Telling progressives that they should just shut the fuck up and vote for the Democrat because you have no choice since the Republican is worse is always an effective strategy.  Just ask Presidents Gore and Kerry.

One of the shortcomings of Obama’s insistence on being “bipartisan” is that he basically shut the voters out of the process. A more partisan strategy would have meant an organized appeal to his own voters to get out there and tell their Congressmen to vote for health care reform and a specific call to move against the anti-reform Congressmen.

Instead, under the guise of bipartisanship, Obama effectively told the people who voted for him, “you’re not needed; the senators will hash something out among themselves behind closed doors.”

That’s actually part of the emotional cost involved: you can’t just call up a bunch of voters every 4 years and expect them to help you get elected and then ignore them right afterwards. You have to remind them that you’re on their side. Maybe even pick a fight with a few right-wingers to show them you mean business.

Nice post. I’ll just add that Sir Charles is being somewhat of a weasel when he mentions the “closing of Gitmo and the end of torture as policy”. Closing Guantanamo so that we can ship prisoners to the Gitmo II that is Bagram is an empty gesture. It’s arguably worse, since it aims to deceive the American public.

Needless to say, this may very well apply to virtually all the items in Sir Charles list that have the word “reform”. Somebody need to remind him that passing legislation with the magic word on it is not an end in itself.

I’m not even a US voter but the “you HAVE to vote Democrat even if just for the lesser of two evils” line drives me utterly insane.

If nobody is prepared to draw a line and refuse to vote Democrat, there’s no benefit to a Democrat being appreciably different from a Republican. Think of it geometrically - if you are assured the votes of everyone to the left of you, you’ll go as far right as possible while still being to the left of the other candidate.

Yeah, it’s pretty obvious people are displacing onto Obama their deep dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party, which is being held hostage by the conservadems who are convinced that the only way to power is hating on hippies.

The thing this strategy ignores is that the main problem to the dems isn’t really that their message doesn’t appeal to a large number of voters, but that they can’t mobilize their voters as easily as the right wing can mobilize the retired populations and suburban evangelicals with miles of time to waste and convenient uncrowded polling locations. And part of that mobilizing is getting people energized. For quite a long time, the Dem approach has been an assumption that their base will have to vote for them, so why bother defending anything, which leaves the base feeling blase and unmotivated about voting.

The Democratic party hasn’t learned the most powerful aspect of the Republicans which wasn’t just the discipline, but the way they would throw red meat to the base. Even if it had no chance in Hell because it was unconstitutional, the stump speeches and the random bills made it seem like they cared about the Rapture and killing all those swarthy liberals. We’re not getting any big progressive thing, time is being dominated by conservadems being the spokespeople for democrat and all legislation has stalled for health care leaving people dwelling on compromise and failure rather than seeing things in the margins pass that would cheer people up.

Overall, though, the real problem, I suspect is a long con.

Basically for conservatives, the key to retaining the status quo that works for them is reducing voter turnout and voter belief that anything good can come from being active for change. This allows tiny minorities to become far more important than they are and prevents any institutional build-up against the life they are used to so they can ride out the clock.

And I think the conservative-types and “moderates” shat their pants a little at Barack Obama’s election precisely because people hoped and cared politically for the first time in a while. The “they” voted, way more than usual and worse yet, the candidate is a visual reminder of how things are changing despite them. So I think that’s why the obstructionism is so blatant and open. It’s not just preventing liberals from getting anything done, it’s reasserting the status quo to disillusion youth and minorities away from activism or making something of themselves or fighting for what is right. It’s basically, you may become president, but damn if we’ll let you accomplish anything or even have a full cabinet and I think conservadems are as frightened of that as republicans obviously are.

It’s worth noting that things do always seem worst at breaking points and if we can manage to get motivation up, we may finally break the stranglehold of conservatism in Congress and the “Beltway Mindset”.

Cause right now, they’re really trying everything to make youth and liberal voters be a “one-off anomaly”.

Course that’s hard with little meat to chew and far too many suicide bombs from conservadems like Stupak who never see a hippie punching moment they don’t like to take advantage of.

But it’s important to note that the establishment is scared for the first time in a long while. We’ve got something if we can keep pushing as hard as we can for as much as we can as often as we can.

I’m not registered as Democrat, and the only reason that I’ve always voted for Democrats is because it’s less bad than voting for Republicans.  This is an issue that I constantly struggle with.  I feel completely helpless, and it’s a lose-lose situation for me.  Most Democratic politicians really suck, and they’re almost as corrupt as Republicans.  I don’t want to vote for them, but I also don’t want to risk power going to someone who is even worse.  We need a better option that actually has a chance of winning.

First of all, I am 51 years old and will be 54 when Obama runs for re-election.  Obama makes the ninth president I have seen strut in, and eventually strut out, of office.  I’ve been following politics closely since I watched the entire Democratic convention coverage, gavel to gavel, when I was 14.  If Matt and Sir Charles think I should “grow up”, they can come tell me to my face and see how they like it when my foot “grows up” their asses.

Second, no, I won’t vote for anyone in 2012 if we don’t get meaningful health care reform.  And I am pretty sure we won’t.  I won’t vote at all, ever, after that because it would be a waste of time.  The failure of health care reform will prove to me for the first time in a life in which I have voted in every election, big and small, from presidential to February school budget votes in New Jersey, that the corporations own the government entirely and there is nothing I can do about it, so it doesn’t matter if it is a Democrat or a Republican.  So far Obama has governed very much like Bush.  Rendition?  Torture?  Bank bailouts?  Health care?  Paper trails for voting?  Afghanistan?  Obama is serving the needs of the corporations, and I don’t doubt that, were he president in 2001, Obama would have given us a war in Iraq in 2003.  And commenter 3 is correct:  closing Gitmo is an empty gesture.  Obama still insists on maintaining our human rights violations.

It seems that Matt and Sir Charles are the ones who need to change their views, not those of us who see clearly what we have in the White House and in Congress:  the Democrats and the Republicans are no different from one another.  Isn’t Stupak a Democrat?

There’s nobody in either party who stands for the American people.  They all serve corporate interests and they all drink from the same trough.  When I see the Democrats actually do something for Americans, I’ll care whether they maintain power.  They got the majorities they asked for and we still got nothing for us.  Fuck them, fuck Matt, fuck Sir Charles, and fuck Obama.

I am a life long dem, and a complete political junkie and the reason I will never vote or donate again are summed up in the following.

Republicans = corporate whores, constant war, torture/covering up of, lies, hypocrisy, secrecy

Democrats = all of the above wrapped in promises of hope and change and this time we really mean it…followed by betrayal withing days of the election and then heartbreak.

Not a single cost containment measure or enforcement option when those oh so trustworthy ins co’s act up.  I still can’t afford insurance, but now I get to pay for the privalege.

“Yeah, it’s pretty obvious people are displacing onto Obama their deep dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party, which is being held hostage by the conservadems who are convinced that the only way to power is hating on hippies. “

No, Cerberus, we’re just looking at what is right in front of our eyes.  Obama showed ZERO leadership on health care reform.  He gave it to Congress to write a bill and he made it clear that he’ll sign ANYTHING that calls itself a health care bill without regard to any standards or minimum achievements.  We’re going to get nothing from health care legislation and that’s just fine with Obama.  If he were a leader, he would have declared that X is the bottom line and he won’t sign anything that doesn’t contain X.

Cerberus, you are an optimist and I applaud you for that.

I think the whole 2008 election was rope-a-dope from the start, and we were the dopes. Obama is one of our Owners, or rather a representative thereof. At best, he believes that he can use his personal charisma to make things marginally less dreadful for anyone who isn’t an Owner: in my more cynical moments, he’s somewhere between a willing tool and a true believer in our Owners.

The HCR reform circus has been Kabuki from the very start. Create the illusion that if it weren’t for just a few clowns like Lieberman—and nobody deserves a kick in the balls more than he—we’d have some kind of real national healthcare. The whole “60 vote” nonsense was a key player in this. Our Owners and their representatives—75% of the Senate and maybe 60% of the House are their representatives, not ours—were never going to allow their profits to be taken away. We’re somewhere between slaves and cattle, as far as they’re concerned. Lieberman is just a convenient tool to make it look as if they’re trying to help us: they’re not.

Watch what people do, not what they say: Obama never once lifted a finger to push the bill in a progressive direction: if anything, he asked us all to stay out of it while THEIR representatives pretended to create something.

But don’t despair, because that’s the other half of their plan: they want us to withdraw in disgust. Taking the Dem party from our Owners is a generation-long project, and the “Dem” majorities we have now are only the first phase. It’s going to take a lot of time and hard work to persuade the sort of people who live in districts or states now represented by Conservadems that those people’s best interests lie with progressives, because those people have been lied to so comprehensively for the last generation or so.

Mad Matt and DBK: I very much understand your frustration, but you are doing exactly what they want you to do. Don’t throw up your hands and stay home, no matter how tempting it may seem: work at the margins to push the corporatists out of the Dem party.

Bipartisan-shit.

felagund, I understand your optimism, but I didn’t mention over 37 years of involvement in politics as a means of establishing my bona fides.  I’ve seen this same kabuki for a lifetime.  The American government is a wholly-owned subsidiary.  Yeah, we’ll push out the corporate tools in the Democratic party.

Pull the other one; it’s got bells on.

the main problem to the dems isn’t really that their message doesn’t appeal to a large number of voters, but that they can’t mobilize their voters as easily as the right wing can mobilize the retired populations and suburban evangelicals with miles of time to waste and convenient uncrowded polling locations.

Liberals can conjure up millions on the street for antiwar protests and can put together huge grassroots armies of volunteers to get Obama elected. It’s the lack of “red meat” moments that are keeping liberals home. Unlike felagund, I don’t believe it’s some kind of pre-planned thing to keep the base home. I think Obama never really felt that strongly about comprehensive health care reform, and his temperament is such that he doesn’t really like the idea of using the power of public pressure to twist arms of the recalcitrant legislators on Capitol Hill.

In 2010 Obama isn’t up for re-election yet, but my representative is, and she voted against Stupak-Pitts and for the House health bill, so I have literally no reason not to vote for her. I also get to vote for a new Senator for Illinois, and while some Democrats have made me quite upset this year, that isn’t any reason to toss myself under the bus and allow Mark friggin’ Kirk to become my Senator.

As to 2012, I can’t say now how I’ll vote, as 2012 is still a long way off.

as to

For a lot of people in America, the slide downhill of their fortunes has been going on so long that they’re feeling bereft and hopeless.  And I think that Obama actually did give a lot of people the first taste of political hope they’ve had in their lifetimes.

My mom is 62 and during the election kept saying how she was excited for a candidate for the first time since Bobby Kennedy. She’s also become far more disillusioned and disheartened than I have by Obama, probably because her excitement. He wasn’t my first choice, but rather my third (Kucinich and Edwards were 1 and 2) so I was never crazed. All the same I cried happy tears on election night and wonder if shedding them was ridiculous.

The people we have to be concerned about not voting are the people who didn’t used to vote before the 2008 election, and who had unrealistic hopes about what participating in the political process means.  Basically the people who’ll do whatever the TV tells them to and the people who thought Obama was going to legalize weed and mandate a Decemberists concert in every town.

Not people who read or write political blogs.

If anything, I’m worried that all the college kids who voted for the first time will get demoralized by the realities of the political process (and don’t have the memories of 2000 like we do).  But I’m not sure Matt is necessarily addressing that.

Punishing neoliberals by allowing a conservative to win basically fucked this country over in ways that we may still not recover from.

Economic neoliberals are holding up the public option and/or any worthwhile (read: liberal) reform. And, they’re members of both parties. That’s probably why 1/3 of Democrats see no point in voting.

“My mom is 62 and during the election kept saying how she was excited for a candidate for the first time since Bobby Kennedy.”

Obama was the first one to excite that commenter’s mom since Bobby Kennedy, and Obama has turned out to be an empty suit.  Now we’re supposed to be concerned that the Democrats might lose their majority, a majority that is helpless in the face of a minority and can’t accomplish one thing for the sake of the American people?  The Democrats said “Give us a majority and we’ll show ya somethin’, oh boy oh boy oh boy.”  Well, they got their majority and their Democratic president and they showed us something all right, oh boy oh boy oh boy.

The sobering reality behind this circus is that the permanent oligarchy that controls Washington quite clearly is completely incapable of, and uninterested in, doing anything beyond guarding its selfish interests, never mind dealing in any way with the massive challenges that face this country. It’s difficult to see any scenario in which that ends well over the next couple of decades.

I’m not even a US voter but the “you HAVE to vote Democrat even if just for the lesser of two evils” line drives me utterly insane. (&c;.)

I think the distinction here is that the people who are threatening to defect aren’t threatening to vote for a third-party candidate or create a legitimate left-oriented political party.  They’re threatening not to participate at all.  Which is exactly what this country needs - even less political participation!  The biggest reason that American politics is so fucked up is that only the elderly and the cranks vote reliably.  We absolutely NEED progressives in the political process.

I, for one, would be extremely satisfied to see all of these folks start attending their local Green Party meetings, or starting up some progressive alternative.  Or running more progressive candidates.  Or, shit, running for local office on progressive platforms themselves.

The religious and cultural right has such a lockgrip on the GOP because to a very large extent it controls all the mechanisms leading up to the election of the candidate: the precincts, the local work, the organizational locii in the churches, and so forth.  DFHs have shown one-one-millionth the interest in this that the teabaggers do and they’re astonished when they don’t control shit.  The only possible solution is to make Dem candidates as terrified of their base as the GOP is.  Politics is the non-violent embodiment of the line from The Sting: “This guy kills for pride”: an overstrong focus on policy as opposed to those dirty emotional things like revenge, grudges and vendettas simply means that you never nominate candidates who will actually implement those sweet, clean and oh-so-pure policy preferences.

This is where Cerebus is right in talking about red meat thrown to the base.  The elite of the GOP may lie to its base, it may hate it, it may be frightened of it, it may look down upon it, but it at least does its damnedest to make sure that it is fed semi-regularly.  The Dems, by contrast, haven’t even hung up their coats in their office before they start fucking over their base.

The bottom line: as long buying politicians wholesale is considered a part of a functioning democracy rather than a cancer on it then this will continue.  A constitutional amendment embodying spending limits is a necessary first step.  But the the Dem party isn’t interested because it’s a subsidiary and the Dem base isn’t interested because it’s toooooo fucking hawwwd, and we wanna cwy first!  (That, and—to be fair—most people in the Dem base are too busy doing damage control on a deeply unfair and shattered society to see to it.)

On-topic tangent: The church element is a huge advantage.  If churches work actively to elect GOP reps they don’t lose their tax status.  The corresponding true believer liberals and progressives are in non-profits and charities which WILL get gutted by the IRS if they go Dem.  It’s a rigged, game, like some 1970s international hockey game where only the Canadians get called for penalties by the European referees.*

* - Off-topic tangent: if you ever want to see how not to referee a sport, pull out some of those videotapes.  Canadian bodycheck?  Roughing penalty.  Swedish or Russian stick to a Canadian head?  Play on.  It made figure skating judging look like Oliver Wendell Holmes.

