left radical liberal leadership of the Democratic Party, which now rules – a party divided against itself.
 In considering what the democrat’s face there are several things the astute political buff must understand.   First of all, the democrats did not win the election, the republicans lost the elections because of the mishandling of the war in Iraq and republican Rep. Folly’s follies with young male interns.   The first point leads us right into the second.   What platform did the democrats win on?   Again: “The republicans mishandling of the war in Iraq and Folly’s follies with young male interns.”   Point being, the democrats had no plan – have no plan – to end the war in Iraq other than they don’t like the fact that we are in it.
 Why is this important to Carbon County democrats?   Because in two years, the presidential election will be up for grabs and the democrats have an opportunity to win the White House.   But can they win again because the republicans mishandled the war in Iraq and Folly’s follies again?   No.   The democrats will have two years to come up with their plan for Iraq and the American public knows it.   Can they do it? No.
 Why not?   For the exact reasons enumerated by Gephart tonight – to win this November, the democrats had to move to the middle to take republican seats.   However the Democratic Party is led by three far-left radical liberals in Pelosi, Reid and the absolute worse, Howard Dean.   All three fanatic, radical, left to the end of the world liberals who did not win by any plan of their own other than the republicans messed up.
  In two years that plan …   rather “lack of plan” will not work.   With radical liberals in charge of the Democratic Party, moderate democrats who won by moving to the middle, will enter their own civil war and as Julius Caesar said … divide and conquer.     Only it will not be the democrats dividing and conquering.   It will be the republicans dividing and conquering the democrats … again.   Radical liberals will run a radical liberal agenda and get trounced in the presidential campaign again just as they did in 2000 and 2004.
 For the democrats to win, they must find a way to compromise, unite, pick a moderate to run for president – or at least someone who can say they are a moderate until they get elected, like Hillary Clinton who can do exactly what her husband Bill did – and begin to act like a republican.   Kind of like Arnold Swartznegger just did by turning into a moderate republican who is acting like a democrat in liberal California.   Can the democrats do that?  
No.  
Pelosi and Dean do not have the capacity for compromise.  No, worse, they haven’t the grace to even act like they want to compromise or the humility to pretend they want to compromise.   Instead they will implode, elect a far-left candidate; a candidate so far to the left, so absolutely left, the candidate will come close to being a neo-conservative rightwing nut.   A candidate that middle American cannot abide right or left
 Too bad, with such momentum, the democrats could do much with little.   Unfortunately … they haven’t even little, they have nothing.   Nothing but a huge Republican mess called Iraq that Republicans are too smart to let linger longer than the two years they have to fix it … now that they have no other choice.