Minority party?

by shamanic

There's a weird little piece over at The Politico plumbing the depths of the perpetual "Democrats have to reach out to southerners and white men" issue. Interesting, on the third page of the piece, author David Paul Kuhn says, "Yet [ignoring white men] is exactly the argument that has kept Democrats the minority party for decades."

Minority party for decades? That's news to me. When the GOP took over Congress in 1994, they supplanted four decades of Democratic stewardship (and promptly ran the place into the ground). And from 1994 to 2001, even with a GOP congress, the Democrats held the White House.

The Democrats were the minority party from 2001-2006, sure. If you want to be creative about it, you can argue that they were generally the minority party from 1994-2006, but Bill Clinton ran away with the White House in 1996 and Al Gore won more than half a million more popular votes in 2000.

The only elections where Democrats were not particularly competitive were 2002, which was an election engineered to be a referendum on invading Iraq using the shoddiest and most manipulative information possible to push GOP candidates, and 2004, when Bush was still running on 9/11 and the promise of somehow making Iraq work. He failed.

With a record like that, it really makes one wonder what it takes to be considered an equal player in American politics. Apparently it's white southern males, so the Democrats can never, ever win that argument. It's a good thing they know how to win elections.