I was solidly in the “if you don’t vote we’re doomed” category. And I have to say that having watched a video of McSame uttering his infamous “that one” line (our cat is now “that one” when he’s being bad), I can’t imagine what a mess we would be in with him.

But really, in the long term, how bad do things have to get before the democrats do something other than this pathetic marking time? The long term right wing strategy is to ram through whatever they can while in power, then frustrate the democrats when people put them back into power after realizing what a mess the GOP has made of things. And the democrats not only seem to be falling into that trap, but they seem to be actively embracing it.

It seems increasingly that our choice is not stopping the Republicans from destroying the country, but merely slowing them down with a few time outs.

“A constitutional amendment embodying spending limits is a necessary first step.”

Um, yeah.  Except that the government is controlled by people who oppose that.  The conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.

These are all the conditions needed for the rise of a serious third party.  And it sounds like you need it.  It’ll be a mess for a while, and it’s easy for me to recommend this course from the other side of the pond, but the US system is clearly well on its way to being broken.  Either it get fixed now, or it continues to wear down and breaks even worse further down the line.

These are all the conditions needed for the rise of a serious third party.  And it sounds like you need it.

Like a hole in the head, because it’ll be the Teabag Party. Bad things happen when the left cedes populism to the right.

I agree with Cerebus and The Opoponax.

The purpose of Lieberman’s actions in their totality has everything to do with trying to depress and deflate the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  Obama, and Rahm as much as I hate this, is doing the right thing.  I was totally filled with visceral disgust last night (to the point of idly dreaming up terrorist acts against Lieberman) because the health care plan in the end is turning out to be yet another regressive tax—which doesn’t even go to the government!  However, my estimation of Obama’s tactics and strategy is that he’s going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing.  I suppose I’m okay with this strategy…I mean, I really don’t think Lieberman and Nelson and the Republicans can keep this up forever, not without paying a huge price.  No matter how disintermediated the average voter is from the political process, constant repitition of Lieberman’s bullshit antics are going to have penetration into the American psyche.  I also wonder just how much Lieberman understands that it’s in a whole bunch of people’s percievably *direct* interests to assassinate him?  A tremendous number of people have loved ones who will no sh*t directly benefit from HCR.  This isn’t votes for wars, there’s no macho to cover up the evil.  He’s just acting explicitly in a way to kill people. 

I strongly urge *everyone* to tie Lieberman to murder.  An avaricious guy like him will hate the permanent reminder of his non-goodness.

DBK,

I’m on the cusp of 50, so not exactly a kid either.  But I’ll happily break your foot off and shove it up your ass.

And I’ll reiterate, if you see no difference between Obama and Bush or the Democrats and the Republicans, then you need to grow the fuck up.

Come to Netroots and I’ll happily tell this to your face.

Hey, DBK, I never said it was doable, I distinctly said “necessary”, not realistic. 

If you actually ask me what I believe is doable then I’ll be frank: American society won’t reform unless there is a coherent, measurable threat to the social order which the established elites think can’t be contained with violence, or, more accurately, can’t be contained without violence that inflicts too large a cost on their wealth and persons.  The New Deal only succeeded because the elites genuinely believed in the viable possibility of a popular uprising.  The New Deal’s social gains were only sustained because of the Cold War, which made keeping one’s people healthy and cared for was a necessary propaganda tool.  The demise of the USSR meant that an awful lot of masks got dropped and people said, “phew, now we can go back to screwing the proles into the ground and starving their wife and kids”.

It’s December 2009.  I think it’s a little early to threaten to withhold votes for Obama over healthcare reform.  It’s not to early to let the Congressmen and Senators up for reelection to know that the majority of Americans want the public option and to stop bending over backwards to the hateful rightwingers.

And while I respect the rights of everyone to vote as they please, I, like Amanda, vividly remember the 2000 election and the 8-year reign of Bush II.  If you are really so tunnel-visioned over this one issue as to not vote for Obama in 2012, then you are myopic.  Take that apathy, redirect it, and let them know it’s not OK, and make Obama get back on course so he’s back to being the leader we all thought he’d be.  Or stay home and watch the Right take control again with Palin/Pawlenty/Huckabee/Romney.  Good luck getting them to listen to health care reform ideas.  My point is fight to fix it now so we don’t have to threaten to withhold votes for Dems in 2012.

And one more thing: the Dems need to see HCR for what it is.  It’s their chance to bury the Right or go down in a blaze of glory.  If they go full-bore on the public option, and get actual HCR passed, they either prove they were correct all along about it or see it go down as the worst idea since New Coke.  This half-ass crap they are trying now will end with some soft version of HCR that doesn’t work that becomes a winning issue for the Right (“See, the Democrats’ plan for HCR was a disaster!”).  The Dems will have passed a bad bill with no Repub support that everyone hates and they will take the blame.  They cannot win with the compromise this time.  There is ZERO benefit to compromise here.

To be fair, I do think Obama and a certain strain of his supporters really did misdiagnose the problem in the country. He did say that he wanted to “bring people together” and talking about bipartisanship and cooperation. There’s a certain strain of the liberal good-government that believes that everyone will “come around” once they’ve heard the right arguments. Obama definitely comes from this tradition, and he’s always portrayed himself as a consensus-builder rather than a guy who picks a fight with an enemy and wins.

felagund, I understand your optimism, but I didn’t mention over 37 years of involvement in politics as a means of establishing my bona fides.  I’ve seen this same kabuki for a lifetime.

And the kabuki started with the 1968 Democratic convention that culminated in leftists and liberals deciding to just stay home.

That’s been the strategy for leftists and liberals for the past 40 years:  if we stay home and don’t get involved in electoral politics, then the Democrats will come crawling to us.  You know what?  That’s not how it works.  If you take your ball and go home, eventually the other kids will find someone else with a ball.

And that’s exactly what happened.  Democratic politicians watched Reagan’s election and all of the traditional Democratic voters who rushed to vote for him (the Reagan Democrats) and realized that they had a choice:  they could continue to try to coax people who didn’t want to participate to participate, or they could take the truckloads of money that corporations were backing up to their door.  The fact that Republicans became nutty social conservatives gave them plenty of cover—they were able to go to corporations and present themselves as the non-nutty alternative to get the money they needed to run.  Now we have two political parties that are completely dominated by corporations because that’s where the money is.

As I said in the thread below, the religious right planned and executed a 30-year-long campaign to take over the Republican Party.  We can’t even stay organized long enough to talk about trying to primary Bayh and Lincoln in 2011.  And that’s because, since 1968, the default position of leftists and liberals has been “stay home.”  It’s not some brand-new idea that just dawned on people—it’s what we do.

I strongly urge *everyone* to tie Lieberman to murder.  An avaricious guy like him will hate the permanent reminder of his non-goodness.

Even Biden seems to have fired a shot along these lines, basically mocking Lieberman’s sanctimonious persona by saying that as a consequence of his actions, he’s not going to have a friend in The Lord.

Very few people ever publicly point out the disparity between Lieberman’s religious persona and his actual behavior, and I think more needs to be made of this.

To be fair, Matt and Sir Charles are more admonishing these demoralized voters to grow the fuck up than anything else.

Frankly, they can shut the fuck up.  I’m a demoralized high information voter.  Matt and “Sir” Charles need to understand that I, and many like me, vote for something - NOT against something.  “The Republicans are really really evil” is not a reason to vote Democratic, it is a reason to vote against the Republicans.

If you’re not familiar with the “I won’t vote for the Dems, there’s no difference!” comment, you don’t read Open Left’s comment threads enough.  Frankly, that song was a big hit back in 2000, but now it just makes me want to smash the radio.

Oh, and the ever-popular “right-wing rule will get the American people to support leftist politicians!”  Frankly, that one sounded better in the original German.*

*“Nach Hitler, uns” was a popular saying among left-wing parties in Germany.  Didn’t work out so well.

I agree with Mnemosyne, but am depressed by the reality that getting progressives to agree and act on even core principles is notoriously difficult.  One of the things that turned me off the left for a decade coming out of law school was seeing just how much they preferred sanctimony and arguing with each other over trying to achieve the one or two things they agreed on.  The right may be fractured, but they can always agree on and mobilize on things like fucking other people over.  Their counterparts on the left would argue over whether it was a good idea to leave a burning building, squabble over the wording of the angry note that they planned to write to the person who locked the exit out, and then strike a planning subcommittee on whether or not they needed a policy analysis of whether burning buildings could be compromised with.

You people thought, for some reason, that this was going to be easy—that all we had to do was win one election and the electorate would greet us with candy and flowers, and pure progressivism would prevail forevermore.

It’s not going to work out that way.  We’re going to have to fight for the rest of our lives, and our children will, too,, and their children will, too.  Hell, we’re still fighting the battles we elected Lincoln to fight.

Obama is the most progressive president since Truman. Nevertheless, Congress is a few votes in the Senate short of being able to pass Obama’s program—the Democratic majority is not a progressive majority; it depends on center/right Dems to pass anything in the Senate.  The remedy for that is to work on places like Nebraska, and Connecticut, and Louisiana—not to give up, and surrender the country to the crazies, because you are tired of fighting.

We watched Life of Brian again recently.  Scenes like this seemed way too apropos.

You people thought, for some reason, that this was going to be easy—that all we had to do was win one election and the electorate would greet us with candy and flowers, and pure progressivism would prevail forevermore. It’s not going to work out that way.  We’re going to have to fight for the rest of our lives

Well, I was kind of expecting Obama to lead us in that fight or maybe even ask for my help in fighting it. In fact, I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

not to give up, and surrender the country to the crazies, because you are tired of fighting.

The nature of being crazy is that you don’t have a rational side that points out to you that your efforts are pointless and crazy. So the crazy have a natural advantage. Who’s on our side, rea?

Obama is the most progressive president since Truman.

That’s not even close to being correct. LBJ was far more progressive on domestic policy, but Obama amazingly enough has decided he wants to emulate the bad stuff from LBJ but pass on the good stuff.

Apologists for corporadems really need to try a bit harder to put a grain of plausibility into their screeds.

Hey felagund, if we push out the corporatists there would be nobody left in the party.  When bush won, the first thing he did was toss some red meat to his base which kept them happy.

What did we get?  We got an RNC lawyer appointed AG and Rethug bankers appointed to the treasury.  The healthcare bill was completely written by a VP from Wellpoint.  How could staying home have been worse?

Obama is the most progressive president since Truman.

How lucky for us.

How could staying home have been worse?

Sarah Palin could be vice president, and we could be bombing Iran right now.

You people thought, for some reason, that this was going to be easy—that all we had to do was win one election and the electorate would greet us with candy and flowers, and pure progressivism would prevail forevermore.

This is such an enormous strawman that erecting it must have taken scaffolding and multiple cranes.

Obama is the most progressive president since Truman.

Hahahahaha…  Even Nixon was more progressive on many issues (including health care) than Obama.

Well, I was kind of expecting Obama to lead us in that fight or maybe even ask for my help in fighting it.

Are you not on the mailing list?  I get at least one, if not two, e-mails a day urging me to take action.  Right now, I’m supposed to write to Boxer and Feinstein to tell them to keep pushing for the healthcare bill.  Not everything is personally signed by Obama, but I get one signed by him every couple of weeks urging me to keep fighting.

Of course, DKOS is busy saying that people should not participate in actions urged by Organizing for America because apparently the magical powers of “don’t do anything” extend to pressuring your representatives.  I guess if we just don’t do what OFA asks and don’t contact our reps, magical ponies will rain down.

Progressive and liberal voters have been manipulated into a double bind, where they must vote for Democrats because they are the not-Republicans. What they really voted for in 2008 was institutionalizing private healthcare and the escalation of oppression in Afghanistan. Being taken for granted is never going to result in the kind of public policies progressive and liberal voters desire. Until progressives and liberals actually vote for liberals and progressives, they should expect disappointment from the moderate, not-Republican candidates they support. Apparently, Americans will have to suffer much more before they receive a new, new deal. They probably will not have to wait long.

By the way, does anyone know if a bill that has been reconciled by the House and Senate committees is subject to cloture/filibuster in the Senate like this bill has been?

Because we all know that whatever bill is passed by the Senate doesn’t automatically become law, right?  It has to be reconciled with the House bill that was already passed and then the joint bill has to pass both houses of Congress before the law goes into effect.

Until progressives and liberals actually vote for liberals and progressives

That’s nice. So what do we after we have voted, worked and donated for them, gotten them elected- and then they sell us out? As the Senate progressives have done and the House progressives are about to do, on health care.

Amanda,

And now on a more civilized note—I think you slightly misread my intended audience, which was activist writers and readers of political blogs, not the voter writ large. 

Here is my concern—there is a huge amount of decrying Obama as an empty suit, a sell out, a corporate whore in inspirational clothing, etc.  Some of this has been via lefty blogs—Firedoglake, Americablog, kos at times, and several smaller blogs have all hit on variations of this theme.  On top of this, though, it is the commenters—see e.g. above—who seem to really be taking this line and running with it.

As I have now laid out in three separate posts and numerous replies to our own commenters, some of whom are quite thoughtful, others who are wholly unsophisticated, in the current environment there is no way to get progressive or even modest, incrementally progressive legislation through absent 60 votes in the Senate.  And what I keep asking people who are flaying Obama is what exactly is their strategy for overcoming this obstacle?  No one has a good answer.  I get third party pie-in-the-sky bullshit, I get suggestions to primary our tepid Conservadem senators, and, mostly, I get the “will” response—If Obama would just try harder and care more it will happen.

Obama has zero leverage against the senators from Arkansas, Louisiana, or Nebraska.  They are more popular in their states than he is.  He doesn’t really have a whole lot against Lieberman.  Sure he can push to have his chairmanship stripped and have him thrown out of the caucus, but how much does this matter to Holy Joe at this juncture?  He is living to fuck us—he is a political dead man walking and at some level he knows it.  So he is going to stick it to the left every chance he gets.  One way or another he is going to be around until 2012.

Now I know that you are steeped in reproductive rights and abortion related issues.  Yes, many of the Dems are tepid allies at best.  But the Republicans are flat out crazy on this (and a host of other) issues.  It matters in the most profound sense whether we have judges picked by Barack Obama and confirmed by a Democratic controlled Senate.  It matters deeply that states can use their own Medicaid funds to pay for abortions for low income women.  It is important that money for family planning be allocated to Title X clinics and that we stop this abstinence only crap.  And it matters deeply who is administering these programs. 

This is just one slice of public policy in which meaningful things are done every day by virtue of who holds the levers of power.

Part of our job as a community, at least as I see it, is to educate people to the long view, the difficulty of the struggle, the reality of our diffuse and maddening system of political power and to get people to understand that pushing our agenda is not the work of one or two election cycles, but possibly a generation.

