lose weight

Democrats did lose the South, but they didn't lose it because of the Civil Rights Act. Rather than waiting for all those mean old Southern white men to die,

Democrats may be better off thinking about Lida Daidaihua why so many of them remained as voting Democratic just 22 years ago.

Nor have Democratic losses in the South been much worse than they were all over the country. To give just one egregious example, Democrats lost the

Massachusetts Statehouse this season - for the fifth time in their last seven tries.

This can be a historic shift. From 1931 to 1995, Democrats held majorities in the home of Representatives for all but 4 years and in the Senate for all but

12. On the state level, they held their own with (or outnumbered) Republicans in governorships and state legislatures for the vast majority of those 64

years.

It's been a totally different story since 1994, however, and by next January, Democrats will not only be in the minority in both houses of Congress, they'll

likely hold 18 statehouses and both chambers in just 11 state legislatures.

Suffering a series of historic defeats isn't a sign that you're winning. The Democrats no more please anyone much, neither their depressed base nor the less

committed. Meanwhile, Republicans still have the ability to portray them as wild-eyed socialists. The party does take the White House more regularly now, but

at the state level, as well as in the midterms, whenever a third from the senators and all representatives are up for election, the party continues to be

hollowed out.

The trouble could be that the Clinton-Obama strategy got things upside down from the start. Why try to cast yourselves as economic moderates and cultural

progressives when the disparate elements of your coalition haven't much in keeping culturally, but they are all struggling with exactly the same wretched

economy?

The Democratic Party that shot to some Half a century of overwhelming electoral success starting in the 1930s was helped in part by changing demographics.

Quite a few people who built what George Packer calls "the Roosevelt Republic" began as Republicans. Or "Bull Moose" Progressives, or Populists, or

Socialists, or Communists, or just the politically alienated and disengaged.

The people who built that party rallied around big things - in most cases big things they'd come up with themselves. The reforms that Democrats embraced were

almost all culled from grass-roots movements, plus they were big enough to erase the lines between cultural and economic issues.

Electrifying large swaths from the South and West changed how people lived and worked every single day, how their cities grew as well as their farms

survived. The GI Bill, to take another of the thousand examples, was meant to reward veterans and push away a postwar depression, it exposed new

probabilities of learning and travel (and therefore work) for millions of young men. This blurring from the cultural and also the economic includes the civil

rights legislation of the 1960s, which threw the weight of the federal government behind the struggle of African-Americans to carry out their daily lives

with hope and dignity and which didn't alienate every white person in the South.

Today's Democratic Party, using Lida Diet Pills its finely calibrated, top-down fixes, doesn't offer anything so transformative. It appears frightened of its own shadow,

which is probably why it keeps reassuring itself that its triumph is inevitable. It needs instead to completely acknowledge precisely how devastating the

recession was for working people everywhere in the usa, and what a generation of largely flat wages did to their aspirations even before that. It must take

on hard fights, even against powerful forces, like pharmaceutical and insurance providers that presume to tell us the limits of the items our health care

could be or energy firms that would inform us what the world's climate can endure. This means carving out a place of respect for working women and men in our

globalized, finance-driven world.