When conservatives look at the newspapers, they see liberal columnists who pick out every tiny piece of evidence or pseudo-evidence of Republican vileness, and then dwell on it and obsess over it until they have lost all perspective and succumbed to fevers of incoherent rage. They see Democratic primary voters who are so filled with hatred at George Bush and John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney that they are pulling their party far from the mainstream of American life. They see candidates who, instead of trying to quell the self-destructive fury, are playing to it. "I am furious at [Bush] and I am furious at the Republicans," says Dick Gephardt, trying to sound like John Kerry who is trying to sound like Howard Dean.Isn't this exactly how the Republicans were about Clinton? Remember Newt Gingrich and Ralph Reed? Remember how they just could not get it that Americans weren't interested in their silly crusade or their Moral Majority sermonizing? And how puffed up and spluttering they were about it? And how the more they fulminated the more they alienated people?
It's mystifying. Fury rarely wins elections. Rage rarely appeals to suburban moderates. And there is a mountain of evidence that the Democrats are now racing away from swing voters, who do not hate George Bush, and who, despite their qualms about the economy and certain policies, do not feel that the republic is being raped by vile and illegitimate marauders. The Democrats, indeed, look like they're turning into a domestic version of the Palestinians--a group so enraged at their perceived oppressors, and so caught up in their own victimization, that they behave in ways that are patently not in their self-interest, and that are almost guaranteed to perpetuate their suffering.
. . . Many Democrats feel that George Bush is just running loose, transforming the national landscape and ruining the nation, and there is nothing they can do to stop him.
Wherever Democrats look, they sense their powerlessness. Even when they look to the media, they feel that conservatives have the upper hand. . . . When they look to the culture at large, many Democrats feel that the climate is so hostile to them they can't even speak up.
One would think the Dems would remember that, wouldn't one? Megan remembers, and formulates Jane's Law:"The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane."
It's always the beam in our own eye, isn't it?
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