I have spent my entire adult life living in the political wilderness.  I’ve fought the good fight every fucking day of my career and I’ve known mostly losses and futility.  The victories have been ephemeral and the losses profound. 

For the first time in over forty years, we may be able to actually create a progressive majority in the U.S.  We need to keep our eyes on the prize. 

The Republicans are very deliberately engaging in a game of obstructionism that is designed to suppress voter turnout and dampen enthusiam on our side.  We play into their hands at our peril.

This comment thread seems to mostly be ignoring the central idea of Amanda’s post, which is that it’s the low information Democratic voters who are going to be the problem in 2010 (and most likely 2012).  The people who threw their hearts into supporting President Hopey Changey in the 2008 election and are going to go into the 2010 election with high unemployment (stimulus too small!), more waves of forclosures (and not even cramdowns to help get out from under), no actual change in their spiraling health care costs even if the crappy HCR bill passes, and the escalation of the war in Afghanistan.  Exactly why are those people supposed to be motivated to go out and vote for Democrats?  More importantly, even if they do drag themselves out to vote, what’s supposed to motivate them to volunteer and donate?

The question, Sir Charles, is, are “we” playing into the Republicans hands, or is it Obama and those he’s chosen to surround himself with who are doing it?  Could talk of bipartisanship be anything but an opportunity for the Republicans to obstruct?

Shorter democrats: REPUBLICANS ARE COMING! Boogey boogey boogey!

Political participation: HELL YES. Voting? No. Voting is not participation, it is the illusion of such. What the Left should do now is to focus on taking these people who were fired up to vote for the first time and turn them to actual participatory politics. It’s when you continue pushing forward the myth of electoralism as participation that people cast in their votes once every few years then get demoralized when nothing happens.

Obama is the most progressive president since Truman.

Off the top of my head, Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon, Ford for sure. Depending on where Obama goes in his term possibly even Kennedy, Carter, and George the Elder.

It’s easy for those of us who are cynical political bloggers to admonish people for seeing Obama as anything but a centrist Democrat, but he really did present himself on the campaign trail as a new FDR, someone who would be able to improve your life in solid, measurable ways during hard times.

??? What campaign did you watch? The man projected a vague nimbus of hope with little to no details, so everyone projected whatever they wanted on him, regardless of his little slip-ups (like the “I like those gays who aren’t the proselytizing types”). Hillary was the FDR candidate with the solid, measurable policy plans. Obama was reverently in love with Reagan. Srsly, did no one pay attention to what the man was saying? Repeatedly?

He seems like such a nice guy, too!  So it was easy to believe.

What trenchant analysis. No, seriously, that describes the spell that was cast perfectly. But Obama’s always been more of a salesman than a statesman; the emperor never had any clothes.

The Republicans are very deliberately engaging in a game of obstructionism that is designed to suppress voter turnout and dampen enthusiasm on our side.  We play into their hands at our peril.

This premise is correct. Your conclusion- that therefore we should just tell voters to eat their shit sandwich and like it, and this will magically cause them to regain their enthusiasm for voting for Democrats- er, how shall I put this politely, doesn’t exactly accord with reality.

Political parties that don’t deliver for their voters lose. No amount of hectoring from the likes of Sir Charles is going to affect this dynamic one whit. Delivering the goods is the way to counter the Republican strategy that you aptly describe.

I love that it’s the people too dim to understand Politics 101 stuff- deliver the goods to your voters or you’re toast- that is burned into the brains of every mayor and city councilor, who fancy themselves the grownups in the room.

“So it’s unfair that he’s getting dinged for what Joe Lieberman and other Senators are technically doing, but that’s just the way it goes when we’re talking about inevitable low information voters. “

It’s Obama’s fault for one more reason Amanda:  they took reconcilliation off the table.  For eight years we all had shit sandwhiches shoved down our throat with 50 votes plus Cheney.

And now that we are in that position, it’s off the table and it ends up that I apparently voted for President Lieberman.

And sorry, but that’s one shit sandwhich I won’t eat.  I’m one of the ones who is very likely not going to vote in 2010, and even more likely to vote third party if I do go out. 

I won’t swallow President Joseph Lieberman and no one is going to make me.

Steve,

What’s your formula for delivering the goods?  I haven’t gotten a decent answer to this question yet.  Where are you coming up with the 60 votes?

The Obama apologists, I note, gloss over one key—and bloody huge—fact.

Obama ran on Change.  It was the mantra, centrepiece and entire soul of his campaign.  Not incremental improvement, not appeasement, not compromise, not integration of GOP concepts and GOP hacks with Dem cards into the administration, Change, with a capital C.  He inspired that, preached that, embodied that in all he did and said and preached.

And now he wants to be a cautious, defensive, almost passive, nearly inert figure.  Is he barnstorming?  Speaking? Inspiring? No, he’s in his office playing grey middle manager and office compromiser.  He.  Did.  Not.  Run.  As.  That.  Period.

He set the game and we have people supposedly on our side wanting to forget that those millions of people who stood to hear him are irrelevant, that their dreams and hopes—which he encouraged—don’t matter at all compared to backroom deals and the egos of sociopaths like Lieberman.  Sorry, no.  He owns and owes this.

Reconciliation is a fantasy.  Comprehensive HCR cannot be accomplished thorugh reconciliation.  People who keep saying this don’t know a goddamn thing about how things get through the Senate.

Llelldorin,

It’s pretty simple.  He’s the 60th vote unless you can peel off Snowe or Collins.  There just aren’t any more options.  The rest of the Republican side is pretty much batshit crazy on almost any issue of note.

It’s a revolting place to be—at the mercy of that schmuck—but he’s about it.  (He just furnished the 60th vote on the budget bill this past weekend.)

What’s your formula for delivering the goods?  I haven’t gotten a decent answer to this question yet.  Where are you coming up with the 60 votes?

The beginning of the formula is to realize that you only need 50. The filibuster should have been killed years ago. Short of that, reconciliation should have been conspicuously on the table all along. And yes, I do know the ins and outs of what can be done that way and how, so spare me the supercilious lecture you were about to deliver.

Also, Obama knew months ago that he wasn’t going to invest any political capital in the public option and that it was almost certainly not going to be in the final bill. Therefore, that bill should not contain mandates, either- just insurance regulation. At this point, mandates are nothing but a raid on voters’ wallets to prop up insurance companies’ profits. (Of course, that’s why the insurance companies will only mount a token pretend effort to defeat Liebercare, whereas they’d go to war over a regulations-only bill.) The Republicans are going to have a field day with that. It’s probably enough to sink the Dems in 2010 all by itself.

The other past of the answer is that it wouldn’t matter even if you convinced me to accept your excuses. The average voter won’t. If the Democratic party doesn’t find a way to throw some bones to the voters it needs to stay in power, it’s toast. That may be unfair but guess what, life’s unfair and it will still be unfair no matter how much Sir Charles whines about the unfairness. If they want to keep their majority they’d better figure it out, and it’s not my job to figure it out for them.

“Reconciliation is a fantasy.  Comprehensive HCR cannot be accomplished thorugh reconciliation.  People who keep saying this don’t know a goddamn thing about how things get through the Senate. “

fuck you.

I’ve read extensive opinions on the subject and while there is wide agreement that it can’t all go through reconciliation, much of it can.

Expanding medicare can, for one thing.

And gosh that’s a pretty important thing isn’t it, mister big dick know it all.

Comprehensive HCR cannot be accomplished thorugh reconciliation.  People who keep saying this don’t know a goddamn thing about how things get through the Senate.

Good thing that’s a straw man then. NOBODY has been saying the whole package could be done that way.

But then, building straw men is pretty clearly your only skill.

So Amanda says, “If someone really isn’t going to vote for the Dems over this, I think they’re doing the wrong thing, but we have to understand where those people are coming from instead of lecturing them.”

And a bunch of commenters are like, “Yeah! Go Amanda! Those people are crybabies and assholes, definitely!”

I don’t get it.

I definitely feel the pull of “fuck all these people, I’m done”. I’m also very unlikely to stop voting. I generally feel like this puts me on the same team as folks who agree with me about progressive policy goals but are 100% sure electing middle-of-the-road Democrats helps do it; I’m not about to leave that team (again, what’s the better alternative?) but nor have I yet figured out how to most effectively work with people whose own frustrations with the political process mean they periodically call me names.

I would urge people to read this post by Nate Silver. 

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/why-progressives-are-batshit-crazy-to.html

Look, Obama is not perfect, not every move he has made has been right, and not all of his goals are our goals.  But sweet Jesus folks we just had eight years of disastrous rule at the hands of the right—and by all appearances they’ve gotten even crazier out of power.  Delivering them back into power by sitting on our hands or suggesting to others that sitting on their hands is warranted—it’s just madness.

I like to read Nate Silver on two subjects: baseball and statistics. Politics per se? He knows no more than some random kid off the street.

“He’s the 60th vote unless you can peel off Snowe or Collins.  There just aren’t any more options.”

Remember when all of the big swinging dicks were telling us that we couldn’t have tax cuts for the rich because we didn’t have the 60th vote?

Oh you don’t? 

Cause we were forced to eat that with 50 votes plus cheney and the big swinging dicks wanting to protect Obama have sudden-onset amensia?

Well, welcome to America.  Amnesia for everybody.  The big swinging dicks are counting on it.

Sir Charles:
So the GOP is engaged in a vote-killing strategy, and you have asked us for a formula for delivering the goods.  May I ask two questions in response?

First: What has the Obama administration done to ensure wider voter registration, turnout and diminishment of voter fraud (a la Diebold) and to prevent vote suppression? 

Second: Do you have a formula that doesn’t involve “you don’t get what you voted for and what the majority of Americans want, but the alternative is worse so fuck off children!”?  Do you?  I don’t see one.

Also, what Steve LaBonne said at #63.

Got it. The centrists have to be appeased at every turn, while the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party has to eat shit sandwiches and vote for whatever the centrists deign is acceptable.

Oh, and then they have to also go out and convince the electorate that shit sandwiches really aren’t all that bad, and Democratic voters should volunteer their time and money to make sure they keep getting more shit sandwiches.

Yeah, that’ll work well.

I’m a demoralized high information voter.  Matt and “Sir” Charles need to understand that I, and many like me, vote for something - NOT against something.  “The Republicans are really really evil” is not a reason to vote Democratic, it is a reason to vote against the Republicans.

Then put your money where your mouth is and work to make things better.

Nobody who is actually dissatisfied with the political process can justify taking their ball and going home.  If that’s what you plan to do, it’s because you don’t give a shit, not because you’re so righteously pissed off about the Blue Dogs.

Has anybody seen Sir Charles and Rahm Emanuel in the same place at the same time?

Seeker - thanks for making me laugh, I really needed that.  Seriously.

Obama ran on Change.  .. And now he wants to be a cautious, defensive, almost passive, nearly inert figure.  Is he barnstorming?  Speaking? Inspiring? No, he’s in his office playing grey middle manager and office compromiser.  He.  Did.  Not.  Run.  As.  That.  Period.

Another possibility is that this, to Obama, is change. He wanted to “change the tone” in Washington. To him, this may mean making middle-of-the-road deals with any republicans he can find to make incremental changes rather than setting up a partisan showdown. One of my biggest reservations about Obama (I eventually came around and voted for him in the DC primary) was that he didn’t have the partisan instincts to deal with Republicans and that he was too much of an “office compromiser” who liked consensus. I’m pretty sure my perceptions were proven right. And that upsets me, because I would have hoped that Obama would react differently to the circumstances he discovered when he had to deal with the right-wing, but I can’t say his leadership temperament is unexpected.

Steve,

I’ve forgotten more about this shit then you’ll ever know. 

Where are the 60 fucking votes Steve?  How are you going to deliver the goods as you claim?

No answers—just rhetoric.

I definitely feel the pull of “fuck all these people, I’m done”.

In a nutshell there’s the difference between the Dem base and the GOP base.  The Dem base gets let down and it says “fuck all these people, I’m done”; the GOP base says “fuck the people I hate, and I will move heaven and earth to fuck them harder and more viciously”.

And they keep getting what they want, even when they have been voted out of office.  What a surprise.

Has anybody seen Sir Charles and Rahm Emanuel in the same place at the same time?

personally, i think the real secret is that rahm is actually a werewolf.

But sweet Jesus folks we just had eight years of disastrous rule at the hands of the right

Starting to look like nine to me.

Also, I am 100% sure that just about every single commenter here is going to vote in 2010 and 2012. Sir Charles et al. don’t have to convince us of anything. The problem at hand, as atrios points out is the millions of voters who may or may not show up. They’re not puttering around here on pandagon, and they’re not necessarily disillusioned activists. What they are is a group of people who could become loyal Democratic voters if the Democrats decide that they actually give a damn about their votes. So, Sir Charles, what is Obama going to do to make sure they vote in 2010 and 2012? You don’t have to convince me of anything. It’s everyone else the party needs to worry about.

I think one of the most important facts that came out last week was the poll that actually did the follow up: why are you unhappy with the healthcare reform?

25% said because it doesn’t go far enough.  The MSM and idiot Beltway Villagers are convinced that anythiing that’s bad for Democrats is good for Republicans, when the reality is being ignored.  There are center-left people in this country—a hell of a lot of them.  There are leftist, and then there are fringy moonbat leftists.  The Democrats, as the party of the left should be answering to center-left and left elements in our society.

They aren’t.  The GOP has pushed the Overton window so far right that it is full of fringe-right whackaloons, which leaves the center-right sane people to the Democrats.  The rest of us?  Shit out of luck, even on issues where we have a clear majority such as health care.

Who’s representing the center-left, which most polls show is the majority of the country?

No one.

Obama is a huge failure not because of who he is—my erstwhile Senator has always been a political creature and not ever the ultra-leftist Kenyan Marxist Antichrist.  He’s a failure b/c he created hope for change.  He ran on it, and he can’t even follow through on transparency.

I’ll always vote.  Obama is better than McCain.  But when all parties are owned by corporations, it doesn’t make much of a difference.  Lieberman should be stripped of all seniority, and if the Democratic Party actually meant what it said, it would do that.  But too many Democrats are as owned by the insurance companies as Lieberman, and they’re happy to let him take the heat.

Only the citizens ever wanted a public option.  The politicians have been trying to get rid of it from the beginning.

Lieberman was mostly elected by Republicans in CT, but some Democrats voted for him b/c they believed him when he claimed he’d caucus.  They believed he was still a Democrat at heart and the primary was a fluke, despite it being the highest voter turnout in CT primary history. 

Despite his behavior, the party still won’t reprimand him, and he’s not even a Democrat.

I can’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to waste their vote on Obama again.  There hasn’t been enough change, and the bailout saved the banks and their CEOs—those people are still getting bonuses.

The 4-6 million loans that Obama claimed would be refinanced by the bailout?  Slightly more than 100,000 have been fixed.  Because the banks are keeping the money.  They aren’t refinancing bad loans, they aren’t making new loans, they are just using that tax money to look good on paper.

