I'm continuing to research the guy to find out exactly what makes him tick. What I'm finding is that while his voting record is overall prettty good, from a liberal perspective, he and his staff have said some troubling things.
For example:
After the Democrats' dismal showing in the mid-term elections [Nov. 2002], Mr Frost's spokesman, Tom Eisenhower, said the party needed to take note of the nation's shift to the right in the election and not select a leader from the party's left wing.This is the problem with Frost, in a nutshell. He's one of those Democrats fixated on the minutiae of policy rather than the larger character issue that confronts the Democratic party. Frost is one of those people who thinks the Dems keep losing because their policies aren't conservative enough. That's the same kind of logic that led George Bush to recently say that the recent presidential election was a vote of support for Bush's failed Iraq policy.
"The country didn't move to the left yesterday, and Democrats won't win back the majority by moving further left," he said, clearly alluding to Mrs Pelosi.
People don't vote for the policy, they vote for the person. The presidential election wasn't about whether the voters thought Bush did the right thing in Iraq. Rather, they voted for which man, Bush or Kerry, gave them more confidence, or fewer qualms, in FORGING an Iraq policy. That's a big difference. It's not the specifics of the policy, it's the confidence in the man/woman to CREATE an effective and wise policy. The factors the puclic is voting on are therefore the CHARACTER of the politician rather than the details of his platform. And that character isn't defined by his being left, right, or centrist. It's defined by his appearing as if he has a consistent well-thought-out point of view, and the guts to defend it.
The last thing the party needs is more leaders who think we need to move to the right. Not just because I don't like the politics of Dems who move to the right. But more importantly, because that kind of analysis comes from people who fail to understand the character problem that is the real cause of the Democrats' recent defeats. And if that problem isn't addressed, we will continue to lose.
Martin Frost simply doesn't get it. And neither does way too much of the leadership of the current Democratic party. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Where is the debate over what really happened last year?
