New Louisiana Democrat leader shows party still doesn't get it

The next person to preside over the long-term decline of Louisiana’s Democrat Party is party insider Chris Whittington, its legal counsel. His ascendancy and rhetoric demonstrate why he will be unable to improve the party’s fortunes.

Long ago the Democrats nationwide forfeited the battle of ideas to the conservatism largely embraced now by their Republican opponents. The liberalism echoed by the Democrats, and (particularly in this state) its cheap knockoff populism, has been thoroughly discredited through logic and fact, so the party has become reduced to name-calling, emoting rather than thinking, and to an exercise in trying to fool voters into misperceiving reality.

Whittington’s comments at his election of state party chairman shows he remains enthralled in this political retardation. Instead of trying to provide intellectual arguments to support the party’s positions that those who contribute more to society must have more taken from them than ever before, that it is moral to murder the unborn, that your characteristics matter more than you as a person in determining who gets what rewards from government, etc., instead we get this:

We have let the Republicans define us as something we are not…. We love our families. We stand for the proposition you should love the God of your choosing. You should be able to speak freely without fear.

I challenge Whittington to name one Republican officeholder or elected official who has said any of (1) Democrats do not love their families, or (2) Democrats do not support loving the God of peoples’ own choosings, and/or (3) that people in this country should fear speaking freely (unless the First Amendment and laws supported by it are violated in the process). If he can’t do that, then what he said has no connection to reality but instead is yet another emotional pandering designed to stop people from thinking about the issues.

That’s because he knows Democrats lose on the issues, and, given his backers, that is especially true. Significant in this leadership battle was that the liberal-in-conservative-clothing wing of the party, comprised of Gov. Kathleen Blanco, Sen. Mary Landrieu, her brother Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, Rep. Charlie Melancon, and others, lost to Whittington who was backed by the good-old-boy populist wing of Agriculture Secretary Bob Odom, Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, and others, joined by the unrepentant liberal wing fronted by state Sen. Cleo Fields.

Whittington lives in delusion if he believes the reasons state Democrats increasingly lose is because they don’t define themselves to their own liking. Just the opposite; they define themselves all too well as the party that believes in property as theft, that government knows best how to spend resources that people earn, in death to the most vulnerable in our society, that irresponsible behavior is to be rewarded, and so on. Ideas better than these, not improved public relations, is the only hope the Democrats have of reversing their sliding fortunes in Louisiana, and Whittington looks like the next victim ready to learn this the hard way at the ballot box.