Customer Reviews

How Democrats Can Take Back Congress

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Brevity in the age of instant communication and instant distraction is sometimes a good thing. This small book makes some critical points that seem like common sense. But, for whatever reason, have not been well articulated recently by the Democratic leadership or rank and file. Instead of unwieldy plans with complex solutions, perhaps it is time to get back to sponsorship of fundamental concepts and let the details get worked out in the doing. Today, we seem to spend huge amounts of time on the minutia and lose the concepts to the lobbyists.

This is certainly not a panacea for the problems of the Democratic Party in the US. But it does cause one to ponder the possibilities of proposing a positive agenda versus reacting to the Republicans.

Good medium, sound ideas and analyses abound. Excellent sense of humor lightens a heavy subject for easy reading and comprehension. An email or letters to our leaders pointing to this excellent resource material from every reader would have to put get Democrats back on top. We can put our emphasis first on food, clothing, housing, education, jobs and health care for everyone; respect and tolerance for all. (This is of course beyond the scope of the book, but with the proper working tools in place everything is probable.)

This isn't a long book, and that is but one of its many virtues. Long books are not necessarily more substantive books, and this one is both helpful and substantive. It's split into two parts: the first laying out why the upcoming elections pose a particular opportunity for Democratic candidates. That material is nice, but it recapitulates much that others have written. The real strength of this book is in part two, in which the author goes through more than a dozen specific issues in a neat, capsulated way, that gives candidates issues, statistics, both the advantages and possible disadvantages of each position, and then even a nice soundbite. Many of the ideas are good ones, and the whole setup is a perfect primer for anyone interested in helping end the Republican stranglehold on Congress. If you are tired of being ashamed of a leadership apoligizing for torture, squandering the nation's future, and starting wars for false reasons, then this is a great place to get ready to change things.

This book reads like the last gasp of the old guard Democratic staff weenies who think that soundbites (one for every issue in this book) and platitudes will make up for ineptness. This book, for example, proposes programs such as eliminating social security taxes for 94% of the workers and paying for everyone's college tuition, without in any way suggesting how the Federal budget might be balanced. There is, in short, no tax reform focused on eliminating subsidies and loopholes and corporate fraud combined with corporate exclusion from the tax base.

Sorry, but on balance, this book is very loosely thought through, and I personally resent anyone using Tom Paine's great name in vain.

The only thing in this book that I think is right on target (sure, the issue positions are acceptable, but any high schooler could have put this list together) is the emphasis on the need to get back in touch with American labor, support the unions, and restore the vitality (the opposite of disposability) of the American worker.

This books makes no mention of Matthew Miller's The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love or Rabbi Michael Lerner's The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right or any of a myriad of good books on Cultural Creatives, New Progressives, Ecological Economics, Immoral Captialism, etc.

Bottom line: YUK. The author gets the third star for good intentions, otherwise this would have a been a two star vote.

At 57 pages, this book is light-weight in every possible sense of the word. It does not achieve its objective. See the image I am loading, if Amazon works today, for an idea of a policy framework that can then be costed out.