What's Wrong With The Democratic Party?

I found this post this afternoon and thought, this sort of explains the piece of driftwood that calls itself the Democratic Party. I took http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/bldemocraticloyaltyquiz.htm the other day and scored 100% Democratic and I still can't explain my position succinctly, but I can definitely tell you what is wrong with the Republican position in detail, ad nauseum.

At the age of 49 I feel like the Democrats are being led by a group of blue hairs that persist in remembering when bread was $.20 a loaf and only the rich had their own phone, while the not privileged used the party line. In reality it is the not so privileged who have the instant communication and the party leaders are stuck in the past. They need to quickly move into the future or all it will take is a charismatic person who makes sense to strike out as an Independent and they will take the middle of the electorate by storm.

MyDD :: About the Vietnam / Age / Generation Thing...: " * I have grown convinced that outside of the gay rights movement, we progressives have been losing ground to conservatives on every front for a number of years. On some fronts, we have been losing ground for around twenty-five years.
* I do not, and will not, believe that this is because we are wrong about the direction we want to take the country. As such, I can only conclude that our failure is a result of poor organization.
* I have come to believe that for too long we relied on a modernist notion of national consensus to develop our ideas and our policies. We used non-partisan academic institutions and non-partisan issue groups to develop our ideas and policies long after the national consensus was utterly smashed and the ability of these institutions to affect change within the national consciousness and to combat an overtly partisan and ideological movement was lessened dramatically. That was our first failure.
* I have come to conclude that for too long we relied on the government, via our long-term position as the natural ruling party of the country, to spread our message to the nation, while the conservative movement built a vast and unchecked anti-consensus message apparatus. That was our second failure.
* I have come to believe that for too long we relied on simply repeating long-standing means of mass public protest to object to the rising tide of conservatism. We kept doing this while the media changed and the ability of those protests to affect public opinion lessoned dramatically. That was our third failure.
* In line with everything else I have said, I have come to conclude that almost all of our current uses of political resources within the electoral realm assume that we still live in an age of national consensus. Among other areas, this can be seen in our mass canvassing operations that harken back to the era of mass participation civic organizations, and in our tendency to engage in an endless focus upon the "swing voter" who can be swayed through truth-telling and rational debate. That is an outdated view of the public sphere.
* I believe that our current failures as a party and a movement rest almost entirely within large segments of our leadership currently failing to recognize these past methodological failures as the cause for our current political backslide. As such, they continue to rely on old methods that have led to nothing but defeat for over two decades. Worse yet, many rely on trying to adopt conservative ideas."

I agree with these sentiments, just not in regards to the Iraq/Vietnam debacle. They are well thought out and presented which is why it's part of my daily news reading.