Dear Democrats,
I’ve thought long and hard about this, probably harder than I even had to think about the letter to the GOP. In a way – you are WAY worse off. If this were basketball you would be the Celtics – you aren’t even close to first, and if you make it through the elections it isn’t because you won, it’s simply because you didn’t lose. But you aren’t in last place either. If you were in last place you’d be getting first picks in the draft raffle, you’d have the benefits you need to rebuild. You aren’t even close to first but you’re still a few steps from last – you are in total limbo. In other words your decisions are mostly terrible but you haven’t bottomed out so you just hang there slowly dying.
How did you get here? You were poised to do really well after Bush. People wanted some change, you ran on change, change was a thing you could take to the bank. Build a few crucial policies, show the country that you meant business/could definitively lead when you were given the power to, and otherwise deconstruct some pretty terrible policy choices from the previous eight years. You ruled every branch you could see and…
Nothing. You did nothing. You complained, argued about who was more liberal and basically just wallowed in petty infighting. Rather than show that you could get things done you managed to do absolute shit. Hell – after Bush you could have even made a sizable dent in the national debt, shrunk some new totally useless government departments and looked like a hero even to some middle line Republicans. You were given the entire country to you on a plate with an almost limitless ability to do what you want and you couldn’t do anything.
I have a few ideas about this- you spent 8 years complaining about Bush so much that it became the party’s sole ideology. Rather than be a party about accomplishing things you became a party that only complained about what you weren’t allowed to do. Did that pay off in the elections? Absolutely, but what has it been doing for you lately? You don’t have any mission. You don’t have any planks in your platform. There is this sort of amorphous idea about what you stand for but I don’t think you really know how to stand for anything anymore.
You’re for gay rights until it’s inconvenient and then it’s “bigger fish to fry” even when you don’t have anything substantial to jump onto. You act like you are against corruption until SOPA/PIPA comes up and you can’t jump harder to get your votes in supporting it (or co-sponsoring it for the love of God). How is that corruption? Well let’s look at one of the big co-sponsors of PIPA, Al Franken (also one of your darling poster children)- not only did he co-sponsor it he repeatedly defended it in a public forum (right to the end) despite mounting evidence that it was hugely destructive, poorly written, ineffective, and probably likely to kill more jobs (with its simultaneous killing of innovation) than the piracy it was meant to wipe out. The top donator to his candidacy? Time Warner- one of the top corporate sponsors of the bill. And between the two bills there are a huge number of Democrat supporters in the same compromised position.
It’s hard to take the high road when you can’t stop putting tollbooths up on the low. But even more telling is that when NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) came to a vote last year with provisions to hold American citizens indefinitely without trial (with a record-breaking violation of the 4th through 7th amendments of the Constitution) what did you do? 86 votes in the Senate were cast in favor of this treasonous legislation and you were 45 of those votes.
The White House had that provision added illicitly and rather than take a stand against probably one of the most dangerous and far-reaching laws against citizens’ rights you went right along with them. If this were during the Bush era you would have been all over the news complaining about the bill and making lots of passive-aggressive comments and fighting it the whole way. But you didn’t do that this time, you did what you were told to (incidentally not by your constituents) and showed a lot of people just how little you cared about your supporters’ most basic human rights.
Now I could go on much longer with examples like these but for the sake of brevity I will skip to the next thing you are screwing up. You have no swagger. This is probably due to you not having any central philosophy as we stated before. When the Republicans do something you don’t stand your ground. You complain about their low-blows and lack of ethics (which we’ve seen you share). You go on TV and do your best impression of a kid who is going to take their ball and go home stomping their feet. It’s hard to respect you when A: we know its an act, and B: if you had thought of it you would have done it first.
Here’s the thing- if you don’t get your shit together, stop pretending like you aren’t in the pocket of special interests, and decide what you are in the first place? You are just going to end up hovering in the “good enough to sell a few season tickets” range. No rebuilding, no improvement. Just a lot of whining and winning the occasional game against bad teams that you don’t explicitly lose. That’s not winning, that’s settling.
With hopes I don’t end up in one of your new-fangled CIA ghost prisons where I can be held indefinitely,
Sean Baptiste
PS Do better.
