YoungDemCA
YoungDemCA's JournalA better question to ask, IMO, is "what will it take to get more Democrats to the polls?"
When Democrats turn out -as we saw in the 2012 and especially the 2008 presidential elections - Democrats win. Simple logic, right? Unfortunately, the last two midterm elections saw a big drop off in the number of Democratic voters. I blame this on three things:
1) Democratic voters being disproportionately working class/poor, lower-income, and as a result, having a lot less time to even think about politics, or pay attention, because of the stresses of daily life - especially since the Great Recession and the deeeply uneven recovery.
2) Republican lawmakers in many states being acutely aware of who votes for them - and who doesn't (What do you think all those Voter ID and other restrictive voting laws were about? 
).
3) Intense negative media attention directed at President Obama - and by extension, the Democrats. A lot of Democratic candidates for office last time around weren't even willing to say that they had voted for the Democratic President. Pathetic!
That's how I see it. Furthermore, we can't just go home once the elections are over. Elections are but one part of the democratic process. And the right-wingers have been pulling no punches, and are showing us no quarter.
All of this is why building truly grassroots social movements, organizing, agitating, etc. is the only way forward. You can't just passively rely on politicians to "do the right thing." That never happens!
Lynching and Race Riots in the United States,1880-1950 (Robert A. Gibson, Yale, 2004)
In light of recent events - in Baltimore, in NYC, in Ferguson, and all across America:
The historical record is brutally clear. This is incredibly ugly stuff, and the worst part is: not only does the impact of this history continue to be felt, but Black lives still are in grave danger-and often times, lethally so - on a daily basis.
This history matters, to understand the present...
Immediately following the end of Reconstruction, the Federal Government of the United States restored white supremacist control to the South and adopted a laissez-faire policy in regard to the Negro. The Negro was betrayed by his country. This policy resulted in Negro disfranchisement, social, educational and employment discrimination, and peonage. Deprived of their civil and human rights, Blacks were reduced to a status of quasi-slavery or second-class citizenship. A tense atmosphere of racial hatred, ignorance and fear bred lawless mass violence, murder and lynching.
snip:
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the lynching of Black people in the Southern and border states became an institutionalized method used by whites to terrorize Blacks and maintain white supremacy. In the South, during the period 1880 to 1940, there was deep-seated and all-pervading hatred and fear of the Negro which led white mobs to turn to lynch law as a means of social control. Lynchings open public murders of individuals suspected of crime conceived and carried out more or less spontaneously by a mob seem to have been an American invention. In Lynch-Law, the first scholarly investigation of lynching, written in 1905, author James E. Cutler stated that lynching is a criminal practice which is peculiar to the United States.
Most of the lynchings were by hanging or shooting, or both. However, many were of a more hideous nature - burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture. Lynching therefore was a cruel combination of racism and sadism, which was utilized primarily to sustain the caste system in the South. Many white people believed that Negroes could only be controlled by fear. To them, lynching was seen as the most effective means of control.
snip:
In the decade immediately preceding World War I, a pattern of racial violence began to emerge in which white mob assaults were directed against entire Black communities. These race riots were the product of white society's desire to maintain its superiority over Blacks, vent its frustrations in times of distress, and attack those least able to defend themselves. In these race riots, white mobs invaded Black neighborhoods, beat and killed large numbers of Blacks and destroyed Black property. In most instances, Blacks fought back and there were many casualties on both sides, though most of the dead were Black.
Gunnar Myrdal opposed the use of the term "riots" to describe these interracial conflicts. He preferred to call this phenomena a terrorization or massacre, and (considered) it a magnified, or mass, lynching. Race riots occurred in both the North and South, but were more characteristic of the North. They were primarily urban phenomena, while lynching was primarily a rural phenomenon.
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1979/2/79.02.04.x.html#e
If you're not angry yet, you're not and haven't been paying attention.
+1. All of the OP's examples are speeches from politicians
Guess what, Obama and both Clintons give inspiring speeches too.
Why do the Democrats* in the OP get a pass on their actual records-which were quite complicated, and had positive AND negative outcomes, depending on the issues, circumstances, and historical, political, economic, and social conditions of the time?
This isn't history, this is historical fiction. Or better yet, romanticizing the past.
*And it couldn't have anything to do with race or gender. No, even dare suggesting that would be "divisive" or "offensive." Well, I find this OP divisive and offensive, because it's being used to criticize contemporary Democrats for not being "tough" or 'strong" enough. For not standing up for "the American people". Assuming that FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ were all "principled" Saints, of course. Come on.
Feminism versus multiculturalism: Excerpts from the article by Leti Volpp (2001)
If you haven't read this article, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Volpp makes a compelling and provocative argument.
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Citation: Volpp, L. (2001). Feminism versus multiculturalism. Columbia Law Review, 1181-1218.
Full article: http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=facpubs
The divison between economic and social justice is a false one
And is generally a division that is conceptualized by people whose basic rights are not under constant assault, or whose opportunities are not being denied, or who are constantly being thought of as less than human by the dominant culture, or who are not otherwise being dismissed, marginalized, and oppressed.
Wanna talk about economic justice? Let's talk about economic justice.
