What the Democrats Need to Concentrate On

In my real job, we refer to graphs like this as Pareto charts. Pareto is an Italian mathematician most famous for the Pareto principle, most commonly called the 80/20 rule. It states 80% of all effects come from 20% of causes.

The chart illustrates both the rule and what Democrats should be doing. The leftomost two bars, Iraq and the Economy, represent what 74% of what everyone thinks is most important. Add in the health care bar and you go over 100% because each bar represents two factors: Most important plus next-most important.

Terrorism and Immigration, the two pet projects of the Right, are to the far right of the chart. As a process engineer, I'd say leave them alone and concentrate on the leftmost issues. But neither of these are traditional Republican issues, in fact, they've avoided and fought against them for so long they can't comprehend that these are what real Americans care about.

Most of us are disgusted with the current crop of Democrats. I suspect if they were to spend the last year of the 110th Congress working on these three issues, calling vote after vote and forcing the Right to sustain veto after veto, November 2008 would be a blowout on a scale we've never seen, effectively eliminating the Republican party. Will they? I have my doubts. Instead of leading, Pelosi and Reid will continue to politick, to the detriment of the Party and the Republic.

Cross-posted from "Colorado Progressive"