Together, We Can Do Better Than This Godawful Slogan

Via Shakespeare’s Sister comes the word that the Democrats are trying out a slogan for the 2006 elections that is, as Shakes succinctly puts it, “a piece of shit slogan [that] aspires to cliché hell:”

Together, we can do better.

Yeah, that’s it. “Together, we can do better.”

Let’s see. We’ve had a stolen election, a devastating terror attack, a rash of anthrax, an ill-planned, unnecessary war, a very necessary but terribly executed war, a trashed economy in which Paris Hilton keeps getting richer and everyone else gets poorer, a skyrocketing deficit and debt, escalating global warming, the destruction of one of our most interesting cities and the inexcusably negligent treatment of its inhabitants, and possibly even criminal indictments this week.

Have I left anything out? After all that -- this is all the Democrats have to say? [Congressional Democrat strokes chin thoughtfully] “I say, I think we could probably do a bit better than that, don’t you?”

Oh, that’ll set the electorate on fire.

The sheer vapidity of this slogan reflects a dispiriting truth: these guys don’t deserve to have power. They are governed by fear. It’s much easier to watch the Republicans so spectacularly destroy themselves, than to wield power, make decisions and be responsible for them. If you can only define yourself by what you are not – a fuckup Republican – and cannot or will not define yourself by what you are, then you should expect no one to follow you. And if Democrats generally don’t decide who they are, we will lose the best opportunity we’ve had since the Contract on America threw us out on our butts in 1994.