We Are Your Base; Hear Us Roar

The Fixer, in discussing the Dem’s apparent inability to pull together the never-ending stream of administration scandals to illustrate its complete crookedness, asks the question that we all seem to be posing lately:

And everyone asks the question, 'why is it just us?' Is it just the bloggers who are ranting and raving about this? Where is the Democratic leadership? Where are Kerry, Pelosi, Ried, Edwards, Kennedy, Leahy, and yes, even Dean, and the rest of them? I mean shit, bloggers connected the dots for 'em as early as '03 (long before I even dreamed of having a blog).

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And why aren't the leaders listening to the bloggers? We are the voice of your base, you idiots. If you stand up, we got your back.

A lot of us on the Left bemoan the decision of so many red staters who seem to vote against their best interests. We don’t understand how someone who struggles to make ends meet, who worries about healthcare coverage, funding their children’s educations, finding a decent job, can vote for an administration that seeks to dismantle the very programs that assist those upon whose votes they have come to depend. We wring our hands and wonder how such voters can be so foolish. These people don’t really understand their leadership.

We suffer from the flipside of this problem on the Left—our leadership does not understand its people.

Bloggers are perhaps the most obvious example of this regrettable situation in which we’ve found ourselves, as our views and expectations of our leadership are easily accessible. Yet, despite our near-unanimity on many issues, the Democratic leadership continues to disappoint, continues to act contrary to the wishes of blogging rank-and-file Dems, as if we are somehow not representative of the larger whole. (My experience with this is that, in fact, bloggers’ views are an accurate representation of the non-blogging rank-and-file.)

They seem to think that the voices on these blogs are the exception to the imaginary Democrats they keep telling "my father was a millworker" stories to. Most of those people now call themselves Republicans, I'm afraid.

The disdain they show for their blogging rank-and-file betrays a deep lack of understanding about who we are. We don’t blog because we like to hear our own voices—we blog in the increasingly futile hope that they will hear our collective voice and conduct themselves in a manner befitting representatives who are actually listening.

Dammit, we’re your base, and we’re worth listening to.