Let's walk through this one more time. If Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi choose to, they can refuse to bring any legislation to the floor that funds the war. As leaders, they could go to Bush and tell him to pound sand, that they will not provide another nickel. They WOULD have to lead the dems on the right. But they hold the same power of the purse over the blue dog, conservative dems that they hold over the more progressive dems. They could use it to lean on them too.
Now, I want to deal with the argument citing Tip O'Neil's famous quote, "All politics is local." There's some truth to that but let's look at what has changed since the time he said that, over 35 years ago. We didn't have 24 hour cable news. We didn't have the internet. People had nowhere near the familiarity with the activities of congress or the personalities. We live in a much smaller world. Politics IS local, but today, the things that happen at a national level have a much bigger influence on what happens locally.
The bottom line is that the congressional democrats failed all the passionate, hard working democratic candidates out there in the grassroots at the local level. The congressional Dem leadership's decision to NOT exercise the power the people elected them to embrace was a betrayal of the constituents.
The big question is, will the policy of betrayal that failed thousands of candidates throughout the nation in November 2007 also fail all the tens of millions of people who will work so hard, canvassing, phone-banking, writing, rallying to support the opposition to the right winger who wins the Republican presidential primary? Will Nancy and Harry, Chuck and Rahm continue to misguidedly prevent the Dem congressional majority from the tapping the true power they really have?
Maybe that is the ultimate question. We have leaders who won't embrace the power they have been given.
It may be due to spineless cowardice. Or it may be due to these Dem leaders embracing the big business interests who are thoroughly enjoying the profits from this ongoing war. We did see them fail to take on the hedgefunds in recent legislation. Either way, the Dem leaders are betraying the people who voted for them and it actually makes sense that Dem voters failed to come out to support Democratic candidates.
The sad thing is, those voters who didn't show up are the ones who have the power. The supervoters who the Dems WERE able to depend upon are often taken for granted and their calls to congressional offices are marginalized by staffers who say that they don't represent the mainstream voters. Yeah. Right. Well, I know a few too many great candidates who should have won, but those mainstream voters finally spoke on November 6. And what they said was, "the hell with the Democrats. They're not worth coming out to vote for." Maybe the dems ought to listen a bit better to the people who did show up, or even those supervoters won't bother doing the volunteer work the Dems will desperately need come fall 2008.Next Page 1 | 2
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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
