Different Shades Of Blue

I've been thinking a lot about some things that have happened in the left-leaning blogs recently. Not really about any one specific incident, just how things as a whole have been going. For some reason we've all been jumping at each others throats recently and I think I've finally figured out why.

Originally I thought it was just because it was about as far from a federal election as it gets and we were all just getting bored. While I'm sure that it's a factor, I no longer believe it to be the core problem.

My next working theory for all this controversy was that we had switched over to defense after the Congress went Democratic last year. I always thought offense was much easier than playing defense. On offense all you had to do was point out all the mistakes that the other side made, in defense you have to fix those mistakes while not making any mistakes of your own. After a while though I realized that it really isn't that different. The rules are still the same, it's just that now we have more to lose. The theory was rejected though there's still some truth to it, switching sides did throw a lot of people off balance.

With these two discarded, yet still somewhat accurate, theories in hand I was sure I had to be getting close to the real problem. And it turns out I was, I believe theory number three finally succeeded in revealing the core problem. Now I'm submitting it all of you for a little peer review but it's so blatantly obvious that you probably already figured it out.

Drum roll please...

The reason we all can't get along is because we no longer have a common goal. We all put aside our differences to work towards a Democratic Congress in '06 but now we don't have anything to work towards anymore. We won't have that kind of comradery over an election again until after the primaries are over and we have a single Democratic presidential candidate next year. Furthermore, now that we've won Congress for the Democrats we're all fighting over the spoils. Sure Congress is blue, but is it more of a royal blue or is it a baby blue? Some would even prefer it to be purple. To put it bluntly, we're all (myself included) so busy trying to micro-manage how our Democratic Congress votes that we risk losing it all together.

I believe that we should quit worrying about what shade of blue our Congress is and instead direct our attention towards applying a second coat of plain old generic blue. After all, there's still some red showing through the first coat.