The Democratic Party still loves us and wants to help us, even though we're bad
According to a St. Petersburg Times columnist:
But the South's tendency toward overt religiosity handicaps Democrats. The Democratic Party's tolerance for individual choices will probably never be attractive to the South. The region is obsessed with (outward) moral conformity. But maybe there's a chance at getting through by going beyond abortion and gays. Sen. John Edwards, to his credit, has been taking a shot at speaking in moral terms of the common values Democrats hold.
Edwards waxes over the virtue in honest labor and contrasts that with the craven actions of CEOs "who give themselves massive raises while cutting jobs." He reminds voters of how this president benefits the wealthy to the detriment of workers: "President Bush has a war on work. You see it in everything he does. He wants to eliminate every penny of tax on wealth, and shift the whole burden to people who work for a living. . . . It's wrong to tax millionaires less for playing the market than we tax soldiers for keeping America safe."
How can this not resonate with middle- and working-class Southern white voters? How can they continue to throw their support behind a party that represents their peripheral issues - as Dean says, "race, guns, God and gays" - but allows the undermining of our national tax system? This is the demographic group that has slipped furthest behind economically over the last 25 years. These are the people most likely to depend upon Social Security and Medicare - the very programs that will need strong federal revenues in the future to survive.
If Southern white voters don't see through the Southern Strategy scam, wealthy Republicans who are indifferent to the plight of daily-grind wage earners, will once again successfully use appeals to racial fears and religiously grounded intolerance to pit people with common economic interests against one another. And they will be laughing all the way to the bank.
Yeah, they're poor old Hosea, saddled by God with the faithless wife who sells herself into slavery.
I wonder, though, what's the reason so many of the rest of the country's middle class has left the Democratic party?
"Among middle-class voters, the Democratic Party is a shadow of its former self. Half a century ago, a near majority of voters identified themselves as part of the Democratic Party. Today, that number has declined to roughly one-third of all voters."
Looks like they've aggravated a whole lot of folks.
Posted by floridacracker at February 1, 2004 02:07 PM