Democrat "debates" - visceral hate for President Bush and little else

Not to open this column like a high school research paper, but sometimes you just have to point out the painfully obvious in order to make your point.  According to Webster, the definition of the word debate is to “engage in argument by discussing opposing views” and that has been what Americans have come to expect when candidates say that they are going to have a debate.  In politics the purpose of a debate is to distinguish the position or character of one candidate from other candidates in the same race.  Unfortunately, Democrats running for president think that the purpose of a debate is to stand on a stage and distinguish themselves from President Bush instead of their opponents.

There have been a few forums held by Democrats this year – all of them designed to pander to particular interest groups; one thing can be said for liberals: they know how to design a red meat message for Bush hating audiences.  When Democrats talk to labor groups they attack the Bush administration for unemployment rates that are the result of Democratic regulatory restrictions and tax laws that run companies out of business.  When Democrats debate in front of Hispanics they call Republicans racist because they want to control illegal immigration and deny Osama bin Laden a California driver license.  On Tuesday Democrats debated for the Congressional Black Caucus and they pulled out everything but the kitchen sink to show President Bush as a member of the Klan whose policies affect only black people.

The problem with Democratic debates is that they do everything except debate.

With nine candidates in the race for the Democratic nomination to compete with President Bush next November you would think that all of the candidates would be fighting one another in order to get ahead.  The undeniable front runner in the race so far is former Vermont governor Howard Dean who leads in Iowa and New Hampshire (once considered must wins for fellow candidates John Kerry and Richard Gephardt) and if I were an opponent of Howard Dean I would be fighting tooth and nail to distinguish myself from him so that I could siphon some votes and pull ahead.  Political primaries are all about momentum and if you start out by losing states that you should win the momentum is lost and you have to get out of the race.

No candidates at any debate have done anything that would distinguish them from the other eight.  There is no message about how any of them would fight the war on terror, no plan for how any of them would nurture the already recovering economy and nothing in their rhetoric about why the American people should fire President Bush and replace him with one of them.  It seems that the Democrats can do nothing while on stage except call the President of the United States "a miserable failure," an "abomination," a "gang leader" and a "bully."

Worse than the adolescent name calling by men and women who want to lead the free world and command the most powerful military on the planet is the doom and gloom message that they can’t get away from.  You would think that the people of the United States were living in dire poverty, that people were dying in the streets from disease and that the environment was being destroyed to a point where we had to all live in bubbles.  The economy is strong – not as strong as it can be, but certainly not anything like we saw in the late 1970s, but you wouldn’t know it listening to Democrats. 

If you believe Democrats America is destined for failure in every aspect of our existence: the war in Iraq is now a quagmire after only six months (forgetting our decades of support to nations after World War II), the American people are sickly and frail who are looking to government to help them and being turned away (despite the enormous increases in federal spending for social programs), and President Bush is an idiot who forgot that Osama bin Laden killed 3,000 people just two years ago.  You have to wonder if liberals really believe that America is that bad off.

Democrats have a chance to distinguish themselves over the course of the next few months in more “debates” where they will undoubtedly bash President Bush in order to appeal to their vitriolic liberal base.  If their pessimistic view of America continues then George Bush will sweep even the blue states into victory next November.  Americans like optimism and there is nothing optimistic in the Democratic message – that favors Republicans and there is nothing wrong with that.