We would have been better off had Obama used the money to pay off all the mortgages, or use it to have them all underwritten to 4.6% interest on a crammed down mortgage.  People would have relief and would be able to spend.

Instead, the banks and Wall Street continue unpunished and without new strong regulation while the people suffer.  It’s like throwing pot smokers in jail, fining them, and giving all that fine money to the drug dealers.

I want to vote for someone who will work the Democratic platform.  I don’t want to vote for another Dem in Republican clothing.  I voted Green instead of Rahm Emmanuel last time I had a chance b/c I despise Rahm.  I could not vote for him in good faith.

I’ll always vote against a Sarah Palin, but I don’t know that I’ll ever donate to a Presidential candidate again.

Obama ran on Change.

And now he wants to be a cautious, defensive, almost passive, nearly inert figure.

If you honestly believe this and aren’t just being disingenuous, you are officially in the “people who thought an Obama administration would mean legalized weed and free Decemberists concerts for everyone”.

I mean, did you not take civics class in school growing up?

Obama ran for president.  The president of the United States is the head of the Executive branch, which is just one of our country’s three total branches of government.  He has certain roles and responsibilities granted to him by the constitution (and a few others by tradition and precedent).  The other two branches of government have other roles and responsibilities that are designed to check his, thus balancing the political process and making immediate radical change very difficult. 

This is how our government was designed to work.  If it starts working otherwise, and making too many changes too fast, a la the Bush administration, intelligent people start worrying about dictatorships, fascism, and tyrrany. 

The way I see it, we have two options - we can play by the rules as previously agreed on over the last 200+ years and watch Obama work incrementally for change by pushing against the other branches of government as constitutionally mandated, or we can root for Obama to become a tyrant we happen to agree with.  And I know how I felt about the Republicans I knew who were in the latter camp during Bush’s presidency.

Sir Charles:

What about Angel Scarlett at 69?  What about forcing them to vote down health care and then mobilizing for an even tougher bill next time around with an angry electorate that knows that the GOP owns keeping them from medical treatment for their kids?  What about saying, “okay, you screwed us on health care we are now going to screw you for everything we can, every chance we can until you learn that `compromise’ is a two-sided dynamic”?

For a guy that likes to be nasty and confrontational you seem to be very, very disinterested in bringing that to the table against Republicans.  Actually, you remind me of Hilary that way, as I’ve noted here before: if she’d been half as vicious and political and ruthless to the GOP as she was to her fellow Dems in the primaries she’d probably be POTUS right now.

Opoponax, I’d consider that post worth something if I wasn’t familiar with LBJ’s administration.  The notion that the President is some sort of woolly hope-for-the-bester rather than a man with a phenomenal amount of political pliers to apply to shrinking balls as necessary is ludicrous.  I may have slept through civics class but I was wide awake in history.

OK, Opopo:
Sorry, but what part of “folllowing through on what you promised” is a tyrant’s threat to liberty again?

Seeker, I’m not by any means saying that Obama should just sit by and do nothing and hand the country to the Right.  But A) he doesn’t seem to be, and B) this isn’t history, it’s current events.  It’s pretty hard for us to realistically observe, from 11 months of an Obama administration, what exactly is going on behind the curtain and exactly how all this is going to play out. 

All we can do is be realistic about what the role of the POTUS is and how American politics works.  I personally think Obama is doing an OK-ish job at this point, given the situation we’re in.  I think that the people we need to be worried about are the centrist Democrats in congress, as well as other obstructionists.  ESPECIALLY the talking heads who are doing their damndest to paint this as a failure of Obama or liberal politics in general, rather than pointing fingers at the actual people who are to blame. 

Just to be absolutely crystal clear, I agree that one of the main failings of the Obama administration so far is the failure to rein in Lieberman and keep party discipline.

To me, free healthcare (and food, and shelter… to each according to their needs) is not even negotiable. That’s the bare minimum. We can kvetch on mere administration when we get these things. If need be some heads are going to *literally* have to roll in boardrooms and parliaments everywhere. We know who these rules of government have been designed to benefit, and it’s not the People.

Oooh, moonbat Lefty, boogey boogey!

I’m very impressed, Sir Charles, with your machismo, as well with your analysis, which is worthless, and the childishness of you telling people that they need to grow up when the actual problem is your inability to see what is right in front of your face.

Thanks for responding to the actual arguments that I made abotu Obama’s record so far and what we, the people are really getting from our gove…oh, wait.  You didn’t respond to argument.  Having no worthwhile response to what I said, you had a hissy fit because I said something about shoving my foot up your ass.  I guess that, when your arguments fall flat, you pound the table.  Good on ya.  It’s all you have left to work with, other than your emotional attachment to Obama and your inability to admit that he isn’t what you allowed yourself to pretend he was:  a progressive who would serve the people rather than a corporatist who will serve big business.

So, in sum, got anything besides macho posturing to offer us, Sir Charles?  Awaiting your response with certitude that it will be as worthwhile as your other remarks on this subject.

To be clear, the democrats can pass the medicare buy-in with 50 votes plus Biden.  They can pick the age - 55 was the age mentioned.  Nothing stopping them from choosing the age of 50, or 45.

If you can’t address that without screaming “SHOW ME THE 60 VOTES ” over and over, you got nothing.  Pack it up and leave.

You aren’t fooling anyone here, try the rubes over at a different site.

It’s pretty hard for us to realistically observe, from 11 months of an Obama administration, what exactly is going on behind the curtain and exactly how all this is going to play out.

Yeah, no, 11 months is plenty of time to observe the Obama administration. Call me when he wants to get out in front of the curtain and, like, actually stand for something (besides bombing more Pakistanis).

Got it. The centrists have to be appeased at every turn, while the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party has to eat shit sandwiches and vote for whatever the centrists deign is acceptable.

Yep.  That is what “Sir” Charles does seem to be telling us.  Sorry Charlie, I’m not buying what your selling.  I’m an activist, not a partisan.

Then put your money where your mouth is and work to make things better.

With all due respect, Opoponax, get bent.  I worked on and donated money to the Obama campaign since the primaries.  I am a legal aid lawyer - it is literally my job to help people and make things better.  I put my money where my mouth is on a daily basis, and do more than my fair share.  Can you say the same?

That nate silver piece was far from inspiring, sir.

One caution: this reflects the situation before the public option was removed from the bill.

That means that the difference in net costs is slightly exaggerated by my figures.

. The more compelling critique, rather, is that the bill would fail to significantly “bend the cost curve”. I don’t dismiss that criticism at all, and certainly the insertion of a public option would have helped at the margins.

I happen to agree that the cost subsidies need to be improved somewhat for this type of family and indeed I wish that this is where more of the left’s energy had been directed.

What, exactly did he think this was about?  He’s blaming us for turning this into a symbolic effort, when Rahm’s over there cutting reform off at the knees in the name of scoring points?

All in all, it sounds like ol’ nate is blowing alot of smoke, as well as either fundamentally misunderstanding or misrepresenting the progressives’ intention.  The reason a robust public option was so important in the initial debate was precisely that it would both reduce individual costs and make our health care system more responsive overall.  When that was taken off the table, it turned into a holding action just to keep something.  For months now, there’s been an ongoing effort to find a reasonable compromise and a way to create meaningful reform.  At every turn, that effort has been met with the worst sort of cynicism and cronyism from the highest ranks of the Democratic party, compounded by the most opportunistic obstruction from the repubs imaginable.  Now, we’re seeing the same sort of industry-friendly corporate welfare we got in the bank bailouts going to the insurance industry, only white house doesn’t have the previous administration to blame for setting this one up.

One of the commenters at 538 summed it up pretty well:

Sorry, Nate, but your entire rebuttal proceeds from a false premise - namely, the premise that health insurance, purchased from a private, for-profit insurance company, is the same thing as health care.

Where are the 60 fucking votes Steve?  How are you going to deliver the goods as you claim?

Where are the millions of voters who are going to turn out just because you tell them to “grow up”?

I’m surprised to see anyone touting Obama’s health-reform cred here today. Who do you think sent Rahm out to do the compromise dance—Cheney? Bush?

Come on. Reality check. Obama is the one selling real health care form down the river. Not the Republicans. Not the Blue Dogs.

The admonition to “grow up” sounds an awful lot like “suck on it,” to me. And, hey, no thanks. After all these years, I’ve had my full.

Sorry, but what part of “folllowing through on what you promised” is a tyrant’s threat to liberty again?

The problem is that Obama promised a lot of things that he really doesn’t have the power to follow through on immediately upon taking office (ending the war in Iraq, closing Gitmo in a meaningful way).

And then he talked a lot about “change” and “hope” in very general terms which mean different things to different people.  It’s almost impossible to immediately satisfy that for all voters, because to me “change” might mean civil rights, while to you “change” might mean an isolationist foreign policy.

Also, what’s with the “Sir”? Is the Queen of England in the business of knighting American bloggers now?

Mnemosyne

No, that has NOT been the strategy since 1968.  I haven’t just written blog comments my whole life.  I worked in politics for progressive causes.  And in case your memory extends to 1968 but somehow went blank for a few years, 1972 was when that big youth vote was going to propel McGovern into the White House.  Do you remember how that worked out?  Then we had Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1976 as a reaction to the evil that was Nixon.  Carter actually made stab at a proactive solution to the energy crisis that has become the global warming crisis and the terrorism crisis of the present (energy conservation reducing gas consumption choking the money supply to the middle east and lowering greenhouse gases, etc.—not to mention the reduction int he outflow of cash from the US for foreign oil), and we all know how that worked out.  Damn good president, Jimmy Carter.  Look at all the good it did us (the Iran crisis was a direct result of right-wing US policies that had been in place for decades, but it was laid at Carter’s feet because guess who controls the media and the flow of information in the US?)

The fact is that liberals have not stayed home for four decades as you claim.  They’ve been out there fighting the tide, but the corporations have been in charge the whole time and if some of us see it clearly, after our own decades of fighting against it, is that, as little Sir Charlie claims, not “grown up”?  I’ve watched this show for too long to waste any more time on it.  We’ll see the same results no matter what we do.  Nothing not “grown up” in analyzing the facts and the history and seeing what people are doing in DC every day and who is and isn’t really trying to achieve a better life for their constituents and who is and isn’t really working for the corporations while pretending to serve constituents…

You get the point.  If you can show me actual gains that liberals have made and that wouldn’t have happened anyway, I’d be happy to hear it.

And don’t even get me started on the way this country treats women.

I have an inkling “grow up” is ancient Sankrist for “suck it, lefties!”

“LBJ was far more progressive on domestic policy, but Obama amazingly enough has decided he wants to emulate the bad stuff from LBJ but pass on the good stuff.”

Exactly.  Keep the war, lose the Great Society.  What a combo…

Here’s the problem in a nutshell, Sir Charles:

In 2006, we retook both houses of congress.  We were told we needed to retake the White House to get anything done (don’t even mention standing up to Bush or anything).

In 2008, we were told we needed 60 seats in the Senate to prevent the Republican filibuster to get anything done.

A few recounts later and our caucus HAS a 60 seat majority in the Senate and still nothing can get done.

Sorry, Charlie.  This is looking a lot like Lucy and the football, and I think you might want to check if your last name is ‘Brown’.  On three occasions the Democrats were given what they needed, and on each of these new occasions, a new excuse was given for inaction and the goal posts were moved.  I really don’t care how the Senate is supposed to work.  Quite the contrary, the Senate appears not to work.

As for concrete proposals - how is it that 60 votes are required for cloture?  I think that would be because the Senators themselves made that rule.  And gee, who has the majority caucus in the Senate?  Oh yeah, the Dems.  So the Democrats made a rule that 60 votes were needed for cloture, and then wimper that they can’t find 60 votes?  Please, don’t piss on my face and tell me that it’s raining.

Oh, and if we are going to have a filibuster, how about forcing Lieberman to stand at the podium and read the phonebook until he drops from exhaustion.  Of course that was the old rule in the Senate, was it not.  I suppose since the Democrats now control the Senate they could make that a rule, right?

As for me, I’ll vote.  But the Democrats (or any other party) don’t get to take my vote for granted.  They don’t own it.

Closing Guantanamo so that we can ship prisoners to the Gitmo II that is Bagram is an empty gesture. It’s arguably worse, since it aims to deceive the American public.

If by “Bagram” you are referring to Thomson Correctional Center in Thomson, Illinois, I’m not sure what exactly leads you to believe that will be worse than Gitmo…

Because as of yesterday, that’s where the Gitmo detainees will be headed.

As for this overall post, I’m pretty much with Amanda 100%... I don’t know which side of the left frustrates me more, the folks for whom Obama can do no right, or the folks for whom Obama can do no wrong.  I don’t like the patronizing tone of Yglesias takes in his argument, but I’m equally turned off by those who posit the ridiculous theory that we’re no better off than we would have been had McCain won, and that Obama is just Bush III.

Obama is fallible, and he’s proven to be far more disappointing than I had hoped he would be last November when I voted for him.  I’m definitely a little more jaded today than I was back in January when he was inaugurated.

That said, I’m still glad that he is the president and John McCain is not (and more importantly, that Sarah Palin is not one 72 year old frail heartbeat away from the Oval Office), I still feel more hopeful about America’s prospects today than I did at any point when Bush was POTUS, and I still have absolutely no regrets about voting for Obama last year.  I want to shake him, he needs to drop that fuckface Rahm like a bad habit, and he needs to knock off the flowery “let’s be friends” rhetoric with the assholes from the other side who have no interest in being his friend.

I am now absolutely convinced that as lousy as the GOP is, they will be the winners next November at the polls… I see no chance of the Democrats making net gains in the next election.

The question for me isn’t about whether or not the Democrats are gonna lose next year - they will - but just how badly they will lose.  If we can keep it to only 2 or 3 Senate seats (and let’s face it, if we learned anything this year, it’s that 60 seats is no more beneficial to our causes than 57), and 15-20 House seats, I’ll consider it a moral victory in the sense that it could have been a hell of a lot worse.

There is gonna be some hell to pay next November at the polls.  Hopefully the president and Congress get the wake up call, quit trying to be the great compromisers, and get their shit together before 2012 so Obama isn’t a one-term POTUS.  If you alienate a significant chunk of your base, you’re going to lose elections, which I think we’re going to see play out 11 months from now.

Although Rahm and I share a common vocabulary, we inhabit two different bodies.  On the plus side, I’m about six inches taller—the downside, I suspect I’m about 50 pounds heavier.

Let me repeat—I wasn’t telling the voters to grow up, I was telling the lefty blogosphere to grow up.

Voting down health care to be able to bargain something better is a fool’s errand.  It would be a debacle, there would be no end of stories on how Obama and the Dems can’t do anything, etc., and we’ll end up with a 1994 situation—39% turnout and a Republican resurgence. 

