If It’s wrong to be a “bleeding heart” I don’t want to be right.

When I was a young boy growing-up in a very ethnic, Catholic neighborhood, this painting of Christ was in just about every house in the neighborhood.

Quite frankly, as a young boy, it scared me. I was very uncomfortable with an image of Jesus being harmed directly in front of me. It was especially scary for my American Baptist girlfriend, who eventually became my wife, because as I learned, Baptist families were not accustomed to this type of religious iconography being prominently displayed.

I often think back to the painting of Christ when I hear people use the the phrase “bleeding-heart liberal” with great disdain. I wonder how they could think a “bleeding-heart” could be such a terrible thing if Christians use it as a symbol for Christ’s suffering and love for all mankind.

Then I read about Westbrook Pegler who, like the current President of the U.S., was extremely good at calling people names, particularly politicians. Throughout the 1860s, the phrase “bleeding-heart comes up often in poetry, essays, and political speeches, as an expression of empathy and emotion but in Pegler’s syndicated newspaper column, he called Franklin D. Roosevelt “Moosejaw” and “momma’s boy.” He called President Truman “a thin-lipped hater”, even though Pegler, himself, was a bit of hater . He didn’t like the labor movement, Communists, fascists, Jews, and perhaps most of all, liberals.

In one 1938 column, Pegler coined a term for liberals that would eventually come to define conservative scorn for the left. Pegler was the first writer to refer to liberals as “bleeding hearts.” The context for his then-novel insult was a bill before Congress that aimed to curb lynching. You can figure-out the side on which Pegler was.

In the modern era it was Newt Gingrich (circa 1995) who lead the effort to brand the Democratic Party and all it’s members as “liberals” and especially “bleeding heart liberals”. Gingrich’s efforts have been quite successful because ever since his branding campaign the U.S. news media and political candidates themselves have labeled candidates as principally liberals or conservatives. The Democratic and Republican parties along with U.S. elections have been in turmoil ever since.

Most knowledgable political scientists will explain that ideological political parties, like Liberals and Conservatives, are not American in nature. They are almost always found outside of the United States, most notably in Europe.

In the United States, political parties have been more focused on building coalitions to win elections than proclaiming some sacrosanct political ideology or philosophy. That’s why Richard Nixon could successfully win-over the traditional Democratic southern states to the Republican Party. It’s also why Ronald Reagan won over working class Democrats to the Republican Party as well. In both cases neither southerns or working-class Democrats had any emotional or philosophical attachment to their political party. Consequently, they were quick to switch their vote when a candidate, like Nixon or Reagan, convinced them “he” better represented their political philosophy than any political party to which they may have been associated until then.

While there have certainly been a string of Presidential victories for Republican candidates within the last few decades, those wins have had more to do with Republicans beating Democratics at the “Branding game”, started by Newt Gingrich, than they have with anything inherently good or bad with the policies offered by candidates of either party. Republicans have simply branded themselves as “conservatives”, which they wrapped in goodness while branding their Democratic opponents as “liberals” which the wrapped in evil.

For Democrats to win elections, especially national elections, like President and Senator, in the post-Gingrichen era, they must win the branding wars. Democrats must convince American voters that Republicans have turned conservatism into a heart of stone.

• Republicans have turned conservatism into a political philosophy that rips young, innocent children from the arms of their parents and locks them in cages unlikely to ever see their parents again.
• Democrats must convince voters that Republicans place all Americans in harms way, especially young Americans in our military, when they repudiate America’s allies and attempt to disengage from decades-old western alliances like NATO, The World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and others that have preserved peace since 1945.
• Democrats must convince voters that Republicans place all Americans in harms way when they disparage scientists through-out the world warning of the imminent dangers to all humanity from global warming and human induced climate change.

None of these policies are inherently liberal or conservative. They are simply policies that can be in the best interests of certain constituencies if those constituencies understand them on their merits and not their political obscurity. If “policies of bleeding-heart liberals” are in the best interests of Americans and Americans understand that then Americans will vote for bleeding-heart Democrats rather than stone-cold Republicans almost all the time.

If Democrats convince American voters that the words of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty are still the words that define America and that Democrats are best capable of enacting those words into political programs and not just philosophical slogans, then Democrats will win elections regardless of Republican efforts to brand them as some type of evil they are not.

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door”