A Moderate & Proud of It; Purple & Proud of It. -- Our State Motto is still "Wisdom, Justice & Moderation," & so let's not squeeze the moderates out.

When I first started this blog in early August at the urging of two web friends and great Democrats whom I still long to (and will in due time) meet, the layout of the blog was as follows:

Cracker Squire, THE MUSINGS OF A TRADITIONAL SOUTHERN DEMOCRAT, [just as it is now], and then after the ajc quote from my friend Ben Smith about my running for the U.S. Senate seat as a moderate-to-conservative Democrat, appeared the following:

Conventional wisdom is that in order to win, a Republican must veer right during the primary, and then veer left toward the center for the general election. Is the reverse now true for the Democratic Party?

With Nov. 2 behind us, let's think about the foregoing paragraph.

Is this what Sen.-elect Johnny Isakson had to do during the primary this year as he had to counter the attempt by Brother Cain and Rep. Collins to discredit him as being a moderate?

And does this explain the bait and switch campaign charge against Rep.-elect John Barrow who was accused on saying one thing (that he would vote "no" for the same-sex marriage amendment) during the primary election campaign, and then shifting his position (to saying he would vote "yes") to appeal to a different political base in the general election?

Today I read a column in the Washington Post entitled "It's the Moderates, Stupid" by Mark Penn. Mr. Penn who heads a Democratic polling firm and also conducted polls for President Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign.

He notes that now conservatives outnumber liberals by 34 percent to 21 percent in this country, and that "[t]his 13-point gap is the fundamental problem with letting any election be polarized on conservative or liberal grounds."

He concludes his article as follows:

"So while liberals and conservatives can be motivated and brought to the polls in increasing numbers, the real battle at the end of the day is for the more moderate voters who this year slipped away to the Republicans, on the basis not of gun control and gay marriage but of security and secular values such as trust and standing up for your beliefs. They are the core of any winning national coalition and at the heart of our national values. These voters have chosen Democrats in the past, and as the Democratic Party rebuilds, they are the first and most important voters we must attract to win a majority in 2008 and beyond."
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So what does all of the above have to do with the title of this post?

It's coming, I promise. The color "purple" part in a minute; the "moderate" part I will tell you now.

I am a moderate Democrat, and proud of it.

When the ajc's Ben Smith wrote:

"The problem is that Cottingham is fashioning himself as ‘the next Sam Nunn’ in a party in which conservatives are in short supply. And he is running in a state in which Nunn himself might want to slap an ‘R’ next to his name, if he ever ran again.”

he was being kind and trying to say a kind word about a friend.

But the truth is that if we were ever able to get Sam Nunn to run again, he would not run as a Philistine. He would run as a Democrat, and yes, as the moderate Democrat that he is.

Would we welcome him? I know we would. If we would not, if we would squeese his out, then surely our Party has gone well beyond from being the majority to the minority party both nationally and in Georgia; it is on life-support and headed for irrelevance.

(A quick digression. You know that Michelle Nunn seriously considered running for the U.S. Senate. What I bet you don't know is that she had pretty much decided to make a go of it -- with her father's blessings of course -- when Mayor Andrew Young entered the picture.

By the time he decided to quit treating this serious issue as a game, his last hurrah just for the heck of it, she had changed her mind. While I do not know the reason for sure, lost time that was already short had to have figured in, with Isakson having been at it for over a year.

And I do not mean to be too critical of Mayor Young. Although he may have treated our Party's having a viable candidate as a game, such treatment represented more consideration than was given by some of our Party's leadership which long ago wrote the U.S. Senate seat off as if it it didn't matter. Thanks fellows.)

Now the color "purple" part.

A red, blue and purple map I saw today reminded me of a post I did on 09-16-04 entitled "Color me purple. And if Demo's want Nov. two to be blue (as determined by the undecided), they can think what they want, but they need to talk purple."

It is not only about color, but moderation as well, as is worth a re-read or reading if you missed it earlier. Part of the post:

Purple and Proud of It

By Richard Cohen
September 16, 2004
The Washington Post

I live in a state of my own. It is not blue, which is to say anti-Bush. And it is not red, long the color of lefties, commies and the like but now somehow the color of reactionaries -- the GOP and zealous partisans of the president. My own state of mind combines some of the blue with some of the red to produce my own political hue. Color me purple.

It is not the purple of rage or the purple of royalty, and it contains a lot more blue than it does red. I was only briefly enamored of George W. Bush, whom I now consider to be a divider, not a uniter, and who went to war in Iraq for stated reasons that turned out to be baseless and for unstated reasons that have yet to be publicly acknowledged. I am referring here to an entire neoconservative foreign policy agenda in which violence plays too prominent and casual a role. I am also chilled by assertions of near-royal power in handling terrorism suspects, and I do not like Bush's choice of judges, his energy policy, his unilateralism or the manner in which he has intruded religion into politics. I'm looking pretty blue, no?

I nevertheless cannot bring myself to hate Bush or, as someone here told me, to consider his possible reelection as a reason to leave the country. In fact, Bush haters go so far they wind up adding a dash of red to my blue, pushing me by revulsion into a color I otherwise would not have. For instance, I have just read Nicholson Baker's novel "Checkpoint," an audacious and repellent work about whether the assassination of Bush would be warranted. What concerns me is not one man's loss of perspective but the milieu, the zeitgeist, that produced it. Lots of people must have told Baker he had a capital idea -- a book that just had to be published -- and with alacrity. He was Paul Revere in print.

I bump into these anti-Bush alarmists all the time. Recently an extremely successful and erudite man I much admire told me he viewed the upcoming election as something akin to September 1939, the time when World War II started and, among other things, European Jewry was all but snuffed out. I add that bit about the Holocaust because the man I was talking to had been born a European Jew. I could hardly believe my ears.

This is not the place to examine why Bush is so hated by some people, though the war in Iraq surely takes pride of place. But even before that particular war, I heard people denounce the one in Afghanistan, that Taliban-controlled horror that harbored Osama bin Laden. These people are infected with a corrosive doubt about their own country. A recent Pew Research Center poll found, for instance, that 51 percent of Democrats agreed with the proposition that "U.S. wrongdoing" contributed to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 (only 17 percent of Republicans agreed). Those are astounding numbers, an indictment not really of America (for what?) but of those people who compulsively blame their own country for the faults of others. You can believe that U.S. support of Israel and the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks, but the term Pew used was "wrongdoing." In this respect, these people and Osama bin Laden are in agreement.

The demonization of Bush is going to cost John Kerry plenty if it hasn't already. It so overstates the case against Bush that a levelheaded listener would be excused for thinking that there isn't one in the first place. It squeezes the middle, virtually forcing moderates to pick which bunch of nuts they're going to join. It's hard to know whom to loathe more -- religious zealots who would censor my reading and deny me the fruits of stem cell research or fervid hallucinators who belittle Saddam Hussein's crimes (or even Sept. 11) and wonder, in the throes of perpetual adolescence, whether the assassination of the president would not amount to a political mercy killing. It's all pretty repugnant.

But some of us cherish moderation, recoil from conspiracy theories and would like, if possible, to stick to the facts. We may dislike Bush's policies, but we do not vitriolically hate the man, think he stole the election or blame our own country for the crimes of Sept. 11. We are the proud Purples -- once the royal color, now the tattered banner of common sense.