Passing health care reform that does a number of the things that we want—and then improving it over time is the better path.  Look, I’m a single payer advocate, but it isn’t going to happen at this point.  The opening up of Medicare to people in their 50s—through reconciliation if possible—in the next year or two would be a way to start on that path.  But we need to get the basic law in place.  (See for example Social Security.) 

DBK,

I believe ‘twas you who got all macho with me.  I merely responded.  And the offer still stands.

Steve,

You don’t really want to address the fundamental roadblock here, which is a Senate in which the balance of power is held by people who are largely immune to pressure from the left.  It sucks, but you really can’t just wish it away.

Shorter Opoponax: “We can’t expect Obama to actually do anything! He’s only the President of the United States, after all, it’s not like he’s in any politically powerful position! Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo!”

Shorter ‘Sir’ Charles: “You grubby peasants need to shut up, do what you’re told, and be pathetically grateful for whatever crumbs your corporate overlords with D’s behind their names bother to toss your way.”

Richard,

I’m all for repealing the filibuster.  Explain to me how you are going to get senators, many of whom are wielding vast power because of its existence, to vote it away.

“The opening up of Medicare to people in their 50s—through reconciliation if possible—in the next year or two would be a way to start on that path. “

Try the next week or two.

Since it’s Christmas, I give them to January.  It passes the procedural test for reconcillation, and they either do it, or the stick it up Rahm’s ass sideways while he whistles Dixie, but they don’t get my vote.

What’s realy funny is that people like Charles are shooting themselves in the foot.

Here is what they refuse to talk about:  In a time of economic devastation, how popular is a mandatory insurance law going to be?  And what are the Republicans, who are proving to be very cunning at tapping into the populist outrage, going to do with that?

Why they’re going to crush the Democratic party with it, that’s what.

And you’ve got no good public option, and medicare buy-in to ease the way for people 50 and up, to counteract that pain.

The Democrats are on the verge of passing a suicide pact.

And Charles and his friends are mad at the progressives.  LOL

I’m all for repealing the filibuster.  Explain to me how you are going to get senators, many of whom are wielding vast power because of its existence, to vote it away.

You miss my point, I am saying that we are getting played by our politicians.  Senators are raising barriers to have plausible deniability for not following though on popular legislation.  Nothing ever gets done, but nobody is ever really to blame either.

It seems increasingly that our choice is not stopping the Republicans from destroying the country, but merely slowing them down with a few time outs.

FTMFW!

What’s more, to get right back to the crux of it, is that Amanda’s post hits the nail dead on.  As others have pointed out, we here are hardly the problem when it comes to voter disillusionment and disenfranchisement.  “Hey, 19-year-old college student—welcome to the real world.  You thought things would change?  Grow the fuck up.”

This all feels so sickeningly familiar.  The first time I voted was for Clinton’s first term.  I grew up watching the Iran-Contra hearings and the Clarence Thomas hearings and the Bush-Dukakis debates and feeling so utterly hopeless that it all seemed so preordained.  Then came 1992.  The world was changing fast, and the old guard republicans seemed like such dinosaurs, so unable to comprehend the change that people were so yearning for.  We (or at least I) felt so buoyed with such hope for change when Clinton came in.  They on the other side, too, are looking back to that same time.  The Rethugs want another 1994 so bad they can taste it.  It seems to me that the surest way to give it to them is to further alienate the potential voters who would otherwise allow them to cement their 2008 victories. 

When did giving support to the party’s base become a bad thing, a suicidal political move that undermines political progress?  It’s what parties are for.  We vote for you so you can represent us.  It gets even more surreal when you realize that the party’s base is the majority of the people in the country.

I also wonder just how much Lieberman understands that it’s in a whole bunch of people’s percievably *direct* interests to (censored) him?

I realize that you aren’t directly advocating this, shah8 (at least I really hope you aren’t), but you really, really, really should never post something like on the Internet, ummm…. ever.

You may set yourself up to get a knock on your door by some federal agents.

I am a high information voter who will continue to vote, but not for Democrats.  I live in IL-5 (formerly Rahm Emanuel’s).  I’m a little puzzled by this notion:

I agree that one of the main failings of the Obama administration so far is the failure to rein in Lieberman and keep party discipline.

This assumes that the Obama administration’s goals are in conflict with those of Lieberman and the other conservative and ‘moderate’ non-Republicans.  Standing aside and letting the Democratic Senate whores squabble over the best way to service their industry johns is not leadership, unless servicing those johns is the goal of the White House, as well.  I’m not suggesting a back-room conspiracy; as long as Democratic partisans are unwilling to take their votes elsewhere, that kind of scripting isn’t necessary.  No, I believe that in the Senate the terms of debate really are that narrow, because why not?  If the voters refuse to hold you accountable, why not keep lining your pockets while functionally ignoring their needs?  The Republicans can ride the self-fucking Tea Party wave back to majority while sensible Democrats insist that keeping Lucy as the holder is the mature thing to do.

What’s your formula for delivering the goods?  I haven’t gotten a decent answer to this question yet.  Where are you coming up with the 60 votes?

The answer is for the Dems to come up with something people actually want, stand behind it, and sell the hell out of it to the country, daring the Republicans to oppose it, and then call them traitors to the country when they do.

Scratch that.

The answer is to do anything that remotely resembles trying to get the votes, rather than what they have done, which is trying to flush HRC down the drain in as plausibly deniable a manner as possible.

That said, I’m still glad that he is the president and John McCain is not (and more importantly, that Sarah Palin is not one 72 year old frail heartbeat away from the Oval Office), I still feel more hopeful about America’s prospects today than I did at any point when Bush was POTUS, and I still have absolutely no regrets about voting for Obama last year.  I want to shake him, he needs to drop that fuckface Rahm like a bad habit, and he needs to knock off the flowery “let’s be friends” rhetoric with the assholes from the other side who have no interest in being his friend.

Well hey, none of that’s going to happen, but it’s cute that you “feel” so good about it.

Why are the Dems always on the reactive, defensive end? The story was that Gore felt pushed into dissing Clinton’s accomplishments and picking Lieberman to run against the conservatives. GOP pushed, Dems reacted.

Bushco then scared the Dems into passing terrible Patriot Act stuff, goaded them into supporting the war in Iraq, pushed them around on torture, Gitmo, etc. GOP pushed, Dems reacted.

Then Kerry campaigned as a war hero, presumedly as a reaction to the hawkish GOP. He ran as a wishy=washy conservative. GOP pushed, Dems reacted.

So now that the Dems control the Congress and the White House, they are still being pushed around by the GOP. That’s the story? Poor Obama can’t get shit done because of the obstructionist GOP.

Jesus. What is the GOP, Lex Fucking Luthor?

When was the first and last time Obama, Reid et al pushed back? I mean really really pushed back? Not against the “far left,” but against the actual opposition?

Hello? Is this thing on?

It’s when you continue pushing forward the myth of electoralism as participation that people cast in their votes once every few years then get demoralized when nothing happens.

Funny how the “myth of electoralism” has put conservatives in power here in the States for 30 years as the religious right turns out at the polls in every single election.  Does this “myth” only apply to liberal votes?

Fuck you again charles…you want us to take a shit sandwich in hope that there will be ketchup provided months or years down the line…provided by the people who are currently selling us out.  Who’s living in a dream world?

And in case your memory extends to 1968 but somehow went blank for a few years, 1972 was when that big youth vote was going to propel McGovern into the White House.  Do you remember how that worked out?

The youth were too apathetic to actually bother to turn out, and the politicians learned not to rely on “the youth vote” to win.  I’m not getting how that negates my point that if you want politicians to do what you want, withholding your vote is the worst way to get it because once you stay home, they don’t give a fuck about you anymore.

The fact is that liberals have not stayed home for four decades as you claim.

Then why have we been losing elections since Reagan?  If the liberal voters are turning out, as you claim, why do we keep losing?

Let me emphasize, it’s not just recently that I’ve heard this “withhold your vote” bullshit.  I’ve heard it since at least 1994 when people were (rightfully) pissed off at Clinton over healthcare and DADT.  How’d that work out for liberals?

I’ve seen an assortment of commenters at dKos talk about not voting—but they’re often those first-time voters, or people who had given up on voting but came back to give Obama a chance. Sometimes former Nader voters who’ve now given up on third-parties as well. They might be the ‘bloggers’ being pointed to, in that grand old mainstream news tradition of ‘they posted a sentence online! They’re the bloggers!’

(It really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that there are plenty of low-info, light-experience voters posting at dKos…)

Sir Charles, look, I know why I should keep voting for Dems in 2010 and 2012, but how are you supposed to explain to everyone else that they should?

Basically, to the greater public, the Dems look like a bunch of guys who are willing to let the Republicans run roughshod over them while they get down on their knees and beg the Republicans to play nice, and then come up short anyway. So don’t keep talking about why I should keep supporting Obama and the Democrats. What do you tell everyone else?

Jesus. What is the GOP, Lex Fucking Luthor?

basically, yes.

Let me emphasize, it’s not just recently that I’ve heard this “withhold your vote” bullshit.  I’ve heard it since at least 1994 when people were (rightfully) pissed off at Clinton over healthcare and DADT.  How’d that work out for liberals?

It’s not about withholding votes in a snit.  It wasn’t in 94, and although I wasn’t around in 72, I suspect it wasn’t then, either.  There’s a deep, fundamental difference between real disillusionment and disenfranchisement on the one hand and poor sportsmanship on the other.  It’s been true in representative politics for as long as I can think of, that unless the elected officials can produce some kind of results, they lose the support of those who voted them in, and not just out of spite.  People are hurting, and they can’t afford to wait out the game.

It’s hard to take one’s ball and go home when that home is being foreclosed on and the ball repossessed.

Lieberman wants revenge on the left and is willing to sell out his own principles in order to get it… and we’re the ones with a bad attitude?

I like how TPM has been trying to peddle the we better pass this or it’s curses for us, and now they have a big picture of Queen Olympia from Maine on the front page with they giddy headline “Is she getable?”.

You know, since the dems are going to pass a mandatory insurance bill and the entire insurance industry is so hard they’re about to come in their pants, and since the Republicans couldn’t have written a better bill themselves, but got the Dems to pass it and can not only make their insurance goombas happy, but actualy run against it on a populist line and take back the House at least, I think we can get Queen Olympia on board.

Ohhhh I’m so excited!!

If the liberal voters are turning out, as you claim, why do we keep losing?

Because there aren’t enough self-consciously liberal voters to win elections, that’s why. If Democrats want to keep power, they have to appeal to the much larger group of voters who consistently show up in polls- voters who would never use the word “liberal”, or in many cases even “Democrat”, to describe themselves- but who on an issue by issue basis support a whole range of progressive policies, policies which they know would actually help them. And what do they get from the Democrats, time and again? Shit sandwiches. Come on, you’re smart enough to see the obvious electoral problem with that.

Obama even knows this or used to- remember “bittergate”? Back then he was talking straight Thomas Frank. He’s always been good at talking.

DBK,

I believe ‘twas you who got all macho with me.  I merely responded.  And the offer still stands.

Shorter Sir Charles:  I still can’t work up an argument that is worthwhile, so I’ll stick to fussing over the silly parts.

Charlie, honey, sweetie, I don’t give a shit about any of that.  Obama has not been a leader in any way, shape or form.  On health care, he clearly considers it a priority to sign anything, no matter how bad, so he can run in 2012 saying, “I signed health care reform”, and so he can blame Congress for how bad the reform is.  But he showed no leadership.  With the momentum among the public, LBJ would have passed real health care reform, with Medicare for all, within the first hundred days of his administration.  A real leader would have said, “This is my minimum requirement for health care reform and I won’t sign anything less.”  Obama?  “Everything is negotiable and I don’t really care what you do.  Send me something and I’ll sign it.”  As for worrying about having a Republican government again, we have one now.  Run all the interference form Obama and the Democrats that you want, but some of us see exactly what they are even if you haven’t grown up enough to see it yet.

Folks, I’m 51 and next month I’m getting a lymph node removed from my neck so they can test it for cancer.  Yes, next month.  No waiting for surgery here in the US, you see.  Nope.  Just a month.  Just found out that, with my excellent health insurance that my wife and I pay for via her employer, with both of us working, we’ll be paying somewhere above $3500 for an outpatient procedure requiring just a local anesthetic.  That’s our 20% co-pay.  That means my less than one hour procedure will cost over $17,500.  Other countries pay half or less than half of what we pay per capita for health care and they have single payer.  The US health care system is completely fucked up, Obama and the Democrats promised they’d fix it up, and we are getting NOTHING for it.

Tell me again how I should grow up.  I never get tired of hearing it.  I also never get tired of hearing true believers talk about how important it is for their tribe to be in power when neither tribe works for the people who vote for them.

<i>you want us to take a shit sandwich in hope that there will be ketchup provided months or years down the line…<?i>

No, I want us to put through the best bill that we can get through Congress, and then come back next year and try again, and the year after that, and the year after that, until we eventually get what we want.

Obama is the most progressive president since Truman.

Cough, cough… ummm, Lyndon Johnson’s ghost disagrees.

And yeah, I know… LBJ had Vietnam.  And Obama has Afghanistan.  No, Obama didn’t start Afghanistan… but LBJ didn’t start Vietnam, either.  Both presidents have taken actions to drastically escalate those wars beyond their predecessors.

LBJ had Medicare and Civil Rights, to name just two of his huge progressive achievements.  Obama hasn’t accomplished anything close to either of those things, at this point.

I certainly hope he does accomplish great progressive achievements before all is said and done, and I would love to be able to ultimately say that Obama was even more progressive than LBJ at the end of his presidency.  But at this point, it is neither fair nor accurate to classify Obama as more progressive than LBJ in terms of policy enacted… and we judge people by their actions, not their intentions.  I don’t care how progressive Obama is in his heart, if he’s not taking that internal progressive spirit and implementing it through solid progressive policy.

There’s a ton of people who give lip service to the social causes that they claim to believe in… and they don’t contribute one dime of money or one minute of volunteer time to furthering those causes.

I nearly flunked a math course when I was in grade school.  A week later, our standardized test results came back, and I scored in the 98th percentile in the nation in math.  And yet still, I didn’t do the math work in my class and finished with a C- for the quarter.  It didn’t seem fair to me, because I knew I was much more intelligent than the C- grade reflected.  And my teacher carefully explained to me, “I know you are smarter than that, and you know you are smarter than that.  But I don’t grade people on their potential, I grade them on their actual performance.  Your performance was C- work, and I’m being generous.”  The lesson I learned was this… just because I may be intellectually capable of being a straight A student all the time, I don’t automatically deserve to get straight A’s if I’m not willing to do the actual work needed to get those grades.  Potential is great… and doesn’t mean shit if it isn’t actually utilized.  The world’s most intellectually gifted street corner scam artist is still going to be remembered primarily as a street corner scam artist at the end of the day.

I’m not gonna give Obama an “A” for progressivism because he sounds progressive and seems progressive in his heart… the policies he has actually enacted - the things which he should actually be judged by - have not been especially progressive, particularly when stacked side-by-side with some of his arguably more progressive predecessors.

