Democrats Looking Disaster In The "I"

I stands for Internet, of course. According to new polling data, how fitting that a Vietnam era liberal coined the phrase that best applies to the political quagmire in which Democrats now find themselves stuck.

We have met the enemy, and they are us
 
This is a twist on Oliver Hazard Perry’s words after a naval battle: “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.” The updated version was first used in the comic strip “Pogo,” by Walt Kelly, in the 1960s and referred to the turmoil caused by the Vietnam War.

Some inside the beltway Democrats are beginning to fear the worst as regards the coming mid-term elections. Internal polling data is causing genuine concern. If those fears become realized, it will be DNC Chair Howard Dean and the Internet Netroots movement that gets the blame.

From today's Prowler:

Democrat National Committee chairman Howard Dean is seeing polling numbers that are making him a nervous man. Recent internal polling data for Senate races from Washington state, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, and Maryland -- with the exception of Missouri, which is a GOP defense -- shows Democrat support cratering if not crumbling around the edges.

Dean helped the Netroots movement come of age but some believe he has shown terrible misjudgment in the way he's now intertwined it with the DNC. I pointed this out, in part, in a post that shows how the DNC is actually behind the move to take out Lieberman.

A win by Lamont ... would be claimed as a victory by Web-based advocacy groups such as MoveOn.org and Democracy for America, as well as bloggers....

Democracy For America (DFA) was started by Dean and is now run by his brother. Then there's this below:

The Lamont campaign hired Tagaris away from the Democratic National Committee in April, where he was the party's director of Internet outreach.

"I left the DNC to come here because there is no more important race in my mind and many people's minds than this primary," Tagaris said.

What Dean failed to take into account was that his success with his Internet outreach was demonstrated in the Democratic primary and despite its continued efforts, the Democrats lost the general election. Now, he is turning the Netroots loose in Democrat primaries, again - targeting more moderate democrats in a move which is starting to label the Democratic Party as far Left.

And this from CBS:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is very pleased with the position it is in right now, despite what's seen as an extremely negative climate facing GOP candidates: bad Bush poll numbers, the war in Iraq, and high gas prices.

Further proof that Dean's DNC and the Netroots are aligned can be found here, in a recent rambling from stock touting stargazer become Netroots founder, Jerome Armstrong. He is pushing the same fifty state strategy that's drained the DNC of its money under Dean.

Ten years from now, the Democratic Party will have fully broadened its election strategy beyond the battleground mentality that dominates strategic thinking today. Democrats will be a national party, leaving no uncontested race anywhere in the nation, and will have rebuilt a party infrastructure down to the precinct everywhere in the nation. The Democrats will have regained their majority status as the governing party, and the mapchanger approach to elections will have been the reason.

The argument can be made that, just as he sold people on bad stocks and silly astrological charts, Armstrong found an unrealistic co-believer in Howard Dean, because they share a common Leftist ideology the majority of Americans simply don't want. Now, in an attempt to scramble back to the middle, the Democratic Party must fight itself. And that's precisely what is happening in the pages of The New Republic and the New York Times.

Comments

[David]

Sound post, Dan. One very small quibble: Bartleby's may be wrong--and those relying on it to draw Viet Nam war parallells may be grasping at straws. I just checked my memory of the famous Pogo quote, and the only references I could find pointing to an actual cartoon depiction of Pogo uttering the words was a 1971 _Earth Day_ cartoon, featuring Pogo looking out over a littered swamp.

Collected Pogo cartoons were issued in 1972 in a book titled with that quote, as well as an animated piece, also titled with the same quote, pretty much validating both my memory of the quoted cartoon and the cartoon itself as found on the web. Indeed, the cartoon and quote are so deeply embedded in conservatinist (pre-greenie-weenie) lore that it was jarring to me to see the Bartleby's citation.

If there was a 1960s use of it by Walt Kelly in another Pogo strip, I've been unable to locate it.

Nit-picking, I know, and not important to your post's thesis, in fact quite peripheral. But it's one reason I don't trust just one site for quotations.

:-)

[Kris Schultz]

Have you heard about the Akaka primary Hawaii? It's a reverse Lieberman situation, where anti-war Akaka is being challenged by Bush sympathizing Case. Akaka is one of 13 Senators to vote for a firm timetable of withdrawl of U.S. troops from Iraq, while Case rubberstamped Bush's war in a house vote the week before. I just wrote a big blog posting about it that I thought you might be interested in. Akaka needs as much support as we can give him.

[fool]

Actually, Akaka needs to eat **** and die.