No Moses In This Wilderness

It now looks increasingly as if the Dems, like Moses's people, will have to spend a generation in the wilderness. And they will do so for similar reasons: because it seems to be the only way to eliminate an existing dysfunctional metality, by letting one generation pass away to be replaced by another. In Moses's case, it was a slave mentality; for the Dems, it's more like narcissism. But either way, the only real solution is generational.

Consider first this article from the Washington Post, indirectly attributing to Bush the same "great commmunicator" persona formerly reserved for Reagan:

"The president walks with his shoulders erect!" lauds Tom Hopkins, a professional trainer and author of "How to Master the Art of Selling" and "Selling for Dummies." "He makes great eye contact! He is buoyant! He walks at a fast pace! You can tell he's a great listener!" These are all the marks of successful salespeople, Hopkins says.

That persona has always been meant to damn with faint praise, of course, by implying that Bush, as with Reagan before him, is only an effective salesman of an inferior ideological product.

Howard Dean's impending election as chairman of the DNC further confirms that the Dems are still in denial about the reasons for their decline. They still see it as a marketing problem, rather than the fundamental rejection of their product that it is. Their solution, yet again, is repackaging instead of soul-searching.

The repetition of the same mistakes this many times over say that this is no small mistake. It is an attitude so fundamentally ingrained that it can only be dealt with through time and evolution. If the Dems are still insisting that theirs is merely a salesmanship problem, then they will have to spend the requisite generation in the wilderness, till new attitudes can take hold.

Without a Moses to hold them together though, it seems doubtful they can last that long.