California Conservative

Showing that she’s an equal opportunity politician basher, “Peace Mom” Cindy Sheehan is thinking about running for the Senate…against Dianne Feinstein. (I know. It took me a moment to realize it was real and not some Bizarro World creation made real.) Sheehan says Feinstein is out of touch with Californians and that she is wrong for voting for the war in Iraq.

To Feinstein’s credit, her staff is defending the Senator, saying she was “misled” by the Bush Administration. (Gee, where have I heard that before?) Regardless, it sets up an interesting Senate race in California for a change.

At the same time as Sheehan’s political ponderings, another group of Democrats has started to shake things up. A group of Senators, including John Kerry and Ted Kennedy, has said that they would attempt to filibuster the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, another group of Democrats, including the aforementioned Dianne Feinstein, has criticized the notion of filibustering Alito’s nomination.

And thanks to another recent even, we’ve hit the “Democrats are in big trouble” trifecta. DNC Chair Howard Dean angering Democrat leaders because it looks like he’s spent the money he’s raised for the party. What that means is that the Democrats have less money now to run an effective campaign to take back Congress in 2006, so they’ll have to do more fundraising and less spending, and more importantly, less campaigning. Yeah, like we can tell…

Taken separately, these events are entertaining, if not downright funny. Taken as a whole, though…okay, it’s still funny, but it’s also indicative of a much larger problem. The Democratic Party today is starting to show cracks in the base. It’s easy to understand why, too. They are in the unenviable position of trying to juggle keeping their base happy, keeping the fringe players like Sheehan happy, and keeping the more conservative members of the party like Joe Lieberman happy, while at the same time courting independent voters if they want any reasonable chance of taking back the Congress in 2006. And instead of being able to do all of this, they’re starting to look and sound politically schizophrenic.

This is a vastly different party than the party that rallied behind Bill Clinton throughout the 90s. You could sense the party was shifting after the 2000 Presidential election towards its current incarnation with how Democrats reacted to George W. Bush winning Florida and, thus, the White House. A smart party would have accepted the loss and worked harder the next time.

The Democrats didn’t. What they did was use the Florida voting “irregularities” to fuel conspiracy theories that would make “The X-Files” look like a PBS documentary. While the party as a whole lumbered forward, they didn’t do a good enough job in quieting their internal dissenters by redirecting their energy from 2000 towards a better goal, like the 2002 midterm elections. This failure to act created the ground for people like Cindy Sheehan to emerge and seem more like a leader than the leaders the Democrats had elected and appointed. And when you’re disappointed with the leaders you got, you start paying attention to people who look like they know what they’re doing.

This discontent is felt and expressed at the grass roots level. I’ve gone to my local chapter of Drinking Liberally for months and listened to my liberal and Democrat friends gripe about how ineffective the party leadership is. The very fact young and old Democrats alike are disgusted with the way the party is going shows me the party leaders aren’t paying attention to the little details necessary to sustain a party.

Now, factor in Howard Dean’s comments from last year saying Democrats don’t need a strategy because they’re not in power. If this were a restaurant, there would be a lot of people asking the waiters and waitresses for their tabs. Well, Howie, let me be the first to tell you that you won’t get a chance to lead again with that kind of attitude. And guess who is there ready to take the reins of leadership.

That’s right. People like Sheehan.

And if you think things are bad now, my Democrat friends, wait until you come in fourth in a two-party race behind Mickey Mouse and Other.

At the risk of angering some conservatives out there, I feel obligated to offer some friendly advice to help the Democrats address their splitting party. It’s really very simple, kids. Don’t let the extremists anywhere the halls of power, except maybe to sweep them after the real leadership gets done with a victory party. Of course, that requires something sorely lacking in Democrat leadership today: actual leadership skills. Without a strong, capable leader to handle matters on multiple levels who can adapt to the post-9/11 world, the Democrats are going to see more and more of their power slip out of their hands due to bad decisions made by people unfit to be leaders. Right now, you’re more likely to find David Duke doing stand-up comedy at the Apollo than you are to find a Democrat with even basic leadership and organizational skills.

And until you do, get used to Cindy Sheehan calling out Democrats.

Thomas Lindaman is a Staff Writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets. He is also Publisher of CommonConservative.com.

RELATED:
CaliforniaConservative.org Endorses
Cindy Sheehan for Senate

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 at 8:23 am and is filed under Activism, Articles, DNC, Elections, Liberals, Op-Ed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.