“This nation was founded by rebels and revolutionaries, and its flags were carried across the battlefields by people who were very, very against the status quo and who questioned and criticized.”
I have some bad news. If you’re reading this, another tragic mass shooting has likely taken place in the United States of America. Yes. Mass shootings have gone up exponentially since Columbine [especially in the last few years], and even the slaughter of innocents in Newtown, Connecticut hasn’t inspired Congress to act on gun violence in this country. “Enough is enough,” President Obama was recently quoted as having said for the umpteenth time. Are you sick and tired of senseless violence seemingly becoming the new normal here in the United States? Are you sure? Alright, I have the perfect suggestion for you. It’s really easy. Check it out below.
VOTE!
Did you miss it? Don’t worry, this isn’t a gun rant. I promise you. Here’s the thing. When citizens–Democrats, especially–stay home on Election Day with the ridiculous notion that their vote doesn’t matter, public figures with a well-documented history of medicare fraud like current governor Rick Scott and other strange individuals around the country will win elections in your backyard despite embarrassingly-low approval ratings. Few states in our Union have more senior citizens living within its borders, yet this is the man Florida’s electorate moved into the Governor’s Mansion.
I wish I were kidding. With the way our American system works, elected governments rightfully respond to the demographics of the electorate, and that’s even before special interests get involved. As a citizen with the right to vote, you have no one to blame but yourself for congressional inaction and stagnation. YOU gave President Obama this Congress to work with. YOU made him a lame duck president last November when the GOP took back the Senate and kept the House. YOU pissed away the “Hope and Change” agenda before it got off the ground. Obamacare was an imperfect miracle.
It wasn’t the Citizens United ruling that made the GOP perennial winners. It was Democrats not having the stones to grow a backbone. Liberals are mad at Barack Obama but can’t even win a message war vs. the failed policies of yesteryear. You’d think the American people would forever tune out the party that led us into the Middle East, after the wrong person, at the cost of over 4,000+ brave American lives, but no. We have short political memories, apparently. Oh yes, Barack Obama won both of his presidential campaigns, but Democrats have been clobbered in virtually every other race across the country since 2008.
Anyone can jump on an MSNBC panel and sound either smart or condescending when talking about the right-wing and some of the policies they’re championing, but the reality of that is that such things don’t translate into votes. They don’t. If they did, you’d have never heard of the Tea Party. Since the last cycle, MSNBC is clearly a “blue” network, meaning they know their demographic. They’re not the ones you need to appeal to. If the Republican Party is stuck in the 1950s with their social policy, the Democrats are stuck in some sort of neutral Dreamland.
The Republican Party knows exactly how to get their message across, even if it means capitalizing on the ignorance and fears of many Americans suffering from the disastrous effects of an anaemic educational system throughout the Bible Belt and various other rural areas, as well as the inner city. This is real. No state as great as Florida can be should be known more for dimwitted residents acting like they’re devoid of good sense via blogs or local news reports. We need a stronger educational system, but we’ll cover that on another occasion.
Republicans win, Democrats lose. That’s what it is right now. Whose fault is it? It’s not voter registration laws or Citizens United that’s responsible for Florida being a purplish-red state. It’s not the Tea Party or even the special interests. The answer is right in front of you, but you’re deliberately avoiding it.
IT’S YOUR FAULT.
Yes. It’s your fault. The Democratic Party is the same party that allowed Chris Christie to become governor of a historically blue state. TWICE. The same thing happened with Charlie Baker in Massachusetts. The second time around, 32% of NJ Democrats and 66% of NJ Independents voted for the incumbent than the actual Democrat!
How is that okay with anyone? Another painful reality: The Democratic Party hasn’t won a single gubernatorial election in Florida since the 1990s. By the time I landed in Florida as a youngster near the end of the 90s, Democratic Governor Lawton Chiles (God rest his soul) had already passed away and Jeb Bush had soared into office shortly after his brother George. The same one you elected President. Twice.
The party rallied around Charlie Crist in the last election. Charlie Crist was the same candidate that chose not to run for gubernatorial reelection vs. Rick Scott. He was losing in the gubernatorial polls, was getting walloped by eventual-Senator Marco Rubio as a Republican in the 2010 U.S. Senate primaries, dropped out, ran as an Independent, then basically split the Democratic vote and gift-wrapped the Senate seat to Mr. Rubio before running as a Democrat against Governor Scott in 2014.
That was the best the Democratic Party of Florida could do. The other candidate was then-Florida State Senator Nan Rich, who it seemed only ran because she was term-limited in the Florida Senate. Her candidacy was basically ignored by the Democratic Party of Florida. Big surprise, there; they went with the political star, no matter what his history was. And they lost, partly because of the candidate, and partly because it was a non-presidential year and Democrats, despite losing in 2010 because everyone stayed home, did the same thing again. When will they ever learn?
Right now, the Democrats are running Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and a bunch of also-rans (sorry, Martin O’Malley) to succeed Barack Obama because the rest of the party is too scared to run against the Clinton Machine. Yes, this same Clinton Machine that saw Arkansas turn red after Governor Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, the one that stepped back and watched Vice President Al Gore lose a race he had no business losing to Governor George Bush due to its closeness, and that’s before the irregularities here in Florida. The same Clinton Machine that–yes, lost to an unknown first-term senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.
I need a reason to think the Democrats won’t just mess it up two years after managing to beat the Republicans, and I don’t have that reason yet. If they don’t get it together soon, they’ll be on the other side of the political trouble coin that the Republican Party is currently flipping into the air. We’re reaching the point where citizens are registering as independents in droves; if that isn’t a tell-tale sign of impending political storms, I don’t know what is.
You may have a president, but you don’t have a Congress, and you’re losing state legislatures one by one. That’s a recipe for disaster, and I fear that the Democrats are suffering this because some within the party leadership must have thought that they could simply take their foot off the gas once President Obama was elected. It’s the same mistake they made in the late-90s, and it looks like history is poised to repeat itself very soon if they don’t get their act together. They probably won’t, either.
The revolution may very well be televised, after all.
Part III is ready. Click here to continue the journey…
“Poor men start gangs and do drive-bys; rich men start wars and drop bombs on villages.”
Talib Kweli
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