The Inexplicable Makeup of the Democratic Party

By which I mean - in many cases it makes no sense why certain people belong to the Democratic Party.

Case in Point: Today I was driving on Rt. 224 in an area that is high-traffic (as most of 224 is). A car sped around me and cut into my lane, with no signal. After shaking off the shock of that I looked at the car. There was a Kerry-Edwards Bumper sticker as well as some sort of Unions support Kerry Bumper sticker. I was then reminded of the unfortunate fact that this area of Ohio has so many union democrats who support Kerry as the Democratic candidate just because they have always done so. But why do they continue to do so? Many of the manufacturing plants that have closed down around the country did so because the companies went bankrupt under the financial duress of democratic environmental regulations. Regulations about emissions and disposal etc etc. Of course, I love nature, and I'm all for the environment, but not to the exclusion of people, lives, jobs and so forth.

And today, Ramesh Ponnuru points out another area in which the Democratic Party chooses earth over life:

One usually doesn't find this sort of thing in the MSM: "The Democrats are likely to lose the Catholic vote in November-and John Kerry could well lose the election as a result. It's about abortion, stupid. And 'choice,' make no mistake, is killing the Democratic Party." I think the columnist, Melinda Henneberger, misses a few things: It's not just Catholics who have ditched or are ditching the party over abortion; casting issues such as the environment in moral terms, while perhaps a good idea for other reasons, is not likely to cause many pro-life voters to switch sides (and shouldn't); the Vatican's statement on how Catholic voters should weigh abortion is tougher than she allows. But still--remarkable.

It's true, the party that favors the spotted owl and the Kyoto treaty on moral grounds, rejects favoring life on those same grounds.
Therefore, it's not surprising that a party that holds inconsistent positions produced a candidate incapable of consistently holding a single position.