Dear Howard,
The November rain in Washington has washed out the Democratic election on another ruby red Tuesday. As I began to write, CNN officially announced that the state of New York fell into the Republican column. The network cut to the Giuliani camp, and as our next president ceremoniously popped his champagne bottle, the crimson army around him chanted, “Roo-dy! Roo-dy!”
The scene makes a fitting eulogy for the Democratic Party. The dominoes were lined up perfectly: the least popular president since Richard Nixon; a Republican Congress almost as ineffective as the political vacuum it set up in Iraq; a cavernous deficit and a national malaise. We – the party and the country – deserved a real leader. We got Hillary Clinton.
I don’t need to remind you of all the injurious bloopers that plagued the campaign. For instance, although it got a round of hearty applause at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary’s theme of “Man enough to Lead; Man enough to Win” probably wasn’t the best strategy for a suspected lesbian.
I could tell at the convention she couldn’t see the forest for the confetti. Her Defense with Dignity campaign, which chauvinist Republicans crassly called her “double-D dream,” missed a huge opportunity. She should have upgraded to the Double-E’s: Energy and Education. With a comprehensive energy independence plan, we could extract our militaries from the Middle East and fortify America’s economic security. That goes beyond Defense with Dignity – that’s Economic Entrepreneurship and Energy with Ethics.
Education would have been the perfect lens for warping the right’s moral issues. It doesn’t take a village to raise a child. It takes a school system. Why couldn’t Democrats see you can’t support family values without supporting children? “Values that make a difference”: That should have been Hillary’s mantra, not her sheep-in-wolf’s-skin act. Like moral values, education transcends class and region. Millions of middle class families live in red states where low property values can’t buy a good American education. Hillary should have unveiled a national school-voucher initiative and a plan to guarantee far greater financial assistance to under-funded school districts.
We needed to hear about family values that touch real families, not issues like gay marriage that most Americans only see on TV. We needed a leader to tell us there is no good defense without energy independence, and there is no dignity without decent education. Our country needed a moral reawakening – a vision of national pride and promise. We got a socialist posing as a hawk, and we wonder why we lost.
It’s midnight on the eve of four more dark years of Democratic irrelevance. Our future looks bleak, indeed. We should have seen it coming.
Derek Thompson is a Medill sophomore. He can be reached [email protected].
