Reader explains: Why I am a Democrat

Spectrum, by David Cheezem

We Democrats got a slap on the face last week. Locally, our candidates lost every race.

It seems all you have to do to win a race is slap the letter "R" for Republican next to your name. One might even wonder why anyone would be a Democrat in Alaska today.

There are plenty of reasons. For me, there are three principles that keep me glued to the Democratic Party. And for as long as the party sticks to those principles, I will continue to be a loyal Democrat, even if I'm the last one in Alaska.

Those principles are: 1.) The Democratic Party is firmly rooted in the "reality-based community." 2.) The Democratic Party is the party of balance. 3.) The Democratic Party is the party of civil rights.

Let me explain these principles in that order:

The Democratic Party is part of the "reality-based community." That phrase comes from an aide to President George W. Bush, who defined the "reality-based community" as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." It was meant as an insult.

State Sen. Lyda Green echoed this remark in a recent Frontiersman article, where she decried the "pragmatism" of Alaskan Democrats.

To the Republican mind-set, making decisions based upon facts-on-the-ground is a sign of moral weakness.

When people in George W. Bush's State Department warned him that we would face looting and other security problems in Iraq once we took control, he refused to listen. Some of his appointees in the Defense Department did their best to demonize the State Department, labeling them morally weak because they argued that we would need more troops and more equipment than Donald Rumsfeld proposed.

I can't tell you how angry this makes me, as an American and as a Democrat: We might have won the war in Iraq within the first two months if we had had the troops and equipment on the ground in time to stop the looting, stabilize the country and start rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure.

But because the Republicans refused to base their actions on the real world, we're faced with an angry, frustrated population in Iraq, and this anger is fueling a growing, evasive insurgency.

The Democratic Party is the party of balance. The Republicans could have had this one, if they had stuck with Teddy Roosevelt. T.R. was the last great Republican president. He understood the need for balance: balance between big corporations and labor; balance between development and the environment; balance between peace and war.

For example, he understood that the nation depends on industry to grow and thrive. He also understood that the single-minded greed of the large conglomerates would lead to self-destruction if unchecked. He forced labor and industry to negotiate over wages and working conditions. He promoted real competition in the marketplace.

Teddy Roosevelt is closer to Bill Clinton than any modern Republican. Bill Clinton was in no sense an enemy of big business, but he did stand up to Microsoft Corporation, aggressively pursuing an antitrust case in court. George W. Bush just didn't care.

And on the local level, our state Republicans have been unwilling to search for a balance between the wants of big industry, such as coal-bed methane producers, and those of Mat-Su residents.

Finally, the Democratic Party is the party of civil rights. It's such a simple idea: All Americans should be free to take part in our democracy.

Within my lifetime, African-Americans in the South could not vote. They could not get certain jobs. They risked arrest, beatings, even lynching, for entering a "whites only" establishment or talking to a white woman.

How a group of courageous men and women banded together to change that is one of the most moving stories I know. When I think of what it means to be an American, the first name to come to my mind is Medgar Evers, who was murdered in the Deep South for taking part in the struggle to earn the right to vote.

Our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence -- these were all dead documents waiting to be brought to life before the civil rights movement.

Now, because of Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Rosa Parks and thousands of other heroes, those documents breathe. And it was the Democratic Party that got behind the civil rights movement.

Ultimately, that hurt the Democrats.

One of the reasons George W. Bush is president today is that Southern white segregationists flocked to the Republican Party after the Voting Rights Act was passed in the early 1960s. But Lyndon Johnson's decision to sign the Voting Rights Act was, to me, the defining moment in American history. It, more than anything else, is what makes me proud to be American.

The Republican so-called "moral issues" -- limiting the rights of women and gays -- seem so narrow and weak compared to the truly noble Democratic moral issues such as equality and human rights.

David Cheezem is a small-business owner in Palmer.