Letters to the Editor
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@pantanal
Race-baiting goes both directions. Just witness the race-pimps Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson telling blacks they'll all be lynched if a Republican gets elected, or the despicable ad the supposedly nonpartisan NAACP ran in Texas in 2000 that all but blamed George W. Bush for the dragging death of a black man. (Never mind that those men were caught, convicted and now sit on death row--in Texas.)
Enough with the stereotypes already. Yours are particularly bad, as someone else pointed out.
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Vlad the Impaler
Your demagoguery is as worthless and despicable as your glorious leader. If you deny the existence of tens of millions of undereducated white males who religiously listen and watch creeps like Limbaaugh, O'reilly and Hannity and vote based on the brain washing they receive from them. That brain washing intensifies existing racism, anger and resentment. You are as bad as they are and I have no use for right wing morons like you.
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Pantanal--we blue color males object
Can you see the leap you make in the following? Can you see how it really hurts to have you (a) specify a subset of the "Southern white male" and then (b) generalize?
You write about "certain white southern males, typically without a college education, blue color, and with racist and xenophobic attitudes. Those who claim that this type of person is a liberal invention are lying, because there are ten of millions of them around, unfortunately. My point is that there's absolutely nothing a Democratic candidate can do to get the support of the average southern white male."
I'm a white, working-class Southerner with a Ph.D. in the Humanities and a job teaching kids who are predominantly white, predominantly working class, and still politically up for grabs. My politics are always liberal if they are not, as they are on occasion, outright radical. I resent your linking me with know-nothings your suggesting that my students--the children of coal miners and dirt farmers--have no choice but to be ignorant hillbillies.
But I resent even more the idea that, doggone it, we all just have to admit that there just isn't a lick of good you can do for one of those benighted rednecks besides write them off and pity them while the decent folk get down to the business of living life as it ought to be.
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Why democrats lose
if the democrats want to win the first thing that they should do is to forget issues like abortion and gun control. Abortion is a dangerous issue because no major pro-life or pro-choice organization has the same position of most Americans on the issue: keep the government out of it. Few people wants a total ban on abortion, but no one want eight month fetus being aborted. Democrats should wait to see republicans destroy themselves on the issues. Gun Control also only alienates voters.
Democrats should be worried with things like education, security, transportation, not abortion, gender issues and gun control. That´s how democrats won the governorship of states like Wyoming, Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arizona.
By the way, it´s bizarre to see how democrats ignore their own gold like Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas or Governor Janet Napolitano of Kansas to praise mediocre senators...
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Maybe the title is a little off
But the substance of the article has been said before. The Democrats should be inclusive for all races, classes, religions, etc. The Democrats, however, should not be a party that caters to racists of any kinds. Ditto for religious bigots.
If "White boy" means confederate-flag toting, anti-Black, anti-gay bigots, then of course the Democrats should not pander to such.
At the same time, the Democrats should not be pandering to extremists of any race/religion.
Surely, there is a middle of the road that can attract people from all groups into one big tent. And the Dems should be such a party. Republicans will continue to shrink if they cannot reach out to minority voters, who are becoming a larger part of the electorate and may become the majority (as predicted by demographers) by the middle of this century. Those are the simple facts.
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Well to be fair there are already all kinds of PC leftist racists
But they hate who we WANT them to hate so it's all good. The very fact that we're having this discussion right here and now is proof that there are all kinds of Americans that the left would happily watch burn up the chimney. The rednecks, the religious, the Jews, anyone to the right of center, anyone richer than them or less educated as long as they're 4th or 5th generation and so on. And that's fine by me as long as we all admit that what's up here. You can be as inclusive as you want but don't lets claim you include 'everyone'.
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A kernel of truth would help
At the same time, the Democrats should not be pandering to extremists of any race/religion.
