An answer to rebuild.democrats.org about future of Democratic Party:
Come up with a new definition of toughness.
Currently, you seem to share the same one as Republicans, who seem to think toughness is crapping on middle and working class people who vote for them and bombing the crap out small countries.
Real toughness is taking on the richest individuals, corporations, and banks who break the law and putting those criminals behind bars not in your cabinet. If Obama had done that one thing alone, Democrats would not have lost the Congress in 2010, and his reputation would be in the ballpark of FDR.
Likewise, after seeing what Wall Street did with the first half of the bailout money, mostly squirrel it away or spend it on lavish bonuses and parties, you could have put some pretty tight strings on the second half or better yet, redirected that money to average Americans they victimized, who were losing their homes, drowning under student loan debt.
The conflict of today is not necessarily between capitalism and socialism, but between capitalism and DEMOCRACY. You have to decide which is more important, the will and welfare of the people as a whole, or the right of the already very wealthy to do exactly as they please no matter who it hurts. Right now, Democrats seem incapable of doing anything unless the rich profit from it too or at least tacitly allow it.
Admit that the government does some things better than the private sector, especially things essential to the survival of all of us, including the poorest and weakest, like providing water, electricity, education, police protection, mass transit, health care, and a safe retirement.
Doing those things better makes it easier for people of talent to rise to the top and small businesses to get started.
Learn the right lessons from the right: people care about outcomes not process. Bipartisanship, comity, and "getting things done" only matters if they are things that help average Americans and not indirectly through trickle down, hypothetical side effects of giving more money to the already wealthy.
In some cases, like the privatization of public education, there's the opposite of "trickle down." You are doing real damage to poor and middle class kids by letting hedge fund managers, for profit companies, and the foundations of the wealthy dictate how our kids are educated. By doing so, you are also demoralizing some of your previously most loyal foot soldiers, teachers. Why should they donate, phone bank, and pound the pavement for you when Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel, Andrew Cuomo, Cory Booker, and countless other Democratic "leaders," pursue the same destructive privatization agenda as the Republicans?
Give up on incrementalism. Think big, and have some big, bold pieces of legislation ready to go when you regain control of Congress.
After 9/11, I don't think Republicans wrote the Patriot Act from scratch. They had it ready to go. Part of the problem with Obamacare was the prolonged sausage-making in Congress with the obscene spectacle of insurance and pharma lobbyists having a seat at the table and everybody else being locked out.
In some cases, the businesses effected NEED to be locked out. In particular, you need to return the power to print money to the treasury and take it away from private banks. This one thing would dramatically reduce our national debt and distortions of all policies in favor of the already wealthy.
Be honest about what's going on in foreign policy. We spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined. Russia and China are only a threat to us if we take the fight to their turf first. Lock out the neocons and keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t manipulate events to force the policies they want.
Likewise, more and more people are noticing that our government is most concerned about "terrorism" in countries that have a lot of oil or pipeline routes and governments that are too independent for our oil companies’ and banks’ liking. In many cases, our government is funding religious extremists and mercenaries to overthrow relatively stable secular governments, so groups like ISIS are of our own making directly and not just as an indirect effect of laying waste to countries like Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
A foreign policy that would be a lot cheaper and better for our national security would be to stop destabilizing and overthrowing other countries' governments because they won't put the interests of transnational corporations and banks ahead of the interests of their own people.
You also need to weld shut the revolving door between Wall Street and government, or at least make it a one-way trip. Members of Congress should be barred from being lobbyists, corporate lawyers, CEO's or do-nothing highly paid board members for at least as long as they served in Congress.
Presidents should end the obscenity of after office graft of privately funded presidential libraries and foundations.
As I write these things, I realize that today's Democratic Party may not be able to do any or even all of this. Too many profit from the way things are done now even when the Democratic Party loses.
But Democrats should take a look at the pre-Civil War situation. One party supported slavery, an institution that would be dead in a few years, and the other nominally opposed it. You would think the party on the wrong side of the issue would die first, but the Whigs dithered and appeased the slave-holders so much that those who saw clearly what needed to be done formed a new party in frustration, and the Whig Party died.
Democrats have one national election or maybe two to decide if they want to go the way of the Whigs.
If we win and elected Democrats govern the way you did after winning back the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, you won't get to decide.
We will leave you.
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