Haiku Politics

A Reuters article from today gives us the headline: Democrats use strategy of ambiguity on Iraq. To which I say--what else is new? The Democrats have been using this "strategy" ever since 2002. Their 2004 presidential platform refused to take a stand on the war in Iraq, saying instead that "people of good will disagree about whether America should have gone to war in Iraq".

Here is an extract from that Reuters article:

President George W. Bush and Republicans have taken a battering over Iraq, but it's not because voters believe Democrats have a clear strategy for ending the conflict and bringing American soldiers home.

"If you ask people out on the street what the message is, they wouldn't know," said Joan Lowery, a 60-year-old insurance company manager, at a recent Democratic fund-raiser in Cincinnati.

Lowery is not alone. Only a quarter of Americans think Democrats in the Congress have a clear plan for Iraq, far less than the 36 percent who believe the president has one, a USA Today/Gallup poll in mid-September found.

But experts said the lack of a clear Democratic plan made no difference at all to most voters. Ambiguity has been part of the Democratic strategy on Iraq all along and has worked quite well, they said. (emphasis added)

This tells us what we need to know about the Democratic Party. The Democrats are clearly not a progressive political force in American politics. A legitimately progressive party would serve as a voice of conscience against imperialism, occupation, empire, and war. The Democrats are not that party.

Posted by The Haikuist on Wednesday, October 04, 2006 at 9:47 AM | Permalink