This diary is in response to thereisnospoon’s excellent diary on the real reason the Democrats continue to give Bush his war funding (amongst their total surrender of their agenda to keep people outraged), and it’s to call out the Democrats in Congress who are using the continuation of Iraq as a cynical ploy to get votes to their side.
This strategy is beyond stupid. It’s beyond idiotic. It’s so damn dumb that I honestly don’t know a word to describe how stupid it is. And here is why.
We are the foot soldiers of the Democratic party. We provide the small dollar donations that help to compete with what once was the Repubicon cash cow. We go door to door every election cycle in freezing cold weather, routinely taking getting doors slammed in our faces with a smile, because if we responded how we wanted to such door slammer, we would hurt your campaign. Ninety-nine percent of us work for free. We’ve eaten more crap from right-wingers than the entire Detroit sewer system could possibly contain.
And we did it because we wanted you to put forth a progressive agenda. But now we see that you obviously don’t care about that. You let Bush get away with vetoing SCHIP, shipping jobs overseas, and allowing for the distribution of wealth to go solely to those who are already wealthy, while those of us on the bottom are struggling to pay our bills. And don’t tell me about Bush’s veto power, blah blah blah. If you really wanted to, you know you’d get it through. You got the minimum wage through despite Bush’s hatred of it, you can get SCHIP and the rest of your agenda through as well if you really wanted to.
To put it bluntly: Your base is starting to walk away. This is the volunteer base. The GOTV base. The "I know I’m having trouble paying my electric bill, but I’ll give $25 more to the party" base. We are the base that makes sure you get elected and reelected to office. And we’re not outraged anymore. We’re just apathetic. We can’t and won’t fight for people who will only stab us in the back. And to think otherwise is beyond stupid.
If you want to win in 2008, you’ll pull your heads out of your asses and get the job done. Otherwise expect Romney or Huckabee or whoever gets the Repug nod to be running this country in 13 months. Because we may always vote for you (even if we have to hold our nose doing it), but we won’t be spending our time and money getting others to do it if you continue to prove to us that doing so is a worthless endeavor.