The absence of organizational values is crippling the Democratic Party
1 in 150 employees who say their organization does not have a set of values are “Fully Engaged.”
Okay. That’s a survey of employees. Just imagine what the ratio must be for “members” of organizations that don’t have clear organizational values? How many of them are fully engaged? 1 in 500? 1 in 2,000? 1 in 10,000?
That we have “third way” Democrats like Tom Carper, John Carny, and (let’s be honest) Hillary Clinton constantly muddying the water as to what it means to be a Democrat is literally handing the reigns of government over to the one American political party that DOES have core values, and by extension, does have “Fully Engaged” members.
Why do Democrats constantly lose in mid-terms?
Why is participation so low across the board for Democrats relative to Republicans?
These are not mysteries. The GOP literally has nothing other than core values, and core values alone (as whacked as they are) are enough to consistently beat the listless and directionless Democrats.
As Democrats we take pride in being the rational party. The party that values reason and science. Except on this topic. It is the one area where we can’t accept the behavioral science. Where we cling to mythology about centrism and the sacred holy ground called “the middle.” We substitute the mystical incantations that rise from the DC punditry, for hard numbers and proven facts.
I never understand this complaint from you. It is as if you need to be constantly told what the Democratic Party stands so that you can remember. Jason, why are you a Democrat? Or a Liberal? What are the core values you adhere to?
Here are mine:
I believe in science.
I believe in evidence.
I believe is equality for all.
I believe in opportunity for all.
I oppose any discrimination, no matter its form.
In other words, my basic CORE VALUE is fairness.
I believe the Democratic Party represents that value.
It is fair that the rich, who make more money, should pay more money in taxes, and the poor and the middle class, who make less, should pay less.
It is fair to regulate the market and industry to protect consumers and prevent abuses.
It is fair that gays should be able to get married and do anything that other people can do without being discriminated against.
It is fair that everyone should have access to affordable healthcare.
It is fair that insurance companies cannot discriminate against you for a prior preexisting condition
Why aren’t you running for office on this stuff? Because I agree that you’ve captured what the Democratic Party’s values might look like if we could get Democratic officials to buy into the second tier stuff:
“It is fair that the rich, who make more money, should pay more money in taxes, and the poor and the middle class, who make less, should pay less.
It is fair to regulate the market and industry to protect consumers and prevent abuses.”
The stuff above is too vague to be very meaningful.
SO MAKE IT MORE SPECIFIC YOURSELF. God, you just complain, complain complain all the time.
I gave you what my values are. You say they are too vague. Where is your contribution to make it more specific!
Jesus Fucking Christ.
Simmer down. I meant being for opportunity and fairness is something that even Tom Carper can be for it while passing a polygraph test.
Where the Democratic Party kills itself is by not agreeing to things that you and I take for granted: the rich should pay more in taxes, it is fair to regulate markets and industries to protect consumers, etc.
There is no Democratic consensus on these items and it is killing us at the polls. [And that’s why I’m for Bernie. I think he puts agreeing on those things out front.]
If the democratic party actually stood for those things, 2009 would have been a much different year. But the “conservadems” screwed things up and allowed the promise of Obama to go down the drain. Those are the Carpers and Coonses and the like.
Common ground.
so jason, just between us BernieBros (i dont care if SOME PEOPLE want to make it an insult, im using it) do you REALLY think he can go all the way, or are you just trying to drive Hillary to the left like me?
The thing people don’t want to talk about is that Hillary Clinton isn’t very likable. I think that gives Sanders a chance. Ultimately, our politics is stupid. People vote based on all kinds of crazy nonsense. Anything can happen.
She (or more accurately her husband) has built a career on peddling her political influence.
I’ll vote for her regardless (let’s be realistic, Delaware’s primary is meaningless, so I won’t be voting in it) in the general election. But I don’t believe a word of her supposed “progressive” positions. She will sign TPP in a heartbeat. She will cooperate with Netanyahu more than Obama does. She will not incrementally move us toward progressivism in any economic sense, because there’s no money in it.
And if we listen to and look at the facts, we can ascertain that nothing motivates a Clinton more than money.
This is not meant to assault DD’s values, because I believe him to hold them sincerely. But to attribute them to the Democratic Party–especially in Delaware–is a joke.
You like science. The Markell administration went to court to deny standing to the Sierra Club to litigate based on science that his administration was violating the Coastal Zone Act.
You believe in evidence. Apparently 90% of Delaware’s rivers and streams had to become polluted before there was sufficient evidence for a series of Democratic governors to begin talking seriously about clean-up.
