The Fading Dream - Will the Dems find a vision for America?

Bob Herbert wrote an excellent piece in yesterday's New York Times (11/13/06) , titled 'The Fading Dream'--- excerpts follow...

Rumsfeld is exiting stage left and the curtain is coming down on George W. Bush's Theater of the Absurd. A rival company is setting up shop and expectations are high.

O.K., Democrats, now what? Inquiring minds want to know if the new troupe will make us laugh, cheer, or cry...

...The elite now send other people's children off to fight and die in wars that are unwinnable. On the home front, a two-tiered economy has been put in place in which a small percentage of the population does extremely well while a majoriity of working Americans are in an all-but-permanent state of anxiety about job security, pensions, the economic impact of globalization, the cost of health care, college tuition, and so on...

...For resurgent Democrats there is no better touchstone than Franklin Roosevelt...His goal was "to make a country in which no one is left out."

Roosevelt had both the vision and the political skills, including an indestructible sense of optimism, to galvanize the nation in some of its darkest hours. These qualities have been in short supply among the terminally timid Democrats of recent years...

Frankly, Mr. Ken does not expect any major changes under the Dems. Both parties are in the pay of an entrenched corporate plutocracy. Don't expect any progress in lobbying reform, either. The Dems just want their share of the 'corruption pie'. And under President Bill Clinton, the racist 'Welfare Reform Bill of 1996' was signed -- a Declaration of War against the indigent, and one of the important factors in the ever-widening gap beween the rich and poor in this country.