California Democrats decline to endorse Feinstein

[KPN]

100. To answer your first queston: Yes, generally. But I also get and appreciate what

I think is your point: that without a willingness to compromise, we miss out on opportunities to achieve some gain, and that some gain is better than none. Where I have a problem with that (I'll grant you this is broader brush as opposed to specific) is we are dealing with a Party that has lived by the ideology that government (federal government in particular) is THE PROBLEM for 40 years now, not to mention a Party that deliberately established obstructionism as its principle strategy for dealing with Democratic control of the White House and Congress, i.e., filibuster everything. The Federal Government can't solve or make improvement on structural economic problems when it is viewed and treated as THE PROBLEM by the Party that is also willing to hold the nation hostage in order to get its way. Compromising with a GOP that is basically unwilling to compromise is actually more like yielding for the most part. Yeah, there may be some marginal gains, but the movement trend-wise continues to be right -- smaller government, less regulation, fewer worker protections, etc., -- and that's essentially what we've done. And in so doing, we as a party have been perceived by many voters as ineffective which only worsens the situation. Compromising with a Party driven strictly by ideology and unable to compromise on values results primarily in further erosion.

As for your 2nd question, most of those laws are marginal improvements relative to the overall decline in working/middle class prosperity. Dodd-Frank is not an improvement over Glass Steagall in my book (who signed the G-S Repeal?). I'm not sure I'd say that the ACA was bipartisan. The final vote certainly wasn't; not a single R voted in favor of it in either the H or the S. On the economic front, there have been marginal gains, but these are vastly overshadowed by policy movements to the right.

In answer to your 3rd question, it would depend on where the GOP is on a particular issue.

What happened in 78? The tax revolt and runaway inflation! That's what swept Reagan into office and the whole notion that government is the problem which we, as a party, have been relatively ineffectual in confronting.

Having said all that, I grant you that there is ebb and flow over time in public opinion and voting that ultimately influences who has and what doctrines have power when. I am only contending that we are out of power now in part because we swayed too far to the right economically. Yeah, liberalism got rejected in 68 and 72, but that doesn't mean we should be cautious with it now -- especially after the 2008/09 Wall Street bail-out/hold none of them accountable fiasco. We need to fight harder and more openly/visibly for economic progressivism that will work. I agree that Bernie's positions are probably too far to the left in some areas, but on Wall Street vs Main Street, they are not. We need to win back the trust of working class Americans while continuing the strong push for equal rights for all. Why can't we do that?