Are you old enough to remember real Dem's?

[MADem]

74. Yes, we are--and once they finally shoved Nixon off the political map, they accommodated Ford,

because he was "reasonable."

When Carter came in, there was a schism in the party--the northern cadre hated him because he was a southerner, and Ted Kennedy went out of his way to fuck him at every turn. He was VIRULENT about it, too. TK was my Senator, but I thought his behavior was disgraceful during that timeframe. He had serious addiction issues back then which might have influenced his judgment at the time.

So ... if we're talking about Democrats, let's tell the truth--the party was fractured in the seventies, Ted Kennedy enabled the election of Reagan by primarying Carter, and those "real Dems" were all over the doggone map, from deeply, DEEPLY conservative to somewhat liberal.

This "happy families" fiction of a united, "progressive" (feh-that word has lost its meaning) party in the seventies is what I find laughable. The Democratic Party in the seventies was divided and in deep disarray. And if this fiction of the seventies as a wonderful era (it wasn't) is going to be perpetuated, we need to admit that we weren't making policy back then for most of that era.

The complete cluster in 72 with the Wipe The Floor DEFEAT of George McGovern showed us just how well we Dems were resonating at the start of the decade at the national level:



Yeah, the American people were really feeling us--not. It wasn't US, of course, it was THEM. They chose sweaty, lying, Tricky Dick Nixon over us. We didn't make the sale because we didn't look, we didn't see, we didn't understand the voting public.

We did not connect.