How about the fact that the majority of American women work outside the home, and many of whom experience various forms of harassment and discrimination - some forms more obvious than others, but all of it dehumanizing - in their work experiences? From being paid less, to being passed over for promotions, to experiencing sexual harassment from employers or co-workers? (Let alone, what happens on the street).
How about all of the women, particularly many lower-status women (poor women, women of color, less educated immigrants) who can't afford to go to work because someone has to take care of their children?
How about all of the employment-based discrimination, and discrimination built into marriage law, against gay and lesbian couples?
How about how deindustrialization, the Great Recession, and economic downturns in general have hit the black working class and other communities of color the hardest - especially when you consider that many in these groups had little to no economic clout to begin with?
How about the fact that the solid majority of the American working class (if you include sub-minimum wage, under-the table labor, or unpaid labor in general - i.e. domestic, agricultural, etc. labor), the vast majority of the very poor, the hardest hit by cutbacks to social services and unemployment benefits and food stamps and other forms of "welfare"-are women, minorities, and immigrants?
Women (including the majority of women - who work inside and outside the home, and regardless of whether their labor is compensated or not by wages), people of color (including black Americans, Latinos, "Asian-Americans", and other highly diverse communities that all fall out of the white mainstream, and the majority of whom are poor and/or working class) LGBT (who, contrary to popular stereotypes, are by and large not upscale, effeminate middle-class white men living in gentrified, trendy cities )-all of these communities and groups have been on the FRONTLINES of struggles for economic and social justice.
The two are not separate. And violence -both state and interpersonal, committed against women, people of color, the LGBT community- is also an economic issue, for what it's worth. Put it this way: Whose wallets suffer more, when their son is killed, when their husband is arrested and sent to prison, when they can't go to work for a while because they've been victimized/traumatized by sexual violence, when their entire neighborhoods' housing values drop drastically as soon as they move in, because more affluent white people move away (out of racist fears of the potential attraction of the "criminal element" to the neighborhood)?
The so-called "social issues activists" have been on the front lines for economic justice for a long, long time. They are inseparable for those who have always been subordinated by the privileged and powerful. Maybe there's something to that inseparability. 
For those who have (understandably) been frustrated at times with the Presidency of Barack Obama...
..in terms of a relative lack of progress on some important issues, particularly in recent years:
Until we find a way to somehow get a significant number (at the very least) of the 298 clowns and jokers out of that building that is located at the following coordinates:
38° 53? 23.29? N, 77° 0? 32.81? W
...we won't be seeing much progress on many substantive issues of public policy at the federal level, in terms of making fundamental, long-term, sweeping changes that will positively affect American society.
President Obama can and has done a lot of good things, but he can't make the law by himself. That's the job of another branch of government. A reminder-who controls that other branch of government?
Only one problem...
Well, 298 problems.
You can find them at the following latitude/longitude coordinates:
38° 53? 23.29? N, 77° 0? 32.81? W
The True Cost of Gun Violence in America (Mother Jones)
Jennifer Longdon was one of at least 750,000 Americans injured by gunshots over the last decade, and she was lucky not to be one of the more than 320,000 killed. Each year more than 11,000 people are murdered with a firearm, and more than 20,000 others commit suicide using one. Hundreds of children die annually in gun homicides, and each week seems to bring news of another toddler accidentally shooting himself or a sibling with an unsecured gun. And perhaps most disturbingly, even as violent crime overall has declined steadily in recent years, rates of gun injury and death are climbing (up 11 and 4 percent since 2011) and mass shootings have been on the rise.
Yet, there is no definitive assessment of the costs for victims, their families, their employers, and the rest of us—including the major sums associated with criminal justice, long-term health care, and security and prevention. Our media is saturated with gun carnage practically 24/7. So why is the question of what we all pay for it barely part of the conversation?
Nobody, save perhaps for the hardcore gun lobby, doubts that gun violence is a serious problem. In an editorial in the April 7 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, a team of doctors wrote: "It does not matter whether we believe that guns kill people or that people kill people with guns—the result is the same: a public health crisis."
snip:
"Two years ago, we called on physicians to focus on the public health threat of guns. The profession's relative silence was disturbing but in part explicable by our inability to study the problem. Political forces had effectively banned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies from funding research on gun-related injury and death. The ban worked: A recent systematic review of studies evaluating access to guns and its association with suicide and homicide identified no relevant studies published since 2005."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/true-cost-of-gun-violence-in-america
Dubya is trying to rehabilitate the family name
By bashing Obama, so as to distract from the substance of his brother's nefarious plans for America after 2016.
A lot of people have already forgotten his own failed foreign policy - a foreign policy that other Republicans (his brother among them) subscribe to.
I hope this strategy doesn't work, but American voters' attention spans are notoriously short.
18%
That's about the percentage of the Voting Eligible Population (VEP) in America that voted for Republicans in the last midterm election. Additionallly, the percentage of the Voting Age Population (VEP) that voted for the GOP in the same election is 14%.
Compare that to President Obama's numbers in 2012: roughly 29% of the VEP and 27% of the VAP.
For reference:
http://www.electproject.org/2012g
http://www.electproject.org/2014g
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