Ideology Purity ~ Eric Smith

Eric Smith:

"Do you want to know who is ultimately responsible for President Reagan and the two presidents named Bush? Do you want to know who bears a huge chunk of responsibility for that disaster known as supply side economics? Do you want to know who really gave us the Iraq war and the Great Recession that went with it? It wasn't Republicans and it wasn't Conservatives. It was us and by us I mean we Democrats/Liberals/Progressives or more specifically those who call themselves these things who were insistent on our presidential candidates being ideologically pure. We did to President Carter, presidential candidates Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry much of which many of us are doing to President Obama today. Because these individuals did not do things our way and only our way, we called them weak, and not up to the challenge of being president."

"The only Democratic candidates we had who won the presidency in the past thirty seven years were those Democratic presidential candidates named Clinton and Obama who did not allow their base bully them into being the slaves of ideology and that was no accident because by appealing to the center they tapped into the source of this nation's greatest strength; its center. If Clinton or Obama had caved to the demands of their base like Carter did when he ran for reelection, and Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry, and Gore did when they ran for the presidency, the White House would have been under continuous Republican control since 1976 and if that had happened what type of country would we have today or would we still even have a country at all?"

"Ideology purity is a recipe for political defeat; whether one is Republican or Democrat and so if we are about continuing to win elections and governing then we need to stop this nonsense with this president. We need to recognize that President Obama is the president of all the people; not just us Democrats/Liberals/Progressives, and if anyone is dumb enough to think that he is even remotely like the two Presidents Bush or even Reagan himself then I suggest you bone up on your history and read what actually happened under those administrations. I know because I lived through all of it and I'm telling you straight up that it was a bitch! It was nothing, nothing at all like it is now, and anyone who thinks otherwise either did not live back then, or is too damn lazy to read up on the history of those times and grasp just how terrible they really were."