Concerned readers sometimes write in to ask, “Lance, how can you be a Democrat! Don’t they break your heart every single day of the week?”
Some of them.
But this is something I learned growing up listening to Pop Mannion and Uncle Bill. You’re a Democrat because you want to see certain things get done and unfortunately you need politicians to get them done and politicians are just people, often significantly flawed people. Saints become nurses and doctors and teachers and missionaries. They don’t go into politics. This is what I’ve learned on the blogosphere. The difference between Democrats and a lot of self-styled Progressives is Democrats want certain things to get done; Progressives want a lot of the same things to get done but they want a certain type of person to be the one to get them done.
I’ll tell you, that kind of person doesn’t usually go into politics, and when they do they don’t often get very far.
I’m not bragging when I tell you this, though. Pop Mannion is that kind of person, as close as you can get anyway, and I’ll tell you this too. If you’d voted for him for town supervisor, the odds are he’d have broken your heart at least a half dozen times during both of this long tenures in the job. You know why? Because he’s still just a human being. He couldn’t do everything he wanted to. He couldn’t please everybody he needed to please. He couldn’t be everything to everybody and whenever he had to choose what he could be to whom he broke a lot of people’s hearts.
Read it all…
h/t Tbogg