I’m not usually a prayerful sort of guy, but I’m falling on my knees for this entreaty: “O blessed Tao, dear God, compassionate Buddha, send us some Democrats with balls. Big ones. Clanging ones. Hurry!”
It was painful, and also hilarious, to watch the Daily Show last night. Paul Hackett, the Iraq war veteran who ran for the House in a solidly Republican district and almost defeated Jean Schmidt in an August 2005 special election, was featured. Hackett has balls.
Thus naturally he was unceremoniously dumped by the Democrats after he announced that he’d challenge incumbent Ohio Senator Mike DeWine. The Daily Show skewered Dem ballslessness by contrasting Hackett’s blunt straight talk with the circumlocutions of a pollster who blathered on about all the reasons Hackett wouldn’t be the best candidate.
I can’t stand it any more, this Democratic reluctance to stand up for anything other than being Republican-lite. A Daily Kos rant I ran across today, “Being Liberal Means Having Balls,” captures my disgust perfectly. I too am ready to vote for anyone with a progressive leaning who has some big ones.
If that means voting for an Independent like Ben Westlund, who’s running for Oregon governor, so be it. If that means voting for a Green party candidate, so be it. If the Democrats aren’t going to run on a ballsy platform—saying it like it is and sticking to their guns—then screw them. They deserve to lose.
As the Daily Show pointed out, that’s just what the Democrats have been doing: losing. Yet their reaction to being a powerless political party is to act even more powerless. They seem to believe that if they do nothing, Bush and the Republicans will self-destruct.
That’s delusional. Karl Rove and company are too smart to let that happen. They’ll pull some balls out of the bag before November and smash the Dems over the head with them. Again.
It’s like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. Grab the political football, Dems, and kick it as hard as you can. Don’t worry about rules, goalposts, strategy, or playing nice. Just kick the damn thing! For once.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd sounds much the same theme in “What’s Better? His Empty Suit or Her Baggage?” I’ll include it as a continuation to this post for those who don’t belong to Times Select.
I don’t know much about Barack Obama, but on the basis on Dowd’s column I’m willing to place him in the lightly populated “Democrats with balls” group. Hillary Clinton? Nope. She’s ballless. And not because she’s a woman—these sorts of balls aren’t physical.
Like so many Democrats, Clinton moves in whatever direction she senses the political winds are blowing, not where her own moral compass tells her to go. To do that, she’d need balls.
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