You believe in equality for all. But in Delaware our Democratically controlled AG’s office holds national records for keeping poor defendants locked up without access to bail or public defenders. Most poor DE defendants first meet their defense attorneys at trial, after a significant percentage have already (in the absence of counsel) been barraged with plea bargain deals along with veiled threats that if they did not accept them prior to meeting their public defenders they would be withdrawn. And let’s not talk about the Delaware idea of “bail reform.”
You oppose discrimination in whatever form. But the DE Democratic party has been in lock step for years (only now starting to separate) with the GOP backers of the Charter School movement that has systematically if de facto re-segregated the public schools in Wilmington.
Your CORE VALUE is fairness. The DE Democratic Party consistently supports school funding formulas that provide far great bang for the buck in suburbia than inside the city.
The rich should pay more in taxes? Not in Delaware under any Democratic administration. In point of fact, Governor Markell and Secretary Cook have proposed raising taxes on the middle class (by eliminating deductions) and seniors while eviscerating the estate tax.
Regulate the market and industry to prevent abuses? Given me a break. Under Delaware Democrats we have been prisoners of corporate Zenda for longer than most of us have been alive. Governor Markell’s idea of dealing with corporate pollution was to give grants to the polluters to clean up, rather than enforce the law!?
LGBT equality? I will give you that one, and that’s the only one on the list I can give you.
Everyone should have access to affordable healthcare? DE’s highest in the nation premium increases are not due to the ACA–they’re due to the Democratic Party’s inability to oust the single most corrupt and inept Insurance Commissioner in the nation, and to her cronies in DFS and the GA (Democratic leaders all) who passed the sweetheart deal giving Highmark first a monopoly on the private insurance market and then a 40% (and growing) share of the Medicaid market. Nor let us forget the unconscionable failure of KWS to keep access to AU DuPont for children covered by US Healthcare, which resulted in a remarkable silence from all DE Democrats. Nor let us forget that it was Democrats who revised the Workman’s Comp rules to make them more advantageous for corporations, not injured employees.
Pre-existing conditions? Yes, Highmark will take you–but will they actually pay for your treatment? Plenty of studies suggest they don’t–to include a far higher than national average refusal to pay for specialist care from top cancer centers.
There are great people associated with the Delaware Democratic Party, but those great people clearly do not run the show, and the continual finger pointing to suggest that “the Republicans would be worse” is a pretty damn lame argument. Pretty much the only way you can tell a lot of elected Delaware Democrats from Delaware Republicans is because the Dems don’t hate gays. Other than that, we have a one-party system in Delaware with two different trademarked wings.
There is a *massively* big leap between the quote — which has no context and which you misapply — and enough Democrats sharing your contention that the party has no core values as to make the quote relevant.
What inference are we meant to draw from the quote, anyway? Suppose an organization has 10,000 people and only 150 think it does not have values. That would mean that 1.5% of the organization is not fully engaged, which just about any organization would take. It’s different story if 150 out 500, but there’s no evidence of a common belief among Democrats that the party has no values.
What’s your contention? That Democrats are highly engaged? I don’t understand what you are going for.
Also. Check your math. Your 10,000 person company would be luck to have 70 highly engaged people.
DelawareDem wrote: “I believe the Democratic Party represents that value. ”
Great. But Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and large numbers of “Democratic” Senators and Representatives don’t represent those values — their records, particularly on atrocious sellout corporate trade deals like NAFTA, make it exceptionally clear. I think this makes it hard for the average American to believe that the Democratic Party represents that value.
You’ve hit the nail right on the proverbial head. The DelDems platform is now 8 years old, not even mentioning some of the significant issues Delaware is dealing with in 2016. This is why the Progressive Democrats For Delaware have initiated a call for the creation of a 2016 diverse and representative Platform Drafting Committee to be followed by a process of debate and ratification by grassroots Delaware Democrats. And we are showing progress on this project with endorsement by our own PDD, Sussex Progressive Democrats, the Wilmington City Committee, the 4th Ward Committee, the 23rd and 25th RD’s. And presentations on a resolution to get going on this are being made in February to the Kent County Executive Committee and the Sussex County Executive Committee. We await a response from the New Castle County Executive Committee to consider a presentation. The Young Democrats of Delaware have chosen to get their own Platform in order before addressing the State Party on this need. Properly done, the consensus document to which posters here refer are successfully in place in all our State Party organizations in our U.S.A. We’re playing catch up, but there is reason for hope.