Thanks for your excellent post and sound reasoning, Bill. Sorry to snip your post, but the part I left above is what I was thinking - and wondering if this is what the Democratic Party is going to go with this time around. I think it would very tempting with so much media buzz about Trump and his bombastic personality.
92 posted that there will be no platform until the next election year - I guess that's how the "old system" of ours works. But why not work on something for the mid-terms?
92tide is also right.
(That was the sound of hell freezing over as I said that).
Platforms are utterly meaningless.
Let me give you the BEST example: in 1980 the GOP had a brouhaha in Detroit over abortion (well, there weren't many brews and very few "ha ha" moments but I digress). They had six main advisers on this, FIVE of whom told them to leave it out of the platform completely. The religious right was flexing its muscles that year and as they basically were converts from Carter (for the most part), it was the old "we have to give them something." So the advisers settled on the phrase that Reagan would appoint judges who recognized "the sanctity of life," which was code for "pro-life judges" without saying it. Or so went the story. But one advisor told a prominent reporter, "You just wait and see how little they actually get after the election." And who did Reagan appoint first? Pro-choice former state senator Sandra O'Connor, and he never once asked about how she would rule on abortion.
Four years later in Dallas there was a similar push as Falwell was featured prominently. Tom Nichols, now a conservative commentator, has related that behind closed doors as the religious carping was going on and they wanted something in the platform, one of the consultants off the record said, "Screw (the F word really) them, they're not voting for Mondale - we know it and they know it."
Oh and it's not just the GOP. Look at this line from 1992:
provide civil rights protection for gay men and lesbians and an end to Defense Department discrimination;
Let me translate for those of you who weren't around: "We're gonna have open gays in the military" and it was one of the few things Clinton promised he actually tried to do right out of the gate.
When it failed and we got the DADT compromise, guess what? One prominent consultant - after the 1994 wipeout - was asked about that subject and said, "Screw them, they're not voting for the Republicans anyway."
Special interest group after group is thrown a sop to make them shut up and after the election, who really cares?
