Nancy Pelosi Can't Leave Me Alone

I got another note today from Nancy Pelosi asking for money for the DCCC. They're nice notes. Passionate. Concerned. Convincing. What can I do? I have to say okay. If the DCCC is broke, then how can we Take Back The House?

But if the Democrats are ideologically bankrupt, how can they expect to win?

I did enough time at Paramount in the bad old days of a few years ago to know that if you don't take creative risks, you can't expect rewards. Back then, the only people taking a creative risk on Paramount pictures were the fools buying the tickets, and now all those executives have lost their jobs.

If the Dems don't stand for something, they stand for nothing. And then what good is my fifty dollar DCCC contribution going to do? (That's post-tax income, mind you.)

In my favorite book of philosophy, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake (madman, poet, part-time nudist, clear-eyed seer) wrote He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star and Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you. Admittedly he didn't know about swift-boating. But the point is clear: Speak up.

Remember that in 92, a sitting Republican president got beat and they lost both houses of Congress Things were bleak for Republicans. But Gingrich led a revolution in 94. How?:

A clear statement of purpose, framed in centrist ideals and promising swift action, is a powerful document. Read it here:

The Republicans in 94 promised tax reform, term limits, social security reform, tort reform and welfare reform. No cultural issues necessary. No mention of abortion. No flag-burning amendment (hello, Mrs. Clinton?). Programs, prescriptions and promises. In the first one hundred days, action.

What will the Democrats do if they gain the Congress in 06? What promises will they make to the American people?

How about Security at Home and Abroad, Affordable Health Care, Fiscal Discipline, Energy Freedom, Executive Competence, and Constitutional Govenment?

• Take Murtha's Four Points to get us out of Iraq's civil war. Convene the Democratic Conference on National Security and emerge with a plan.

• Remove the waste from health care by getting the profiteers out of the system. The government runs the VA efficiently. There's a lesson to be learned from that. Apply it nationally.

• Stop charging our children for our adventures. Stop selling the country's future to the Chinese. Live within in our plentiful means. Repeal the upper-income tax cuts. Restore the estate tax on the hyper-rich. Of those to whom much is given, much shall be required. That's from the Bible.

• Set mandates and incentives to increase energy efficiency in the short term, not twenty years from now. Peak oil is upon us. Energy prices will rise. Build the technologies the world will need to conserve. Create jobs for the 21st Century.

• Restore competence to government. Staff the agencies not with political loyalists but with public servants who put the public first. Stop the lobbyists' stranglehold on policy.

• Enforce the laws. Stop illegal spying on Americans. Restore the power of the Congress.

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I'd tell Nancy all this if she'd care to listen, but the form supplied to take my money, and the acknowledgement and thanks that quickly follow, nowhere contains a place to tell the House leadership what I think.

It's as if the DCCC doesn't want to hear new ideas, doesn't want to be called to account, doesn't want to know how off-base they were in asking Tim Kaine to respond to the SOTU address, doesn't want to adapt to the evident American desire to make a change from the disastrous crony-ridden plutocratic policies of the current crop of toadies and thieves that make up the Republicans in power today.

Maybe you'll help tell them.