By Joe Marren
Buffalo, NY – I am a Democrat and I make no apologies for that. Rather, as Inauguration Day draws ever nearer, I urge my party not to squander our heritage that stretches back through the centuries, but to renew our energy to fight and win on Election Day 2005 and all the election days to come.
Except for Brian Higgins' win in his congressional race, we were soundly beaten last year. And the hurt still lingers. But we also beat ourselves because we failed to deliver our message to the voters and the media. Our media - and I'm at fault here by implication since I was a journalist for 18 years and now teach future journalists - is too willing to let sound bites substitute for investigation. The media should serve the public by holding those in power accountable. Instead - and I'm going to acknowledge my mea culpas by saying "we" when I mean the media - we allow honest patriotism interfere with our job of serving our audience. We should have asked the hard questions about policies and practices. Because we didn't ask, there were many things that went unreported. Let me tell you about some of them:
On George W. Bush's watch, the economy is changing for the worse. We face a rising debt and a looming deficit that will eat away at the hope of a brighter future. For example, Ohio alone lost about a quarter-of-a-million jobs in the past several years. As the poet might say, that's a quarter-of-a-million dreams deferred. Those people worked hard and played by the rules as we know them, but now they struggle to make ends meet because corporations believe outsourcing is more profitable than responsibility. From factories to the financial districts we are losing high-paying jobs and replacing them with lower-paying service jobs. Sure, that makes the job growth numbers look rosy, but it's a lie because those lower-paying replacement jobs offer little or no long-term security, health care coverage, or retirement benefits.
Our work force is the backbone of this country. We Democrats believe that helping the rich get richer with unfair tax breaks only rewards greed. And that's why we believe that helping the middle class means helping the country.
Shared work and shared responsibility are core values and not something to be distorted or tweaked and massaged for sound bites that signify nothing. We have other disagreements with the president, and though we can reason together with the administration, we will not sell our country short. Regardless of whether we live in a red state or a blue state, we all believe in the rightness of our cause. But there are things we disagree on and we don't cut deals.
For example, we disagree about how to care for the environment. The president's agenda would open up thousands of acres of public land for oil and gas drilling. We Democrats believe that those lands are held in sacred trust not only for us, but for all the generations yet to come. Rather than squander, endanger and exploit fragile ecosystems, we Democrats believe that alternative energy systems must be studied and, when appropriate, implemented.
The original keepers of this land believed that every moral decision should be made based on its effects down to the seventh generation. But Mr. President, we Democrats sadly believe that your energy policies do not take any generation into account, but were instead made to make rich corporations richer. We Democrats believe that energy independence is a moral imperative for us, our children, our children's children, and their children down the sweeping path of time.
Mr. President, we also believe that yours is an irresponsible foreign policy that puts us at odds with old friends. We believe in cooperating with our allies to make the world a safer and saner place. We Democrats believe, Mr. President, that peace is a moral value.
This session of Congress will see many debates and not a few battles. So we Democrats can take solace in the words attributed to the poet:
I'm a little wounded, but I am not slain; I will lay me down for to bleed a while, Then I'll rise and fight with you again.
Listener-Commentator Joe Marren is an assistant professor of communications at Buffalo State College.