Joshua Green ("The Atlantic Monthly," June 2005) has recently written that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are "old-fashioned Democrats," and that they are an "odd [political] couple." They are "odd and odder," in my books, but not because of their early backgrounds. Nancy Pelosi, Democrat House Minority Leader from California, is a millionaire (there are now as many millionaires in the Democrat Party as in the Republican) who grew up as the daughter of an Italian mob-conversant ward (later elected mayor) boss in Baltimore's Little Italy, while Democrat Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada made a name for himself in that state by "targeting the mob" in Las Vegas, as chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission. Mr. Green quotes Mr. Reid in this month's "Atlantic Monthly," (page 38) as saying, " My dad was a miner; my mother took in wash . . . In my town of 200 people we had as many as 13 whorehouses . . . whose wash she did." Those two backgrounds don't make them unlikely House and Senate Minority Leaders. On the contrary, they both grew up in ways that would make them familiar, along with their Republican counterparts, with the ways of those that P. J. O'Rourke called in his famous book, "The Parliament of Whores." Who can deny that political prostitution (fee for service) has not become ever more popular in Washington?

One forgives various local and county politicians in our 50 states for their occasional feeble forays into political corruption, because one finds most of their well-documented misdeeds more charming than malicious. They are simply an un-evolved breed of clumsy sinners; annual fodder, if you will, for summer revivalist feedlots and watermelon festivals. But one's contempt for politicians on the state and federal level, and one's sense of political history, combine to make us wish for a king, except that I don't know of anybody I could accept as king--except myself? Which, I guess, is what every American thinks: "As long as I can't be king, then by gum no other mother's son is going to tell me what to do, especially if I can't vote." Now you have it. We Americans believe in democracy because we won't stand for our next door neighbor being a king. That's democracy by spite, and it's highly exportable, especially to Islamic savages. However, no existing king wants democracy of any kind, including presidential playmates and potentates such as President Bush's best Middle Eastern buddy, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, whose hand I wouldn't hold without a rubber glove. But that's another column.

We don't want a king and we yearn, like sheep for the slaughter, for the "good old days" when we had old-fashioned slave-owner-cross-burning-Democrats and elitist-never-saw-a-poor-man-Republicans running the country. Which brings me to my major "beef" with Mr. Green's "Atlantic Monthly" article. I don't believe that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are "old-fashioned Democrats." Nor do I, a real Democrat, believe, in my most demented moments, that they really want to be called "old-fashioned Democrats." Let's start with a working definition of "old-fashioned." Old-fashioned means ancient, obsolete, out-of-date. But are those two out-of-date Democrats? How far back do we want to go to make the comparisons? Should we start with Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun, two of our original "old-fashioned" Democrats? I warn you that history teaches us modern day Democrats that the Republican Party, even before Lincoln, has a far better historical record than us Democrats on race and equal rights, even though the "politically late" (former) Senator Tom Daschle told the nation on CNN that, "Republicans have to prove . . . to the American people that they are as sensitive to this question of racism, this question of civil rights, this question of equal opportunity, as they say they are."

Thomas Jefferson was the founder of what would become the Democratic Party. He was a slave owner who argued that slavery was bad for both the slave and the slave owner, yet slavery persisted under Jefferson. Then came the "old-fashioned" Democrat, John C. Calhoun, who defended the institution of slavery. History teaches us that John C. Calhoun transformed the Democratic Party of Jefferson into the Party of Slavery, and slavery persisted until the Republican President Lincoln came along and rescued the "Founding Documents" of America, including Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. We fought a bitter Civil War over slavery and equal opportunity and basic human rights for all Americans. Yet, as late as 1964, when President Johnson, not an "old-fashion Democrat," pushed the civil rights legislation through Congress (rescuing the Declaration of Independence), 21 leading Democrat senators voted against the bill, including Al Gore's racist daddy and the KKK's permanent representative in the Senate, Senator Robert Byrd. History tells us that it was a Republican Senator, Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, who pushed the Democratic President Lyndon Johnson's legislation through the Senate. By the way, Democratic "liberalism" back to the time of Woodrow Wilson, himself an old-fashioned racist Democrat, did not include relieving racism. In fact, Wilson was a Democratic President of the old fashion school, a "liberal" Democratic racist, and he wasn't alone. Other dead Democratic racists include such well known political hypocrites as the late William Fulbright of Arkansas, Sam Ervin of North Carolina, and Albert Gore, Sr. of Tennessee, and Strom Thurman. Thurman let the political winds blow him from the Democrats, in 1948, to the Dixiecrats, and then, presumably holding a flickering KKK torch to the political winds, decided to become a Republican. All the while, aging Democratic Senator Robert Byrd has decided to stay in the Senate, honing the fine art of partisan hypocrisy, until his body joins his brain, which died a good while ago.

Finally, I agree with Joshua Green when he writes, "Absent a GOP scandal or . . . economic collapse . . . the Democrats will have to draw the electoral equivalent of a straight flush . . . " to break out of the minority in 2006. We don't stand a chance with the likes of Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Joe Biden, whiners all. We need ideas, not moans that "the sky is falling." We Democrats need a leader, not "Chicken Little!"

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.