Long in the Tooth

Don't get me wrong, I'm really glad the democrats won the mid term elections. I really am.

At the same time we need new blood and as important we need young blood in government

On the flight home today from nyc I read in The Economist that 7 of the 19 upcoming democratic committee leaders are over 70! One of them has actually been in congress for 51 years.

Suddenly the Who's "my generation" is stuck in my head.

Comments

[steve]

one can argue that the dems have lacked a vision since LBJs laudable but untenable Great Society failed. and that the Great Society was itself just a rewrite of the New Deal for a rich (not broke) USA

what is the dem vision now? the repubs have clearly lost their way but that doesnt mean the dems have recovered from (what i think) is the afilure of the 1960s/baby boomer generation to care about anything other than their own material pleasures and the self-righteous celebration of their ability to offer criticisms of american policies

(they have every right to criticize and are often entirely correct in their critiques, but they revel in saying what not to do without ever proposing what to do)

on a broader scale, the rage of the then-very-young baby boomers over the (supposed) squareness of their parents then vietnam then watergate made well-meaning but empty left-leaning revolution ("question authority!") into the seeming "mission" of the dems. but when given power, the emptiness of that became apparant quickly and the various factions in dems start fighting turf wars and the mass of voters get turned off. jimmy carter anyone?

ronald reagan filled that void with a brilliant mixture of Rooseveltian toughness and aggressive interventionalist foreign policy (RR campaigned actively for FDR!) plus Goldwater-ian core conservatism (smaller govt + lower taxes + free markets + libertarian social views).

yes, to get elected reagan bonded with the religious right -- but it was so yearning for a political home and was willing to overlook reagans essentially liberal social policies (he was a Hollywood divorcee who never set foot in a church!)

now 26 years later the reagan revolution has, like all reviolutions, gone from "storming the gates" to "protecting the gates", and correuption is rampant and the religious right is feeling owed a due and bush's "compassionate conservatism" has failed to rebirth the reagan revolution and the repubs have self-destructed.

but the dems are *still* held hostage (in my view) to the 1960s baby boomer anti-policy (not clear what they are for other than truisms and platitudes -- the environment, peace, equal rights -- but always clear what they are against, even when being so against is in direct contradiction of what they are for (e.g. killing nuclear energy while decrying global warming -- 30 years later we all see what a tragic error that was)

and the best evidence of all this is what you point out -- their leadership has not changed since what, watergate?

bill clinton offered an awesome path to the future for dems, and got elected, by suggesting a "third way". and he and his administration had excellent successes until prosperity made them either lazy or corrupt or both -- in any case, the booming economy of the 1990s made the dems sit back, self-satisfied, rather than forging the new vision and new consensus for the post-cold-war era. which allowed radical islam to fester, and china and india to become super-powers without first agreeing to reasonable shared vision (they are left out of Kyoto, remember?) and now we are in crisis-mode, needing that vision

but maybe human beings can only create and execute vision in crisis-mode?

[bijan]

for me unfortunately it has been a "lesser of two evils" approach which really bums me out. i wish i excited as i was when we all put clinton into office the first time. boy that was a great feeling of optimism.

in any event, i generally believe that the todays democrats are more likely than todays republicans on the following domestic issues:

-stem cell
-pro choice
-separation of church and state
-liberal/moderate judges
-minimum wage
-gun control
-less tax breaks for the super wealthy
-better immigration policy
-environment

[and_tchernikov]

Здравствуйте, уважаемые коллеги. Обнаружил, что мои публикации, например эта http://and-tchernikov.livejournal.com/4570.htm без моего ведома и даже без указания моего авторства использовали на сайте <a href=http://xnnov.ru>xnnov.ru</a>, если говорить точно о вышеуказанной публикации, то адрес http://xnnov.ru/?p=113 Написал пару писем на хостинг сайта т.к. емейл, указанный в контактах недействительный, но пока результат почти никакой. Позже