State of the Democratic Party

[Belsnickel]

(11-16-2016, 01:12 PM)GMDino Wrote: Honestly Matt I rarely think about or care about "the party" as a whole like that.

The inner workings and the backroom politics are well out of my view and my hands.

But given the results of THIS election it would seem they either need to change their entire campaigning methods or wait it out and see if Trump can be successful enough to carry out a re-election campaign the same way.

Let's say he doesn't run for a second term for the sake of argument.  Pence can NOT run the same kind of campaign Trump did.  Trump had a personality that allowed him to say whatever, whenever and never be flustered about being caught in a lie.  He wasn't a "politician" he was a television character on in improv show.

And he was facing an opponent that had many negatives herself that could not be overcome simply by talking about them because there was always the background noise from the right that she was always lying...even when she didn't and Trump did.

This may have been a once in a lifetime type scenario and we won't see ANY change except in the selection method of who the behind the scenes types want to push to the fore front to run for office.

It's hard to talk about parties in this country because we aren't like others. The party itself is nothing more than the elites that work for it, since there is no real formal membership. Even elected officials don't truly belong to the party. But the identity, what the party stands for, is something that the party in the electorate (the people that identify with the party) and the party in the government (those elected officials with a D or an R next to their name) really shape.

I like progressive ideas. The ideas of FDR, the ideas that really changed our country. What I don't like is that progressive ideas have just become synonymous with social issues. This is where I agree a lot with Webb, and Bill Clinton from the sounds of it from another thread. Those issues are important. The civil rights of minority groups and women are important things to fight for. But the focus on them, the move to identity politics, has just gone too far.

The party of Hillary Clinton is the party of moderates with a focus on social issues to make you think they are actually progressive and liberal. But at the same time, those more liberal in the party focus on those things a lot more than they should as well. It's a tricky situation.