Welcome to Real Democratic Moderate. This is basically my third attempt to start up my own political blog (hopefully third time is the charm!). The first two blogs basically died because I seem to float in and out of interest in blogging about politics, but hopefully I’ll post on a regular basis right now.
This blog will pretty much have two purposes – the first is to highlight, like many other democratic blogs do, the stupidity and incompetence (or worse) of President Bush and the GOP. However, something else I will attempt to do is to try to keep my liberal democratic brethren in check.
Even when I did have my own blog before, I still often posted on sites like Daily Kos because I typically agreed with the site philosophy there. However, recently I’ve come less and less likely to even visit the place, much less post there, because I think they’ve gone so far to the left that I’m just no longer comfortable being there anymore.
They’ve gone from trying to find the best way to accomplish the goals that the democratic party wants to achieve to wanting the democratic congress to “stick it to” Bush and the GOP for the sake of sticking it to them.
That’s not to say that Daily Kos still doesn’t do a lot of good things and posts a lot of good content – it is still a worthy blog to go visit, and I do still occasionally post there, I just don’t do it nearly at the frequency I used to.
I think I typify the standard Democratic Moderate (I’m sure I’ll expand on all these at one point or another):
- I believe in the democratic brand of helping the less fortunate and prioritizing the middle class over the wealthy.
- I believe in balance between business and other moderate/liberal priorities. I believe that environmental regulation and business interests should be balanced. I believe labor laws and business interests should be balanced. Republicans usually tip the scale wildly to the favor of business interests while many liberals want to wildly tip the scales in the other direction. I don’t think either situation is healthy for our nation.
- I support compromise, but not compromise for compromise’s sake. Ex-democrats like Lieberman like compromise for compromise’s sake. He believes that as long as there a compromise, then the deal is good, regardless of who the compromise actually favors or what is being compromising. On the other hand, many liberals don’t want the democratic party to compromise on anything, even if it is in their own interest to do so. Again, I believe both of those views are wrong.
- I want the Iraq War to end, but I want to do so responsibly. I’ll have more to say on this soon.
- I believe that, unless urgent and radical change is shown to be necessary, changes in policies and programs should be taken at a measured, yet steady pace rather than all at once.
- I want to work with liberals to help improve the party, but only if they’re actually willing to respect my moderate views. Having different views, and even criticizing my views, but still willing to talk things over and coming up with a good middle ground position is one thing. Demanding that I should come to their position or else I’m “just as bad as Bush” is another.
- I’m both socially and economically moderate.
I hope that you will find this blog insightful and I hope that I can do my small part in making the democratic party – and the nation – a better place.
