Silly politicians

I have a bone to pick with the Democratic candidates. It stems back to something I learned during my first-ever government lesson in the fifth grade. I seem to recall Mrs. Heffernan mentioning something about mud-slinging.\nHowever, when she talked about it, mud-slinging was something inept candidates did against the other party in order to make themselves look good. She never mentioned anything about digging up dirt on your own party's members.\nBut the way these little Democratic boys are acting on stage these days is quite revolting. Take a gander at some of these headlines. "Democratic rivals step up attacks on Dean" (The Frontrunner, Dec. 11), "Who's the meanest of them all" (Salon.com, Oct. 27), "Kerry criticizing Dean's criticisms," (Boston Globe, Dec. 22).\nIn the end, of course, all of this infighting only hurts the Democrats. Voters want a well-oiled, cohesive package that will work together to get things done. With every candidate attacking every other candidate, it becomes blatantly clear that the party is in tatters, and cannot work as a group anymore. If a party cannot function within itself, how well do you think it will function with the opposition?\nThe Democrats began to lose their focus after the 2000 election fiasco. They became even more disoriented when they lost the House of Representatives midterm elections. The non-presidential party has only lost seats three times since 1862 according to Vital Statistics on American Politics. The upshot was that the only battle cry the Democrats could come up with when the 2004 race began was "We hate Bush."\nThis proved a relatively effective, if juvenile, platform that most of the candidates used during the beginning of their campaigns. However, I naively assumed that once we moved closer to the primaries all that rhetoric would change. Candidates would focus on their solutions to the problems, not on the drawbacks of the competition.\nWhich would you prefer? Choice one: "Because those options are bad, choose me." Or choice two: "I believe I am a good candidate, here are my goals, I hope you agree."\nInstead, rivals have focused on blunders. For example, they attacked Howard Dean when he said he wanted "to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," as quoted by the Associated Press, Nov. 4. John Kerry picked a fight with Dean about his stance on the war with Iraq. \nBoston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi was dead-on in her Dec. 9 column.\n"[Kerry] can't reverse his fortunes by blaming Dean for pushing Democrats to the left on war. Kerry must sell Kerry."\nCandidates need to let the ire and indignation to comments like Dean's come from the public and the media. Their time is much better spent promoting their own ideas.\nTheir new battle cry, "everybody in my party sucks except me," amuses me to a certain extent because some candidates are bound to drop out and endorse someone else before the primaries are over.\nOnce a nomination has been made, most of the Democrats will vote for him in November, regardless of their prior preferences. Once that happens, the Democrats will be back to the "We hate Bush" slogan, and we'll be back to where we started.\nLearn from Mrs. Heffernan. Stop screaming and act like respectable politicians. Otherwise, you'll have to pout through Bush 2004-2008 as well.