[...]
>
>>
> References to the DP's base on this list confuse the _base_ of the party
> with the large masses of "abstract -- isolated -- individuals" who can
> be shuffled to the polls by these organizations or can be corraled by TV
> ads. But these voters are no part at all of The Party -- either its base
> or its leadership. And they cannot be reached by working "inside" the DP
> because that is not where they are, except for 5 minutes every 4 years
> (for some of them every 2 years). The last place on earth to go looking
> for DP voters is inside the DP. I agree, of course, that when a left
> appears in this country, it will consist mostly of DP voters. But as
> long as the Myth of the DP survives, leftists won't put the brains to
> work figuring out how to 'get' these voters for left causes.
============================
Are you certain about your information, Carrol - that the Democrats have no
campaign workers, only free-floating five-minute quadrennial voters who have
no contact with each other and do not form any coherent base?
I have friends and have known people in the US who have worked on many congressional and presidential campaigns, in both primaries and elections. They have spent well more than five minutes every four years in committee rooms and canvassing by foot and by phone. They've devoted additional hours to informal discussion with with other Democrats about party policies and strategy, and still more in some cases organizing opposition to the leadership. I don't see how Democratic or Republican candidates could get norminated or elected without an army of volunteer campaign workers, notwithstanding the massive amounts spent on media advertising and online organizing. Given the busy US primary and electoral calendar at all levels of government, someone who wanted to be fully involved could do so on a nearly full-time basis. It seems to me only someone who by his own admission steers well clear of electoral politics and the DP could make an observation which is so at odds with the other accounts I've heard and what I'd assume to be the case on the basis of my own exposure to NDP electoral politics here in Canada.
I think my US friends are fairly typical of the hundreds of thousands of other campaign workers who either approach the party on their own or are enlisted by their trade unions or their organizations in the black and Latino communities and the women's, LGBT, environmental, antiwar, and other social movements.
I don't know the exact numbers, but the Washington Post reported last December that the labour movement alone supplied "187,000 volunteers to help Democrats match the GOP's get-out-the-vote machine, which was far better financed." ("Labor to Push Agenda in Congress It Helped Elect", Dale Russakoff, Washington Post, Friday, December 8, 2006, A13).
I think whether you want to be involved with the Democratic party is more of a personal decision - how you like to spend your free time - than a political obligation, given the relatively stable nature of politics in the advanced capitalist countries and that you may not feel yourself as affected by the lack of health care, stagnating wages, lack of union rights, and the other bread-and-butter issues which bother most American working people.
But I think you're wrong to wishfully assert that your abstention from organized mass politics is universally shared by other Americans, and that the 187,000 trade unionists canvassing for the Democrats, quite apart from the volunteers from other communities, are an irrelevant milieu for the US left.