No, I want us to put through the best bill that we can get through Congress, and then come back next year and try again, and the year after that, and the year after that, until we eventually get what we want.

Too bad the mandates in that “best” bill will be so politically poisonous that 1) there won’t be Democratic majorities to “try again” for a long time, and 2) the very name of “health care reform” will be mud for at least as long a time.

Might want to rethink that “strategy” a bit.

Shorter Opoponax: “We can’t expect Obama to actually do anything! He’s only the President of the United States, after all, it’s not like he’s in any politically powerful position! Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo!”

Not really.  More like: let’s be aware of who this guy is and what we elected him to do.  Anyone who thought we were electing Emma Goldman, or that the POTUS can usher in sweeping changes to decades (if not centuries) of national precedent overnight, is extremely clueless about what American politics is about.

I’m not all that happy about how Obama has done in office so far, either.  But I knew going in that it wasn’t going to be all sunshine and roses and getting everything on my political wish list.  So far Obama has done OK, and it’s better than McCain would be, and I think there are some interesting changes to his approach that are going to prove to be very important in a long-game sort of sense.

The difference is that I’m not going around crowing about how I’m not going to vote in 2012.

“Then why have we been losing elections since Reagan?  If the liberal voters are turning out, as you claim, why do we keep losing? “

Because there aren’t that many of them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t right.  Get it?  Man, that really wasn’t much of a response.  The youth vote didn’t turn out?  The youth vote almost never turns out.  I think it might have for Obama, but I haven’t seen the numbers.  That would be the first time.  But then the myth of the youth vote is that it is liberal so maybe that wasn’t worth mentioning by me anyway.

The bottom line is that you’re calling for liberals to work harder.  Well some of us have been working hard for decades and the results have been minimal enough for us to say we’ve had enough.  Mind you,  I am not disillusioned as a lot of people by Obama.  I never thought he was liberal or progressive or even center-left.  I called him a corporatist all through the election.  A lot of liberals/progressives kind of tricked themselves into thinking he was one of them and now they’re disillusioned because he turned out to be exactly what he was all along.  I think that’s a big part of the unhappiness over at Kos.

You want me to keep working for liberal representation?  Been there, ain’t happened yet and ain’t gonna happen.  We have a government that doesn’t represent me and has no intention of changing.  It’s bought and paid for and I can’t afford to buy one for the rest of us.  Voting for Democrats is just participation in the self-delusion.  Not worth my time anymore.

DBK, I hope everything works out for you.  Three weeks ago I had ovarian surgery; my obgyn went in pretty convinced I had ovarian cancer.  I did not.  Everything turned out okay, I hope the same happens for you.

I also know about the waits here in the US.  For a specialist to do a second sonogram on me, I had to wait 6 weeks.  6 weeks and they thought I had ovarian cancer.  My obgyn called the specialist up herself, and guess what?  I got in in four weeks!  lol.  Such bs about the “waiting lists” in canada.  There here too, and that’s if you have insurance.  No insurance and you don’t have to worry about waiting lists.

What a bunch of bs we swallow.  And it’s just as annoying when someone on the left tells us to be patient.  You know, newsflash, not everyone has the time to be patient.  They really don’t.  Their clock is ticking.  Lives are in the balance.

Anyway, good luck!

We got an RNC lawyer appointed AG

If you want to be critical of Eric Holder’s record prior to heading up DoJ, pleas base it in fact, not hyperbole.  Eric Holder has never been employed in any capacity by the Republican National Committee.

And while we’re focusing on health care in this thread, let’s not forget that the Dems have been busy serving up shit sandwiches to their voters on jobs and mortgage relief as well (and by the way, don’t mention the war!). At least one Democratic pol understands what this is going to mean- they’re screwed: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/15/rep-capuano-tells-fellow_n_392685.html

By the way, does anyone know if a bill that has been reconciled by the House and Senate committees is subject to cloture/filibuster in the Senate like this bill has been?

Because we all know that whatever bill is passed by the Senate doesn’t automatically become law, right?  It has to be reconciled with the House bill that was already passed and then the joint bill has to pass both houses of Congress before the law goes into effect.

Yes, the final bill that emerges from conference will have to undergo the exact same process as the current bill being debated by the Senate… filibuster rules will still apply, and 60 will still be the magic number.

Yes, the final bill that emerges from conference will have to undergo the exact same process as the current bill being debated by the Senate… filibuster rules will still apply, and 60 will still be the magic number.

I’m pretty sure that’s not true—the joint bill that comes out from reconciliation can’t be filibustered.

The Republicans can ride the self-fucking Tea Party wave back to majority while sensible Democrats insist that keeping Lucy as the holder is the mature thing to do.

And why will they be able to do that?  Because Republicans know that they can count on the Tea Partiers to show up and vote.  Doug Hoffman blew away the Republican candidate and almost won in NY-23.  If he had just bothered to actually move into the district before the election, he probably would have won.

We spend a lot of time here saying “better Democrats” but we don’t actually back any better Democrats—we wait for them to be handed to us on a silver platter.  The teabaggers go out and find the people they want to run and force the national party to go along with it.

People keep complaining about being fed a shit sandwich, but if your stand is “I’d rather get nothing if that’s the choice” why do you expect them to suddenly offer you roast beef instead?

“the joint bill that comes out from reconciliation can’t be filibustered. “

Um, that doesn’t make sense.  If that were the case Pelosi would just stick the public option back in.  I think you’re wrong.

DTG is correct. There is a technicality involved- motions to proceed to consideration of a conference report are not subject to debate and hence to filibuster (as they are with “regular” bills- the “double filibuster”) but the report itself is subject to debate and therefore to the “single” filibuster.

Steve,

What’s your formula for delivering the goods?  I haven’t gotten a decent answer to this question yet.  Where are you coming up with the 60 votes?

It’s called reconciliation.  50 Democrats + Biden.  Republicans used it throughout the Bush years, and nobody blinked when it was 50 Republicans + Cheney to pass the most draconian wingnut shit imagineable.

But we’re too nice to do anything like that.  Well… fuck that.  We can use reconciliation, yet we choose not.

Give me a good reason why reconciliation isn’t an option on anything?  Why did the Democrats allow the Republicans to pass anything and everything with less than 60 votes, but we create a false higher bar for ourselves?

“The teabaggers go out and find the people they want to run and force the national party to go along with it. “

We already did that with Lamont, and we ended up having Lieberman forced down our throats through the combined efforts of the democratic party AND the republican party, and boy, if that don’t tell you something, you can’t be taught.

And Firedoglake will be taking the lead on running progressives against blue dogs in 2010, 2012, and 2014.  If you think Hamsher still isnt’ gunning for Lieberman’s ass, and has Reid and a shitload of others on her list, you’re wrong.

And she’s going to get the money from the netroots. From people like me.

So when you say that people don’t do anything, just expect to be served up roast beef, find out who you are talking to first.

We spend a lot of time here saying “better Democrats” but we don’t actually back any better Democrats

Up yours. I’ve given more money than I could afford to ActBlue to do EXACTLY that.

You’re getting as offensive (and factually challenged) as “Sir” Charles.

When was the first and last time Obama, Reid et al pushed back? I mean really really pushed back? Not against the “far left,” but against the actual opposition?

I don’t know about anyone else, but the single thing I ALWAYS hear from true political independents—the “a curse on both your parties” types—is “Why should I support the Democrats?  They won’t stand up to the Republicans—why should I trust them to stand up to bin Laden?”

Seriously, a new generation of kick-ass-and-take-names Democrats is EXACTLY what we need.  Knock the R’s to the ground, stand over them and shout “Don’t you ever come near my family again!”

I’m pretty nearly a pacifist, but you can only be a punching bag for so long.

Because there aren’t that many of them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t right.  Get it?

Oh, I definitely get it—we’d rather be right than win elections.  Frankly, that’s part of our problem.

The bottom line is that you’re calling for liberals to work harder.  Well some of us have been working hard for decades and the results have been minimal enough for us to say we’ve had enough.

It’s not so much work harder as work smarter.  We know how the right wing infiltrated the Republican Party, but no one seems to be willing to do the same with the Democrats.  We keep demanding top-down change when the only thing that’s going to work is grooming people to move from school boards on up into the ranks.  And it’s not a Democratic problem, it’s a liberal problem.  How many people swore that electing Nader was going to fix all of our problems?

It’s a cliche, but—if you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got.  Dropping out and not voting is what liberals have been doing for years.  Isn’t it time to try a new strategy that might actually work instead of deciding that voting is for suckers?

DTG in STL look at the firm Holder worked for before the election…They were the RNC’s lawyers…and I know yada yadda yada that just cause a lawyer works for a firm…etc.  His first move was to set BO’s senate and BJ buddy ted stevens free…god forbid people start convicting senators!

Reconciliation is a fantasy.  Comprehensive HCR cannot be accomplished thorugh reconciliation.  People who keep saying this don’t know a goddamn thing about how things get through the Senate.

fuck you.

I’ve read extensive opinions on the subject and while there is wide agreement that it can’t all go through reconciliation, much of it can.

Expanding medicare can, for one thing.

And gosh that’s a pretty important thing isn’t it, mister big dick know it all.

Yup.  The public option can also be established through reconciliation.

What cannot be achieved through reconciliation is health insurance regulatory reform.

I agree that the latter is also a very important component to overall reform, but to claim that absolutely nothing meaningful can be achieved through reconciliation is absolute horseshit.

I’m so proud to be a liberal American!  It doesn’t matter whether things get better or not.  As long as we can talk about what we should do, but never expect it to actually happen, things are great!

...‘scuse me, the guys from Happy Meadows are here to take me to my new home.  I have a room next to Napoleon Bonaparte, somebody who used an ax to kill his family, and some guy who still thinks America is a democratic republic…

If you don’t vote progressive, we’re doomed.

Put your Senator’s feet to the fire.

And Firedoglake will be taking the lead on running progressives against blue dogs in 2010, 2012, and 2014.  If you think Hamsher still isnt’ gunning for Lieberman’s ass, and has Reid and a shitload of others on her list, you’re wrong.

Is Hamsher going to run that Lieberman in blackface ad again that lost us the election last time?  I’m really looking forward to that.

Again, you and Steve are making my point for me.  ActBlue has been around for five (5) whole years, and you’re astounded that it hasn’t completely transformed the Democratic Party from top to bottom.  It’s a great start, but if people abandon the approach now and stay home on election day, you may as well have just burned up the money you donated in the fireplace.

Hey DTG, the current bill doesn’t reform anything about the Ins industry…nor are there any methods of enforcing such regulations….its all about trusting our friends at BCBS

MikeEss:
Tell that poseur bastard that he’s not Napoleon, I AM!

ActBlue has been around for five (5) whole years, and you’re astounded that it hasn’t completely transformed the Democratic Party from top to bottom.

STRAW MAN ALERT! FIRE HAZARD!

Stop lying. Seriously. It just makes you sound like a complete asshole.

Let’s see what the bill looks like when it comes out of conference committee before we start screaming bloody murder, ok?

Jesus, from reading some of the comments it’s almost like FDL hijacked Pandagon.

I don’t know about anyone else, but the single thing I ALWAYS hear from true political independents—the “a curse on both your parties” types—is “Why should I support the Democrats?  They won’t stand up to the Republicans—why should I trust them to stand up to bin Laden?”

Exactly. Why do people vote? People vote because they feel that their opinion is worth something and want to express it. Now, people are going to vote for politicians who are a lot like them: the ones who feel that their opinion is worth something.  If you were a voter primarily concerned about health care policy, tell me, would you identify with Obama? Of course not—if you have really strong feelings and beliefs about health care policy, then a guy like Obama, who basically says, “pass something, anything” isn’t going to come across as your leader. When a guy stands up and says, “I DEMAND a bill with X, Y, and Z,” voters understand if the final product isn’t exactly what you wanted; at least the guy took a stand.

Look, it’s not me the Democrats should be concerned about. I’m going to vote for Democrats. It’s the voter who might have voted for Obama in the last cycle who’s saying, “you know, I just don’t know what the Democrats stand for” that we have to worry about.

It sounds like people are going to try to blame the “activist left”/netroots for any stumbles in 2010. That’s not who the Democrats have to worry about.

Mnemosyne, that ad was a mistake, and one of the biggest reasons I have not been a big supporter of Hamsher’s.  However, recent events have turned me, and I do plan on supporting her efforts.  however, that ad was distasteful, only someone very dishonest would claim it lost “us” the election.

What lost “us” the election was the fact that the Democratic party, including Obama, actively supported their buddy Lieberman during the primary, and then the Republican party didn’t finacially or in any other way, support the candidate running against him.  Lieberman was the consensous candidate of both parties, that’s what lost “us” the election.  And it’s very indicative of what is wrong with our system.

Don’t lie like that again when you are talking to me.  I’m not some schlub.  And that was a lie Mnemosyne, not a difference of opinion.  And you know it.

And of course, no one has said that they are “astonished” that act blue and other progressive organizations have not “completely transformed” the democratic party.  We’ve said we’re going to continue to support those efforts.  And some of us, myself for instance, refuse to vote for Rahm’s little buttboys anymore. 

So that makes two lies…

What else you got dear?

Oh, and here’s an idea:

How about we actually get a liberal Democrat elected in Maine? Maine, a deep-blue New
England state that’s represented by a pair of, essentially, blue dog Democrats with an “R” by their name. That’s probably more doable than getting a liberal Democrat elected in Nebraska.

Hamsher thinks going after Lieberman’s wife is a winning strategy.

The Republicans have tried the “attack the spouse” angle many times before and it doesn’t work. Not only does it not work, it’s also, well, a Republican tactic.

Stop lying. Seriously. It just makes you sound like a complete asshole.

What am I lying about?  ActBlue has been around since 2004.  Jane Hamsher ran a picture showing Lieberman in blackface that swung the election to him.  Lefties stayed home in 1994 and gave us 12 years of Republican domination in Congress.

What lies have I told in this thread?

“Why should I support the Democrats?  They won’t stand up to the Republicans—why should I trust them to stand up to bin Laden?”

Right, exactly.  I was just having this conversation with someone this morning.  It’s so true.  And if the Democrats had fought their hearts out, with everything they had, for true, real, health care reform, and they had gone down, people would have loved them.  People love a fighter.  People love someone who believes in something and is willing to fight to the death for it.

And their base would have picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and gone forward, FIRED UP, and said, this time we win.

Instead, they have a depressed base, and no respect from independents.

It’s so simple a monkey could figure it out, but the great mind,t he great political pitt bull, Rahm Emmanual can’t?  Really?

Or, he’s just doing his corporate master’s bidding just like the rest of them.  Yeah, that seems a lot more likely to me.

I spelled out your lies Mnemosyne, Lieberman ran basically unopposed because the Republican party wanted him.  Anyone who claims that this isn’t what won him the election, it was picture on the internet that did it, is nothing but a stinking liar.

