Dissing the Competition

When I transferred from production into the office, my first manager taught me something that I have never forgotten, and which I used as a management tool until I retired. He said that one should never criticize one’s competition or think ill of them. “It is your competition,” he said, “which requires you to be as good as you are. If you had bad competition, you could be bad at your job. There's no honor in winning by default.”

Democrats are absolutely wallowing in the disarray of the Republican Party, and the liberal media is spending all of its time laughing at and mocking the fecklessness of Republican candidates and campaign slogans. They are delighted, and are proclaiming victory, eighteen months in advance, not based on anything that Democrats have to offer, or the great job that they're doing, but based on the weakness of the opposition.

Meanwhile, Democrats have a President who gets, at best, 50% approval. They have approval in Congress below one-fourth. While the stock market is hitting new highs, they have an economy that is growing at an anemic 1.8% rate, not enough to keep up with the birth rate. New unemployment claims were over 400,000 for the third week in a row, and unemployment is still near 9% and would be higher if it were not for a shrinking work force. The value of the dollar is at a historic low and still shrinking, leading to ever climbing gasoline prices.

That’s actually a fairly dismal prospect, but what are they doing to improve the picture on their side of the political spectrum? Nothing. They are not at all concerned about a presidential approval in the “high forties,” and in fact consider him to be unbeatable. They are bragging about how he will raise
$1 billion in campaign funding to win the election in a cakewalk because the incumbent Democrat is unbeatable.

The past batch of Republicans may have run the car into the ditch, but the present batch of Democrats have left it in the ditch and set it on fire. David Frum rather colorfully, and I believe accurately, said of Democrats, “Well, we did our little stimulus and it didn’t work, so now we’re just looking at our watches waiting for something else to happen.”

And they believe they can afford to “wait for something else to happen” because they have no respect for their competition. Why should they work hard to please the electorate when they don’t, in their opinion, need to do anything of the sort. Their opposition is a group of complete idiots. They can sit back, do nothing and allow the idiots to shoot themselves in their collective foot. We will vote for Democrats because we know the Republicans are crazy people, and are stupid to boot.

That is what they are doing and what they are telling us. They are doing nothing and merely telling us that we dare not vote for those crazy, stupid people on the other side. Planning to win, without honor, by default.