Yeah, extremists like the moonbats at Daily Kos, MoveOn.org (and why, by the way, can't these idiots just move on?), etc. And all the Republicans have to do is show the over-the-top ad about Gen. Petreaus, show Hillary and Obama speaking at the yearly Kos moonbat-fest, and the true face of the Democrats will be shown.
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Ya know, a lot of urban middle-class "yuppies"
are white too, and very attentive to core Democrat appeals - healthcare, public education (damn it would be nice not to have to pay thousands a year for a decent high school), the war...
I'm not an angry white male looking for conspiracies, but would you really accept it if someone advocated that a major party just write off another minority? The black male? Hispanic? Asian?
You write off no-one, definitely not on race and subculture. If your policies can help them, they can be persuaded to vote for you.
Now, to say "let's allocate a little less on trying at all costs to sweep each and every NASCAR dad and a little more on upwardly-mobile, big-on-family latinos or (especially) asians", for instance, that's fine. But don't write off white men. We's people too!
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Being a white male liberal is harder than you think
I am a white straight male who has remained a steadfast liberal despite finding myself repeatedly insulted by other liberals over the years. Generally, it's not democratic politicians per se who drive me up the wall. Democratic supporters, as exemplified by the identity politics crowd, however, are another matter. They've been killing us.
Here are but a few examples of what I'm talking about.
Feminists have repeatedly and categorically stereotyped men as violent, domineering, misogynistic, racists whose favorite form of porn idealizes rape and dismemberment while at the same time ludicrously portraying themselves as fighting sexism. They even endorsed a literal witch hunt with the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysterial of the late 80s and early 90s in which they claimed that there was a national epidemic of wives and daughters, having to, among other things, eat their own fetuses and underg ritual sex with their fathers. So profoundly were feminists wrapped up in this hysteria that its supposed reality was affirmed by a cover story of the January 1993 Ms. Magazine entitled "Believe It! - Child Ritual Abuse Exists!" Men who questioned this insane bupkis were accused of not caring about or even endorsing rape.
Let me tell you that Rush Limbaugh started to sound awfully good to this boy after being put through that one. From where I sit, "feminazi" is a perfectly apt term.
Then let's take Al Sharpton. Shaprton was a featured speaker at the 2004 DNC despite the fact that his campaign was financed and, to a large extent, organized by Republicans(http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/conason/2004/02/03/sharpton/index.html)! Why would the GOP pay for a Sharpton run?
Well, let's see. The most famous thing Sharpton ever did was spend the better part of 1988 falsely accusing a bunch of white men of a rape that clearly never happened. During this time he literally compared New York's very liberal Gov. Mario Cuomo to Adolph Hitler and was guilty of whipping up a hysteria in which anyone who showed reasonable skepticism in front of his supporters was vehimently denounced as racist. A grand jury found the story to be a hoax and Sharpton was then successfully sued for slander in court. Today, Sharpton is treated like a hero.
Is it really so hard to see why a white man might be insulted by that?
More recently after Katrina hit, liberals were up arms about the atrocity of blacks being drowned in their own homes and left to fend for themselves. This was a perfectly just criticism for something truly deserving outrage. The only problem is that poor white southerners drown in their own homes just a good but you hardly heard liberals complaining nearly as much about them. Exactly what do you think a poor, white southerner is going to make of that?
What our side has repeatedly failed to do is to explain specifically to white straight males how the Republicans have been screwing them too and what Democrats are going to do to make sure they get a fair shake along with everybody else. When challenged, liberals explain that NASCAR dads will never vote Democratic anyway, so it's no use before turning around and complaining about what a bunch of bigots those stoopid white males are. Nice, circular reasoning that. And so completely free of racist, sexist stereotyping too.
Unfortunately, the identity politics crowd are our True Believers and, like the GOP's religious right, must be humored.
It isn't that we can't get the white straight male vote. It's just that we don't really want it.
Thank God for sexual perversion and hypocricy. Elsewise the situation might be hopeless.