You’re a liar.  You’re a liar Mnemosyne.

I challenge anyone on this thread to go look up what happened in that election.  The Republican party walked away from the race.  Fact.

Mnemosyne is a liar.

DBK,

I’m genuinely sorry to hear that.  Seriously.

And I don’t think you understand my position on universal health care, which I support with every fiber of my being.  I just don’t see us having anywhere near the votes for single payer or a French or German style system at this point.  The vested interests are extremely powerful and the public’s fear—irrational though it is—of “socialized medicine” and/or higher taxes remains powerful enough that it is, sorry to say, going to take years to get there.

I have family members who have had similar diagnoses and who live with the fear of losing their group insurance.  I also have a child who has a couple of chronic conditions that would cause him a problem in terms of pre-existing condtion clauses once he becomes an adult.  On top of that I spend a great deal of my professional life working with union helath plans, so I really am familiar with the difficulties caused by our present system and am very much in favor of profound change.

My comments are directed at the realistic path for accomplishing these things, not opposition to the goals themselves.

Thanks, AnglScarlett.  I’ll be fine, fortunately.  Only thing that’s ever going to kill me is whatever I’ll catch from sticking my foot up Sir Charles’ ass. 

What lost “us” the election was the fact that the Democratic party, including Obama, actively supported their buddy Lieberman during the primary

Well, yeah, that’s kind of what they’re going to do.  The Democratic party apparatus is going to funnel the most money and resources into the incumbent with a track record of winning elections.  Anyone who hopes to challenge an incumbent in a primary has to be prepared to do so without party backing.

We have a few options in this scenario:

1.  Work that much harder and raise that much more money to make sure our progressive challengers beat moderate Dem incumbents, because we know the Democratic party is not going to do it for us.

2.  Form a new leftist political party and challenge these moderate Democrats in the general election with full backing of our own party’s resources.

3.  Get fully away from within-the-system liberal change and become leftist radicals agitating outside the system, probably for full-on revolution.

An option we do not have is to whine that it’s just so HARD to fight an incumbent in the primaries, so waaaaah, let’s all just stay home and watch American Idol instead.

Ben, Hamsher hasnt’ said antyhing about Lierberman’s wife that isn’t true.  Look, it’s time for the dirty little secret of politician’s spouses being paid by corporations with interests in legislation, comes out.

It’s come out before, but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored now.

I have thought Hamsher wrong in the past on certain decisions she has made.  I am with ehr on this.  When someone’s wife is dirty, it’s not wrong to say so.  Sorry, it just isn’t.

Luckily Oponax, that’s not what “we” did.  We in fact, won the primary.  But then the opposition party, refused to fund their candidate, so in love with the “Democrat” were they.

So, Lieberman won the election as an independent.

Does everyone here have amnesia?

Don’t lie like that again when you are talking to me.  I’m not some schlub.  And that was a lie Mnemosyne, not a difference of opinion.  And you know it.

Excuse me, not recounting the entire history of the primary campaign to an audience that I presume knows it is now a “lie”?  Or are you the one lying and claiming that the Democratic establishment supported Lieberman in the general election when they did not?  Yes, they could have supported Lamont better, but they didn’t support Lieberman in the general.  Lieberman won because the Republicans got behind him and deserted their own candidate.  Blaming that loss entirely on the Democratic establishment is, frankly, a lie.  There’s plenty of blame to go around.

And of course, no one has said that they are “astonished” that act blue and other progressive organizations have not “completely transformed” the democratic party.  We’ve said we’re going to continue to support those efforts.  And some of us, myself for instance, refuse to vote for Rahm’s little buttboys anymore.

So you’re not going to vote for Democrats you don’t like, but when I say that you said you’re not going to vote for Democrats, that’s a “lie,” too?  Do you need a dictionary?

@DBK -LOL!

When someone’s wife is dirty, it’s not wrong to say so.

I’m not talking about morality, I’m talking about the fact that it is a horrible, horrible political strategy. No matter how true those things are, all it does is generate sympathy for the spouse and the candidate. That and the blackface debacle sometimes makes me wonder if Hamshire is a Republican plant, but really I just think she’s a horrible political strategist.

Mnemosyne’s other lie was claiming there are people disappointed that ActBlue and the like haven’t completely remade the party yet. What a steaming pile. The point of bringing it up was that ActBlue is just an example of what- contra Mnemosyne- many people have been doing and are doing; but their efforts are doomed to futility if the party leadership follows its usual suicidal course, as it’s well on the way to doing.

People love a fighter.  People love someone who believes in something and is willing to fight to the death for it.

Which is why you need to put your money where your mouth is and give MONEY to people who DO fight - Feingold, Grayson, Kucinich, Franken, Frank, Leahy-  to name a few that I’ve contributed to in the past year. (yep, even after the big elections they still need money.

CALL people. Call at least one person in govt. every week. They need to hear from the people. Even better write letters or postcards.

And show some damn support. Don’t assums that just because they’re in office that they know what you want.

“Lieberman won because the Republicans got behind him and deserted their own candidate.  “

EXACT FUCKING LY!

Okay, now that we’ve proven your former claim of “Jane Hamsher lost us the election” to be the load of shit it was, we can finally lay that shit story you were peddling to rest.

But boy, it was like pulling teeth to get you to finally tell the truth.

And how about working to change up CT’s screwed up primary laws where you can run for the nomination of one party while collecting signatures to get on the ballot as an independent? Strange FDL and all the other purists have done nothing to change that. I guess it isn’t glamorous enough and doesn’t get you on cable news.

Rahm’s little buttboys

Can we at least leave the homophobia out of it?

Anyone who hopes to challenge an incumbent in a primary has to be prepared to do so without party backing.

Thanks so much for the condescension. Everybody fucking understands that, oddly enough. But they also expect the party leadership to GENUINELY rally around the primary winner- not just give grudging lip service as they (including a certain junior Senator from Illinois) did with Lamont.

Ben @ 164 - well, I used to feel that way about her, and guess what?  I may go back to feeling that way about her again.  But for right now, I’m willing to give her some money and a chance.  You may be right, but I am one person who used to financially support Susan B Komen through a friend who always ran for them, and then this summer, ran for them myself, but they’ll never get another penny from me now that I know what they are about.

So she is educating some right now. If there is a political downside to this tactic, we’ll see it soon enough.  I don’t yet know that there is.  She’s not calling her a whore.  She’s stating that the woman is a lobbyist.  You know, I think people have the right to know that.

It sounds like people are going to try to blame the “activist left”/netroots for any stumbles in 2010. That’s not who the Democrats have to worry about.

again, this.  They want to blame preemptively us because it’s easier than taking responsibility for their own (in)action.  But the bottom line it that they are the ones in power and they are squandering the first real chance they’ve had in fifteen years to enact real reform, all in the name of gamesmanship.

AnglScarlett, still, Lieberman can get on TV, make a sad face, and whine about “the mean mean leftists are dragging my FAMILY into this!” and the low information voters will eat it up.

EXACT FUCKING LY!

That’s not what you said, at all.  You said that Lieberman won because the Democratic party refused to support their own candidate and instead supported Lieberman*.  Which has nothing to do with what either the Republican party or Republican voters did.

*Note: I am sitting about 6 feet away from someone who holds local office in the state of Connecticut, is extremely active in the state Democratic party, and can definitely tell me straight up to my face what the Democratic party did or did not do in that particular election.  It is in your best interest not to contradict the facts on this particular matter.

Opoponax - don’t be a weasal just because I am making fools out of you and your buddy.

I have no idea what you mean, but I use that as asskisser.  Weasal.

Calling a whore a whore is perfectly legitimate…especially such an obvious one as hadassah!

Somebody should ask Joe why it is ok for his pet project of Israel to offer single payer health insurance when they fund it with US taxpayer money!

Thanks so much for the condescension. Everybody fucking understands that, oddly enough.

Except for AnglScarwhatever, who brought it up in the first place.

I’m genuinely sorry to hear that.  Seriously.
Thanks.  No problem.  Posted it to illustrate that costs are uncontrolled at this point.

And I don’t think you understand my position on universal health care, which I support with every fiber of my being.  I just don’t see us having anywhere near the votes for single payer or a French or German style system at this point.
We actually weren’t discussing universal health care.  I have a lengthy story about my experiences with my worthless Republican representative and his staffer in charge of health care issues that is too much to post here (all about uiversal single payer), but I have given him a hell of a lot more arguments than what you see here.  I don’t just post blog comments on issues; I go out and talk to and, where necessary, yell at my representative, or his dishonest staff member (who somehow couldn’t remember the identities of any of the “stakeholders’ who had input into the legislation my representative introduced on health care…fancy that).

The point is, we don’t even have the votes to pass a public option, let alone single payer.  And that isn’t because we lack the Democrats to do it.  There’s a significant Democratic majority in the House and Senate.  If we had five more Democratic senators it wouldn’t pass because we have Democratic senators opposed to it.  That’s why the 60 vote thing is a myth.  Your remarks about “growing up” were foolishness.  It isn’t and never has been about maturity; it is about reality.  Your argument amounts to “Let’s pass anything no matter how crappy and then maybe we’ll get more Democrats in office” or something like that.  And you’re saying that we should vote for Democrats because they can get us a fifteenth of a loaf, even if it does mean giving even MORE money to insurance companies and not imposing any restrictions on them regarding denying coverage or increasing costs.

I’m saying that I live with my eyes wide open.  I may fool myself sometimes, but I make it a priority not to fool myself if I can help it.  I’m not fooled by the Democrats.  I look at what they do and have done.  There may have been differences at some time, but the Democrats are in the same service as the Republicans and they will not give us anything better than what the Republicans have given us.

Voting down health care to be able to bargain something better is a fool’s errand.  It would be a debacle, there would be no end of stories on how Obama and the Dems can’t do anything, etc., and we’ll end up with a 1994 situation—39% turnout and a Republican resurgence.

Perhap it is true that passing nothing will be disasterous for Democrats… but you act as if getting something this bad is gonna be wonderful for Democrats next year.

Get this… we’re fucked next November.  Period.  We will lose, the end, and the Republicans are gonna gain seats in Congress.  There is absolutely no rational argument that can be made that would point to a different outcome.  And you are out of your fucking mind if you don’t understand that.  The only thing we don’t know is just how bad we’re going to lose next year.

So maybe what you’re saying is that it will be a lot worse if we don’t pass anything at all.  I don’t know, maybe that’s true.  But don’t think that getting this God-awful piece of crap passed is gonna suddenly translate into an infusion of voter enthusiasm on our side, because it won’t.

And on the overall picture… I don’t care how much the stimulus may have averted an even worse crisis, if you are still unemployed next November and your prospects for gaining employment are still dim, you aren’t gonna be voting back in the party that appeared to do nothing helpful for you in the previous 2 years.  10% unemployment next November (and don’t tell me it can’t happen - people like you promised that the stimulus would prevent us from hitting 8.5% unemployment) is gonna be an utter disaster for the Democrats at the polls.

I spelled out your lies Mnemosyne, Lieberman ran basically unopposed because the Republican party wanted him.  Anyone who claims that this isn’t what won him the election, it was picture on the internet that did it, is nothing but a stinking liar.

Yes, I’m sure the fact that the picture was picked up by every right-wing blogger, made it into the Washington Post, and blew up into a huge controversy had absolutely zero influence on the election.  Yep, it’s just a pernicious lie and the loss was entirely due to the Democratic establishment and not any mistakes on Hamsher’s part.

I’m saying that I live with my eyes wide open.  I may fool myself sometimes, but I make it a priority not to fool myself if I can help it.  I’m not fooled by the Democrats.  I look at what they do and have done.  There may have been differences at some time, but the Democrats are in the same service as the Republicans and they will not give us anything better than what the Republicans have given us.

Wow, a time traveler from October, 2000!

Man I’ve got a lot to tell you about what happened in the last eight years. You better sit down for this…

Oh, look at the liar Opoponax lying about what I said now.  He must believe that there is no way to check.  And maybe there isn’t?  Oh but wait, I just scrolled up and it ends up that my post is actually there, opps!

“What lost “us” the election was the fact that the Democratic party, including Obama, actively supported their buddy Lieberman during the primary, and then the Republican party didn’t finacially or in any other way, support the candidate running against him.  Lieberman was the consensous candidate of both parties, that’s what lost “us” the election.  And it’s very indicative of what is wrong with our system.”

What do you know.  I said exactly what I claimed I said, and then Opo claimed it was Jane Hamsher who won Lieberman the election, and then got backed into admitting they were lying, and so is now lying about what I said.

And now they are sitting 6 feet away from OZ!  It’s in my best interests not to contradict Opo’s lies because OZ is going to…well, do something!

LMAO

What a fucking weasal loser.  dude, you’re pathetic.

Except for AnglScarwhatever, who brought it up in the first place.

Please point me to the place where she claimed the party apparatus should have supported Lamont in the primary.

Opoponax - don’t be a weasal just because I am making fools out of you and your buddy.

I have no idea what you mean, but I use that as asskisser.  Weasal.

1.  No idea what you’re talking about.

2.  You’re getting into YouTube commentariat territory, here.

3.  No idea who “my buddy” is.

4.  Homophobia is homophobia regardless of your personal favorite derogatory terms to throw around. 

5.  It’s spelled weasel, by the way.

DTG, my comment was thoroughly accurate, and fairly obvious that I didn’t advocate that.  Hollywood sorta does though, with movies like John Q.  I thought that this point needs to be explicitly made to illustrate just how far from the realm of reasonableness Joe Lieberman was, such that the censored, as you put it, is an eminently rational response for someone who’s desperate to get care.

Look, ultimately I’m on Sir Charles’ side here.  People who are talking about reconciliation do not know what they are talking about.  No seriously, it’s not a viable tactic on this strategic map.  I also knew from the start that this was an unimaginably difficult undertaking, and that Obama pretty much *would* have to drag this thing like a turkey trucked through gravel and dirt and serve it with rocks, grits, and germs for all—for us to get anything at all.

Obama is just seriously constrained by the massive disfunction in the legislative branch.  There isn’t any way around it, and it’s going to take a genuine disaster, probably the financial kind, before the Senate is put in its place.  And oh god, I *hope* the Gordon Geckos of the Bond Vigilante Tribe can put some real pressure on the need for higher taxes on the wealthy, because failing that, we are *going* to have a Peronist coup.

As for the likes of Steve LaBonne and some of his other idiot fellow travelers…Well, I regularly read Oakland Raiders forum, and regularly laugh at the folks in Raiderfans.net who are so fixated on JaMarcus Russell as the sum of all that’s wrong, that their scapegoating and asshatery undermines their chances of seeing a winning team anytimes soon.  But seriously people?  Shit sandwiches are on the menu here.  The inmates bought the asylum and the system has too many veto points to ever change things without extremely regrettable events.

Lieberman won in 2006 because he ran as someone who was liberal on domestic issues but hawkish in Afghanistan. So the Democratic Party vote was split, with Republicans putting Lieberman over the edge.

