I’ve been paying attention to politics since the mid-60’s. My perspective is that the Democratic party has been trying to take up the causes of so many different groups that there doesn’t seem to be a central set of themes that all those groups can support. You ask about labor union support - hell, these days there are a lot of labor union members that are socially quite conservative. They’re not too comfortable mixing with the gay rights folks. And there are plenty of working people who are not all that thrilled with the open-border concept. The successes that the Republican party has had seem to me to be due to the fact that most of their message can be agreed upon by most of the party’s members. The war has made for a central issue that people can coalesce around for or against, but there’s really not much else there for the Democrats right now. And now that Speaker Pelosi has come out and said that there will be no one central position of the Democratic party about the war (other than “war is bad”, I suppose), I have to wonder what will happen in the next couple of years running up to the 2008 election?

Yale grads? The only difference is that Harvard grads used to run the Democratic party, and still have a pretty big influence.

I must say, though, that I despair of such efforts. How many people pay any attention to editorial endorsements or attend forums? It seems these days that the attack ad in a flyer or TV ad (local or national, respectively) is what people pay attention to. How many people actually read the editorial page these days?

Campaign managers and treasurers are used more and more even on local campaigns and it’s usually a relatively few people who do this professionally and they may represent more than one political candidate although not in the same district race.

Newspaper ads and inserts are expensive. Television ads are, but they’re not really useful at the local level so that’s not an issue unless you go higher than that. Signs are expensive too, as are people who are paid to do phone banks and go door to door.

Most of campaigning is strategic(i.e. picking good representatives to do editorial board interviews for endorsements, debating at voting forums, etc. or even holding forums). A consistant hard effort through the election day is still most important but money matters too more and more.

Indeed they won the last election, but I fear that was more of an anti-Republican vote than a vote in favor of what the Democrats stand for, if only because no one can figure out what they stand for if anything.

It’s probably an issue of bounded rationatlity: We might THINK that people assess all available information, and make a rational choice…. but they don’t. In fact, most people assess only a very limited amount of information. they use that information 9as they assess it) to decide when to stop collecting information (which has a cost) and then they make their decision based no, usually, very limited quantities of information.

Ads and the like are efficient ways of communicating small quanta of limited information. That’s why they’re so effective. Of COURSE we could all learn a lot more by reading each candidate’s individually-authored platform, or by listening to a 4 hour Q&A for each candidate, but we don’t want to send the time. So we get limited information from ads (”OK, matches on abortion rights in general; seems nice; is the right race/gender, etc”) and act on it.

As for the $5/hour maid and the wealthy family, I think the point is that radical disparity in wealth - the kind of disparity which has been much on the increase - is not healthy for our society. I have absolutely no problem with the CEO of a major corporation making more money than the janitor, but how much more? It has gone way too far. This is a racial issue, but it is more than a racial issue, it impacts everyone.

Great speech. I wish the world it describes wasn’t so distant.

Just watching the latest round of local elections, it’s costing more and more money to launch a successful campaign and elected officials are lining up and announcing endorsements of political candidates before they even officially file their intent to run. This smacks of cronyism and breeds further cynicism in the process even at its bottom in the cities, towns and counties which is where so many of the decisions are made that most directy impact people’s lives.

This, I regret very much to say, has the ring of truth to it. I suspect that this will come home hard in the next couple of years. I expect that the Democrats will do much the same as the Republicans did in their place; perhaps for different people, but the main business of government will still end up being redistributing money and power based on political expediency and advantage. In my judgement, despite the easy answer of the war, this is one reason why the Republicans lost their Congressional majority. Republicans ran on the grounds of minimizing governmental interference in private affairs, but once in power they failed to do so; they grabbed and stuffed pork into a different set of hands than the Democrats, but grab and stuff they did.

I wonder what this means. I can see that this kind of thing is a gross disparity. And it’s also the kind of thing that a minimum wage bill is supposed to address. I was alive then and worked for minimum wage. It was more than $5 a week. Was a maid at that time not included in the minimum wage law? Was the family in this case breaking the law and getting away with it due to racism, and is that what this author meant to address?