Who Democrats are

Here I am in Baltimore, getting ready for a foot-killing week on my feet at our annual conference. I actually wrote this entry on November 6, using the advance publishing feature so that there would be something posted — just in case I don’t have time to post, or a free internet connection.
Anyway, here’s a little taste of the book I’m reading right now, Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor.

We are all, God bless us, uniquely ordinary and rise up in the morning and wash our faces and pull our pants on and it would be nice to eat a breakfast that isn’t full of poisons, send our children off to a good school, ride a safe bus to work at a building that complies with health laws, and use a cell phone that won’t give us brain cancer. We’d like our employer to treat us fairly according to accepted practice. We’d like the police to guard the city against predators and vandals. We’d like to imagine that city officials are visionary and honest and committed to the common good and not in the pocket of the power company. We’d like to think that people in trouble get rescued. This is the Democratic view. We prefer the secular society to one in which persons of unpopular beliefs are ostracized, and we don’t make the American flag into the Shroud of Turin, and we refuse to be cowed by our own government, and the sexual lives of our neighbors are not of profound interest. Republicans are troubled by homosexuality and can’t figure out how not to think about it. Hunger and homelessness don’t get their attention but the sight of two women kissing gets Republicans all buzzed, what a porch light does for moths. Democrats care more about health care and other staples of middle-class life. You drive out of St. Paul into the Republican suburbs and you see what the New Deal and Fair Deal and Great Society accomplished: they enabled people of modest means to get a leg up in the world and eventually become right-wing reactionaries and pretend that they sprang fully formed from their own ambitions with no help from anybody. And vote to deny what they themselves were freely given. Bless their hearts. But they’re not Democrats.