Unless you have better rhetoric than the other guy and speak within a narrow band of accepted discourse you will always be marginalized. What made Nader such a bad candidate was his terrible rhetoric and style. (This was the point of the recent "burn the banks" debate here on the list.)
The republicans understand this and the dems do, to a degree. That is why you see those memos by operatives with lists of good words and bad words to use.
One classic example is the republicans trotting out "class warfare" bullshit whenever confronted with the truth about the inequality of wealth, etc. Liberals have yet to find a language that resonates.
Although I think that people do want something and someone to believe in, not enough of them want that person to be a liberal.
eric dorkin
--- dave dorkin <ddorkin1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have had a very similar set of experiences as
> those
> described by Justin. I work with other parties
> precisely because Dem. Party work has proved so
> unuseful except on immediate stop gap issues on
> occasion. Political education is next to impossible
> there; it's just not part of the rules of their game
> as far as I have seen. No religious fanatacism here
>
>
> --- Justin Schwartz <jkschw at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > You know, Nathan, I and a bunch of comrades and
> > coworkers (movement
> > activists) in Ann Arbor attempted this through the
> > 1980s. The party was
> > happy to have our labor, but totally iced us out
> of
> > any policy input. Thjese
> > were super-liberal Democrats, not DLC types. We
> > would go to party meetings,
> > and after a bit, when we started to insist on our
> > views, we were (a)
> > attacked by the regulars in the press for
> "packing"
> > meetings with
> > "activists" who were not "real Democrats" (there
> > were no official membership
> > requirements), and (b) iced out of the closed door
> > meetings with the hacks
> > and bosses and big donors where the real policy
> was
> > made, and (c) had the
> > resolutions we got passeda t the open meetings
> > unhdemocratically ignored,
> > and (d) faced with real meeting packing when the
> > bosses brought in boatloads
> > of union bureaucrats from Ypislanti and other
> places
> > who didn't even live in
> > AA to defeat our resolutions, and (e)
> outmanuevered
> > by parliamentary
> > bullshit such as declaring meetings adjourned when
> > we arrived, and so forth.
> > Moreover, when we got a genuinely multiracial and
> > radical Rainbow Coalition
> > going in 1984, the black millionionare who funded
> > the Michigan RC pulled the
> > plug on it, setting up a rival RC, and both of
> them
> > went down. Most of the
> > people I worked with in this endeavour were so
> > totally disgusted that they
> > gave up on politics altogether. The lesson I drew
> > was that the Dems were not
> > reformable. I joined Solidarity. You think I
> should
> > have kept plugging away?
> > After seven years of trying--isn't that a
> > respectable run?--with nothing tos
> > how for it, I figured it was time to fish or cut
> > bait. jks
>
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