Well its Dean being Dean . . .now (not then) but its more than that really. The LGBT groups are missing a point or they do not wish to admit it publicy - they have been totally cast adrift by the Democratic Party. At some level, the wiseguys in the DNC read the tea leaves and decided that standing up for this community was a sure poll loser.
So they got jettisoned without so much as a thank you for all your dedicated service these lo, 30 years or so.
Well, howdy do. And I hate to also say this, but Matt Foreman is wrong. Dean is the DNC chair and if he says today, on Pat Robertson's network, that the Democratic platform says marraiage is one man and one woman, well, that's what it says. Even if it doesn't.
The truth is political platforms in US politics have always been what Marc Hanna rightly called "gas." They're ephemeral, mean nothing, and can be forgotten or changed on a whim by whomever is currently driving the party. Platforms exist solely to give activists something to get excited over. Sometimes they do get followed through on - sort of - the last time in my memory was the famous "Contract on America" which reached about 20 percent fulfilment before it was quietly (and thankfully) forgotten.
I keep seeing this image in my head of all of these disparate groups that have been progressively (there's a good word!) jettisoned by the Democratic Party over the last 10 or so years - blacks, women, LGBT, the working class. . . playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little disinfranchised liberals and nobody's around - nobody big I mean - except the ghost of Robert Kennedy. And what he has to do, he has to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff. He'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know its crazy. . .
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posted 11 May 2006 04:22 PM
