Another Realistic Democrat Gets It

Local columnist Jeff Smith of the Tucson Comrade Citizen has an interesting op-ed up on page 5B of yesterday's edition. It's also online. Entitled Dimwitted Dems migrate away from the middle, Jeff pulls no punches. Here are some tasty excerpts:

I don't want to become a Republican. The first time I disagreed with my father over anything more weighty than wanting to stay up and watch "The Mummy's Curse" and he said "no", was over Kennedy vs. Nixon. Up to that point, Dad hadn't really given me any excuse to cross him.

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But Dick Nixon struck me as someone Abe Lincoln would despise, and John Kennedy hit all the right notes: I became a Democrat and never had any reason to regret it.

Until lately.

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After Clinton II, the nation embarked on Bush II, and the Democratic Party rapidly changed from a vessel like Noah's Ark - sheltering all God's creatures who sought shelter from the storm - into something more akin to the "Christina," Aristotle Onassis' yacht and an apt metaphor.

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It was after Bush beat Gore - yes, he beat him - that the Democratic Party left me. It wasn't the other way around.

It was no surprise that both parties said terrible things about each other as the ballots were counted and recounted, seemingly without end. It was no surprise that the Democrats said they were robbed after they lost. The Republicans would have done the same. It was a surprise when my party still sang the same sad song six months later. And six years.

"No Sniveling" is more than a bumper sticker; it's a law of human behavior. Persons and political parties violate it at their peril.

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And as the Democratic Party hierarchy grew increasingly bicoastal intellectual elite, more and more of the low- and middle-class Joes joined the exodus, not out of bigotry but because they weren't stupid: They may not have had graduate degrees, but they knew when they were being condescended to.

When John Kerry went bird hunting in a Carhartt jacket that still had the folds from the box in it and held his shotgun like a yachtsman's telescope, he synthesized and symbolized the state of the Democratic Party today:

The elitist, stooping to offer a limp handshake to the Great Unwashed.

Read the whole thing.

Maybe the Democrats are going the way of the Whigs, and another party will rise, phoenixlike, from the ashes.