Who Are You?

  • Posted on March 20, 2005 at 4:41 pm

This entry has no answers, only questions. Or, to be precise, *one* question:

Who are you, who-who, who-who?
Who are you, who-who, who-who?
I really want to know

With the theme song from CSI running through my head (borrowed, of course, from The Who), I think this is the question that approximately 30% of American voters – the so-called “swing voters” are asking the Democratic Party.

A lot of pundits and political analysts claim that the a lack of a definitive – or even consistent – answer to this question is what caused the Democrats to lose seats in the House and Senate, as well as the Presidential election, in 2004. I think they’re probably right. So, have we learned our lesson? Apparently not.

Since the 2004 elections – mostly in just the last week, in fact:

he Democratic Party is supposed to be the “pro-choice” party – yet our Minority Leader in the Senate is anti-abortion (although I’m not certain that he’s actually anti-choice) and Democratic leaders are apparently strong-arming Pennsylvania Democrats into running an anti-abortion Senate challenger to Rick Santorum in that state’s 2006 Senate race, and seem to also be recruiting anti-abortion James Langevin to challenge pro-choice Lincoln Chafee for the 2006 Senate race in Rhode Island. Even that eternal bogeywoman of the fringe right, Hillary Clinton, is talking about making nice with anti-choicers. What’s going on here?

  • The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the working class, yet 19 Democratic Senators voted for the debt peonage bill laughably (if it weren’t so sad) titled “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.” A rotating cadre of three to five Democrats helped to defeat amendments that would have provided:

    • -protections for those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, service in Iraq, and identity theft

    -protections for seniors in danger of losing their homes due to bankruptcy

    -curbs on high-income earners’ ability to shelter monetary assets from bankruptcy proceedings in asset protection trusts, and multi-million dollar estates in states with generous homestead exemptions

    -curbs on corporate practices that deprive employees of their earnings and retirement savings when a business files for bankruptcy

    -curbs on credit companies’ predatory lending practices, and

    -require credit card companies to disclose the true cost of the credit they offer

  • More recently, four Democratic Senators – Baucus (D-MT), Cantwell (D-WA), Nelson (D-NE), and Pryor (D-AR) – joined Republicans to reject an amendment to the budget resolution that would have repealed tax subsidies for companies that move manufacturing operations and American jobs offshore.
  • The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of environmental protection, yet three Democrats, Daniel K. Inouye and Daniel K. Akaka of Hawaii and Mary Landrieu (La.) — joined 48 Republicans to defeat an amendment that would have stripped the Senate budget resolution of authorization for drilling in Alaska’s pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
  • The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of education, yet even there, one Democrat, Max Baucus of Montana, voted against restoring funding for the Perkins Vocational Education program. The amendment would have restored the funding by allowing the Alternative Minimum Tax to be restored. It’s not like the Republicans even needed his vote to reject the amendment, they already had the votes to do so, and I don’t think there are a lot of high-income taxpayers in Montana clamoring to be saved from the AMT, so what gives? Why provide “bi-partisan” cover for a bill that takes away one of the few programs that might – might – help kids from poor households get the education they need to lift themselves out of poverty – a bill that was going to pass on Republican votes alone anyway?

    • Who are you, Democratic Party? I really wanna know.

    (Note: go to the dkos diary version of this entry for discussion of the questions “who are we?” and “who decides?”)

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