The Day After

Alex Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair summarize the Democrats' predicament:

The Democrats are a party of ghosts and revenants, not the most convincing battalion to put against the party of property and oil, of fundamentalist Christians now in coalition with warmongering neocons ranging from Wolfowitz to Hitchens. The most articulate voice against the war fever has been an octogenarian, Bobby Byrd.

Final verdict? We agree entirely with this assessment by Mark Donham, an Illinois environmentalist who sent it along to us the morning after.

"If the democrats do not see this as a serious repudiation of their strategy of trying to 'out republican' the Republicans, then I think we will continue to see the Democrats become more and more irrelevant. Only if the Democrats embrace a new vision based upon real change, change that will mean taking on the status quo in real ways, not just pandering to the status quo, will they return to power.

"An interesting article ran in yesterday's USA Today regarding the lack of voting by people in the age group of 18-24. In non-presidential elections, the percentage of this age group that are voting is only about 25%. That is because no one is providing them with a vision that makes sense, and the smaller parties that might be providing that vision, like the Green Party, don't have the resources to reach them in adequate numbers.

"Therein lies the untapped political resource to revitalize the Democratic Party, but they will not be fooled or interested by milktoast ideas. It's time for Daschle and Gephardt to step down, admit that their strategy failed, and let some new, progressive leadership re-excite the party. If the party leadership looks at this and concludes that the they weren't conservative enough and tries to push their positions even more to the right, then I see the Democrats disintegrating into near irrelevancy."

Meanwhile, the Republicans are salivating at the prospects...