Had he said in 2006 “I’m going to support John McCain for the Presidency, I’m going to oppose any meaningful health care reform” and so on he would have lost. Period.

It has little to do with Hamshire or whether the DNC supported Lamont or not.

Er, sorry, “hawkish in Iraq”. The WHOLE election there was about Iraq. Supposedly the differences on domestic policy between Lieberman and Lamont were very small.

As for the likes of Steve LaBonne and some of his other idiot fellow travelers.

Ah, someone else wants to play. So it’s YOUR turn to explain why millions of voters will turn out just because you say they should. Good luck. In case you’re tamped to claim it’s not a real worry, I direct you to the polls referred to here: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/15/814570/-Demoralized-in-2010

What lost “us” the election was the fact that the Democratic party, including Obama, actively supported their buddy Lieberman during the primary

There.  You insisted that the Democratic party was in the wrong to support their own incumbent in a primary right there.  Thanks, I was actually kind of too lazy to scroll up and find it.

“Tempted”, that is.

“the loss was entirely due to the Democratic establishment and not any mistakes on Hamsher’s part. “

No, the Republican party walked away from the general.  It’s pretty hard to lose an election when you don’t have a real opponent.  The weak support Lamont got from the dems in the general, and the fact that they had so strongly and passionately supported Lieberman in the primary, had something to do with it, but certainly the biggest factor was you know, not really having an opponent.

Pretty simple concept.  What seems to be your problem in grasping it?  Let me try and rephrase it.  I dont’ actually speak Stupid, but luckily I do have a Stupid Translator, let’s put in my statement and see what StupidII spits out:

“Say you, Mnemosyne, run for dog catcher in town.  You good.  You run against bad man.  But bad man doesn’t really run.  You mnemosyne, become dog catcher”

Well, that’s as stupid as the StupidII software can make it.  Mnemosyne get it now?

Well Opo, of course a liar would also cut off someone’s statement to make it appear they said something they didn’t say.  But once again here is the entire statement that you, being a liar who was humiliated because they got backed into admitting that Jane Hamsher didn’t actually win Joe Lieberman the election like they were claiming, doesn’t want everyone to see:

What lost “us” the election was the fact that the Democratic party, including Obama, actively supported their buddy Lieberman during the primary, and then the Republican party didn’t finacially or in any other way, support the candidate running against him.  Lieberman was the consensous candidate of both parties, that’s what lost “us” the election.  And it’s very indicative of what is wrong with our system.”

So now we know that not only is Opo a liar, they’re so dirty, they’ll cut off someone’s statement trying to hide their lies.

Man, that’s so pathetic.

With regards to the primary:

Not only does the Party typically support incumbents, but AGAIN, Lieberman has taken a very sharp turn to the right in 2006. He was always a warmonger in foreign policy but he was moderately liberal on domestic policy until quite recently (remember the video of him supporting a medicare buy in?)

Okay, now that we’ve proven your former claim of “Jane Hamsher lost us the election” to be the load of shit it was, we can finally lay that shit story you were peddling to rest.

Yes, it’s a complete load of shit to say that an image that mobilized Republican voters to get out and vote for Lieberman instead of the Republican candidate had any influence on the election.  I’m sure that all of those Republican voters just happened to show up that day and decide on a whim to vote for Lieberman.  It had absolutely nothing to do with the right wing flogging the picture 24/7 and demanding Hamsher’s resignation.

The Republicans never had a candidate to begin with! Even BEFORE the primary challenge they walked away from that race because they figured Lieberman was too difficult to beat. Their “candidate” was an addmitted compulsive gambler for God’s sake.

It wasn’t some conspiracy between the two parties.

Ben D @95- which, of course, is he point. Jane Hamsher wasn’t needed to turn out Republicans for Lieberman, he was the all but official Republican candidate all along

“It’s spelled weasel, by the way.”

Opo has lied, tried to hide parts of my original post to cover up the lie, and is now reduced to pointing out spelling errors.

Well, I’ve won the internets!  And to think, I was going to go Christmas shopping today!  LOL

anyway Opo, you are a liar, that’s been proved, and worse I think, you are exactly the kind of bullying, lying, braying jackass, that pushed me out of the peace movement.

The truth is that though I strongly believe in leftist policies, I just can’t stomach the peoples.  And you are a pretty pathetic example of that.

But that’s okay.  I’ll still do what I want to do.  You won’t win any one over this way.  Certainly in my case, all you’ve done is harden my original position.

I happen to know that liars, and pontificating windbags who claim to have SOMEONE VERY IMPORTANT sitting six feet from them so just better be careful how you speak! always have to get the last word.

And they always continue to lie to cover up their lies.  I’m confident that any fair party can see what happened here.  I think you’ll be seen as the liar you are.

So have at it dear.

No she wasn’t, but she could have possibly alienated moderate Democrats from voting for Lamont.

Anyway that race was pretty much over after Lieberman decided to run as an independent, for that reason: the Republicans + moderate Dems > liberal Dems, even in Connecticut.

What should be changed is the CT primary law about how someone can run as an independent after they lose a primary, and ALL other states that have a law like that should change it. It’s an outrage.

Now that the thread has degenerated into a shouting match, I doubt there will be much more good to come out of it;  I still want to know, however, how we’re supposed to think there’s any way to motivate voters to come out next fall without giving them something to pin their hopes on.

Howard Dean has just stepped forwward with a strong an loud message:

The Senate must defeat this bill as currently written.  Period.

Man… imagine how different things could have been if we didn’t fuck up the primaries back in 2004?

Jamie D—

Wait for the conference committee bill before you give up hope totally. If the bill that comes out of conference is B.S., though, then I’ll be with you.

Ben, that’s your take.  I disagree.  I belive the Republican party wanted Lieberman in that seat.  And you know, if you fast forward two years and see that Lieberman supported and campaigned for the R presidential nominee, and in fact spoke at the R convention, I think my belief has some solid ground.

Of course, unless either of us was privy to internal RNC emails on the subject, we will never be able to know for certain.  I was not privy to those emails.  If you were, then I concede the point to you.  Otherwise, I’m just not convinced.

Now that the thread has degenerated into a shouting match, I doubt there will be much more good to come out of it; I still want to know, however, how we’re supposed to think there’s any way to motivate voters to come out next fall without giving them something to pin their hopes on.

Well, one reason for the degeneration is that the apologists for the party establishment will use any red herring to avoid having to address that question. They know they have no answer.

DTG If Dean had been elected we’d have the same problems and purity trolls screaming for his head.

It’s funny, they love Al Gore now, but in 2000 he was a corporatist puppet. It’s like if you win, suddenly, you’re not liberal enough. That to be a real liberal, you have to lose.

“Howard Dean has just stepped forwward with a strong an loud message:

The Senate must defeat this bill as currently written.  Period. “

Wow.  Wow, that really shocked me.  I feel this way, but I didn’t think Dean would come out with this, I thought he’d have to back it, even though he didn’t really want to.

I wonder if this is going to change anything.

In fact I remember back in 2004 the people on the left side of the party dismissing Dean as an “Eisenhower Republican”.

Perhaps Ben D would like to have a crack at that question. Over to you, Ben.

Okay, steve, I normally don’t respond to you, because, yes, you’re an idiot.  You are an idiot because you pull crap like imply that I have a position on turnout.  In fact, the only thing I have ever said about turnout was that the specific mechination of Lieberman action points to an attempt at suppressing the progressive wing’s participation.  An attempt to drive us into a situation that italian voters face, and move the public out of the civic space so elites can loot at peace.  I said nothing about turnout.

One point I *do* want to make again.  Obama has an actual agenda and big programs he wants to pass.  He lacks flexibility in the short term because of that.  Long term?  I just seriouly doubt that the right wing can keep being productively obstructionist without nuclear fallout/contaminated rain levels of public disapproval.  So this teeny tiny shred of hope is that the TPTB cultured dynamic of having to choose between blatant corruption and malicious insanity will become untenable and there will be daylight on the left side of the field for progressive ambitions 3-4-5 years down the road.

Well, that’s not true of me Ben.  I am not a purity troll, I am the farthest thing from it.  I supported Obama through a lot of shit, I fell out with real people in my real life, who became friends through the peace movement over OBama’s actions on Gitmo and other issues.  I gave him every slack.

But health care is a bridge too far for me.  I’m sorry that makes me a “purity troll” in your eyes.

But it’s myself I have to look at.  Not you.

Perhaps Ben D would like to have a crack at that question. Over to you, Ben.

What question would that be? I really don’t want to wade through the shouting and YouTube-esque insults.

In other words, shah8, you got nothin’. No surprise there. But thanks for playing.

Funny how the “myth of electoralism” has put conservatives in power here in the States for 30 years as the religious right turns out at the polls in every single election.  Does this “myth” only apply to liberal votes?

Yes. It only applies the to leftist votes. That’s because that’s who the system is stacked against to begin with. The state is designed to further the interests of capital owners. Anyone who’s even able to get into politics is already compromised. What happens if a broad coalition of leftists work their asses off to elect people that arise from their own, and will truly represent them, and then win? Ask Spain. That’s what happens. Military coup, terror, the mask of civility falls from state institutions and the true face behind that mask is shown in all its glory. Government is violence. Government is coercion. Electoralism is a myth. If voting changed anything, it’d be illegal.

The only time the right-wing loons get their nose rubbed in it is when they start taking their morality more seriously than their economics. Of course the state will bash down right-wing populists who actually start threatening corporate profits. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened this election. The elites destroyed Sarah Palin, they destroyed Huckabee, because useful idiots are only useful as long as they stay in their place.

No, the Republican party walked away from the general.  It’s pretty hard to lose an election when you don’t have a real opponent.

It is also extremely rare that a political party with almost no support in a particular jurisdiction, running against an incumbent with no apparent weakness, will pour money into a candidate.  I live in an extremely liberal congressional district, and while my incumbent-since-the-80’s representative doesn’t run unopposed per se, he routinely wins more than 90% of the vote.  The Republicans field a candidate, but they don’t even bother to campaign.  They funnel their money to candidates that actually have a chance of getting more than a couple thousand votes.

“In fact I remember back in 2004 the people on the left side of the party dismissing Dean as an “Eisenhower Republican”.

Really, who?  I voted for him in that primary.  I still love the guy.

do you just retell anecdotes to discredit anyone who won’t cross the bridge (more like jump off of it) on health care?

What question would that be? I really don’t want to wade through the shouting and YouTube-esque insults.

This one, reiterated by jamie d @199:

I still want to know, however, how we’re supposed to think there’s any way to motivate voters to come out next fall without giving them something to pin their hopes on.

Yes. It only applies the to leftist votes. That’s because that’s who the system is stacked against to begin with. The state is designed to further the interests of capital owners. Anyone who’s even able to get into politics is already compromised. What happens if a broad coalition of leftists work their asses off to elect people that arise from their own, and will truly represent them, and then win? Ask Spain.

BlackBloc, ask the USA during the Progressive Era, or in the 1930s-1960s. That kind of reaction only happens in basket case (Spain is not a basket-case now, but was in the ‘30s) countries like Spain or Mexico. It doesn’t happen in France, Britain, Canada, or the USA. Seriously give me ONE example of an advanced industrial country with a democratic tradition having a reaction like that to a leftist party taking power.

What I’m saying is that if the religious loon hadn’t gone off the rail completly, it would be President McCain, not President Obama. This wasn’t a victory for the Democratic party, it was a defeat for the loony wing of the GOP. When you overstep your bounds, the masters hit you with a rolled up newspaper. Since they don’t seem to have learned their lesson (they’re purging the remaining ‘sane’ Republicans, i.e. the ones who understand who butter their bread) you can expect the Dems to win again. But it won’t be because Obama did something good for the People. The way it looks like, it will be because of the good he did for AiG, the auto industry and the insurance companies.

Look, it’s not me the Democrats should be concerned about. I’m going to vote for Democrats. It’s the voter who might have voted for Obama in the last cycle who’s saying, “you know, I just don’t know what the Democrats stand for” that we have to worry about.

It sounds like people are going to try to blame the “activist left”/netroots for any stumbles in 2010. That’s not who the Democrats have to worry about.

Pretty much my sentiment as well.

Jake what you are leaving out of the equation, and Dean might not be, is that the Democrats are going to pass a mandatory insurance bill during a terrible, painful, horrific economic downturn.

And that there is currently a strong populist (phony) strain in the R party as personified by Sarah Palin.

and that populism, if channelled can destroy the democratic party for the next ten years, maybe longer.

Why is it nobody wants to talk about forcing people to buy health insurance during a time they care having trouble buying food and paying their mortgages?

This is a bad move.

Yeah,l whatever, Ben D.  I can see you’re terribly superior and all, but your fixation on 2000 says more about you living in the past than me.  I don’t live in the past nearly as much as you do, apparently.  My complaint is about Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress, not Bush and the Republican majority in Congress.  Obama is the president now, Ben.  Bush has been out of office since January.  Try to keep up.

Oh!

and I forgot.

LBJ, and for damn certain Eisenhour-Nixon, were not more liberal than Obama.  They simply had different systems and different pressures to deal with.  I mean…Nixon?  Seriously?

During his presidential campaign, conservative critics labeled Dean’s political views as those of an extreme liberal; however in Vermont, Dean, long known as a staunch advocate of fiscal restraint, was regarded as a moderate. Many left-wing critics who supported fellow Democrat Dennis Kucinich or independent Ralph Nader charged that, at heart, Dean was a “Rockefeller Republican”—socially liberal, while fiscally conservative.[19][20]

Go to the Wikipedia article if you want to read those citations. I’m not following you down that rabbit hole, thanks.

I still want to know, however, how we’re supposed to think there’s any way to motivate voters to come out next fall without giving them something to pin their hopes on.

If the final healthcare bill is godawful, there won’t be a whole lot and we’ll probably lose seats. Actually we’re going to lose seats no matter what, but more if there’s no healthcare bill (though I doubt we will lose either House, the majorities are just too big).

you are exactly the kind of bullying, lying, braying jackass, that pushed me out of the peace movement.

Ummm, OK?

Because, what?

Because I think Obama is kind of OK at being President and is at least better than McCain would have been?  Because I think that, if you’re going to complain about the Democrats not being liberal enough, you need to put your money where your mouth is?  Because I think it’s better to support a nominally decent candidate who is actually running than spin coulda-woulda-shouldas while we sit home waiting for a messiah or shining knight or whatever?

A really strong public option was supposed to offset the mandatory insurance, doesn’t anyone see this?

Obama ran AGAINST a mandate.  He did.  It’s a fact.

I was willing to go along with the mandate as long as the people had options for real, true, affordable health insurance. 

That’s not what this is.  Don’t you see what the Republicans are going to do with this?

You are supporting, and demanding that I support, forcing people who are worried about paying their heating bills for the winter, to buy health insurance.  With no cost controls. 

My God, this is a disaster in the making.

What is wrong with you people?

Yeah,l whatever, