Tennessee's DINO Governor Bredesen said he "was a little surprised this year that no one was coming" to the Nashville meeting of the Lieberman/Ford wing of the Democratic Party, aka the DLC.
Actually, there were some 350 Dems in attendance. Bredesen's complaint was that every one of the Democratic presidential candidates skipped the Democratic Leadership Council's 2007 conference.
Bredesen suggested that the Democratic candidates were "run[ning] from centrists."
Yet, on a host of issues -- from the Iraq War to health care -- Bredesen and the DLC are more in line with the Republican Party than they are with the American public. But the delusional DINOs continue to call themselves centrists.
How telling that the Democratic Governor who stripped poor and disabled Tennesseans of life saving health care -- in the most drastic cuts to Medicaid this country has seen -- was actually permitted to speak on the subject of health care at the DLC. In Bredesen's view, Medicaid is scary socialism.
Yet another pro Iraq War DINO from Tennessee, U.S. Rep. Lincoln Davis, demonstrated that he too does not get that the country has moved to the left, leaving the DLC lost somewhere to the right of the new center:
“The right has proven to us that they can’t govern from the right, and the left has to learn that you can’t govern from the left,” Davis said. “The new ideas are going to be coming from those in the center aisle in America.”
And if you want to hear all about those lovely "new ideas" from the "center," just tune in to Fox News where you can hear Fox News contributor DLC Chair Harold Ford broadcasting the latest Lieberman talking points.
Again, the DLC is not just out of touch with Democrats, it is out of touch with the American public.
As Noam Scheiber writes in the New York Times:
Today, the council has almost no constituency within the Democratic Party. About every five years, the Pew Research Center conducts a public opinion survey to sort out the country’s major ideological groupings. In 1999, Pew found that liberals and New Democrats each accounted for nearly one-quarter of the Democratic base. By the next survey in 2005, New Democrats had completely disappeared as a group and the liberals had doubled their share of the party. Many moderates, radicalized by President Bush, now define themselves as liberals.
On a variety of issues the council, and not the party’s liberal base, is out of touch with the popular mood. A recent Washington Post poll found that 60 percent of independents, along with 70 percent of Democrats, favor withdrawing from Iraq by next spring.
Democrats DLC Conference Bredesen DINO Healthcare News Politics Medicaid Cuts Nashville Tennessee Fox News Harold Ford Lincoln Davis
