The Chris Moeller Archives

What awaits the Democrats

2010 will not be a fun year for Democrats. They'll be forced to take their medicine in November for failing to move on any reforms of substance, whether it be health care, the economy and homeowner protection, civil liberties, or for their war mongering in far-off Muslim countries.

But the traditional news media won't paint the coming collapse that way, of course. The Republican Party will be the great beneficiary of the Democrats' destruction, and so the "revolution" will be sold as a rightward shift by the electorate. You and I will know better, though, because we know about this little-noticed poll released during the Thanksgiving holiday.

The November '10 thumping will have nothing to do with conservatives racing to the polls in vast numbers, or moderates moving to the right. It will have to do with Democrats simply staying home on election day out of disgust. Call it the Obama Hangover.

The Research 2000 poll site, which surveyed 2,400 Americans between November 22 and 25, found that 40% of self-identified Democrats already say they "are not likely to" or "definitely won't" vote in next year's mid-term elections. Self-identified Republicans were three times more likely to say they would vote next year.

Wow. Ugly.

Can we acknowledge finally that liberals simply don't have anybody for whom to vote? We want the U.S. out of war in the Middle East. We get war escalation from our president to the tune of $1 million per year PER SOLDIER in Afghanistan. We want health care as in an inalienable right. We get 2,000 pages of giveaways to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

I say "right on" to stiffing the office-seekers. If we can't get principled, liberal contenders, then the next best option is to just stay home. Like that old bumper sticker says-- If God had wanted us to vote, he'd have given us candidates.

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I'm trying to figure out why the circumstances that led up to a single-car accident involving a sports celebrity who was neither drunk nor engaged in any criminal behavior is any of my business. It's a hell of a leap from car crash to marital infidelity for prying commentators and talking-head baffoons demanding a "full accounting" of the night's events. Even the biggest stars in the world deserve a fundamental right to marital privacy. Tiger Woods owes me nothing.

But then again, I don't buy Tiger Woods products. I've already sworn them off. I don't drink Gatorade. I don't wear Nikes. I don't have an American Express card. I don't drive a Buick. I have no idea what the hell Accenture is. Titleist is a dirty word with five too many letters. Tiger already lost me due to his true moral shortcomings-- that is, his partnership with Chevron (in a golf tournament he'll ironically miss this weekend), a global corporation that props up dictators and serves as one of the world's largest polluters; and his ongoing failure to address any of the long-standing charges of sweatshop and child labor employed in the manufacturing of Nike shoes. Tiger Woods owes me nothing because I've never bought into him. As a man, he deserves respect for his right to individual privacy. As a corporate mouthpiece who pockets ten times more cash endorsing products than he does swinging a club, and even as a corporate "brand" in and of himself, he doesn't deserve any privacy, and he certainly shouldn't expect it.

posted by CM @ 8:23 PM