NOV 01 - 15, 2004

VOL. 2 ISSUE 21

NOVEMBER 9, 2004 – First Gore, then John Kerry, were described by the media and many voters – who opted to vote for the other side instead – as being indecisive, people who needed to take a poll before deciding what to do.  Indeed, in this past election, the biggest reason people who agreed with Kerry on the issues but ended up voting for Bush gave for doing so was they weren’t quite sure they could trust the Massachusetts Senator to act decisively, or Democrats in general to actually stand for what they stand for.

The DNC is undecided what to do about this problem.  The label of indecisive has cost them two straight elections, and they are not quite sure what action to take about it.

“We’re just having a hard time figuring out how to deal with the fact that people don’t think we can decide how to deal with things,” said current, and likely on his way out, DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe.

The party even resorted to sending out an e-mail to all of its supporters this past week asking them if they had any idea what they should do, or stop doing, and what issues they should take a stand on, and which stand they should take on those issues.  (If you are subscribed to the DNC mailing list, you know this because you actually received one of these in your e-mailbox.)

Chairman of the Centrist DLC, Al From, said, “We don’t quite know how to deal with the fact that people think we won’t know how to deal with things.”

Underway is a real battle for who will be in charge of the Democratic Party’s process of deciding how they might decide what they should decide on and which decisions they should make about those to-be-decided-on things.

“Should the left-wing lead us, the centrists, maybe the conservative values types?” mused McAuliffe.  “We just really don’t know.  All we know is that people who would like to vote for us because of our stances on things like the environment and the economy continue to vote for the other side because they are afraid we will be too wavering and poll-driven in office.  We’re currently conducting research and focus groups to see what we should do about that.”

“Maybe if we completely change our agenda, that will calms people concerns that we are too wishy-washy to be trusted,” said From.  “At the very least, we need to come up with a good process for deciding how to shake the public perception that we can’t make decisions.”

He added, “There’s a lot of debate about how we should or shouldn’t go about this.”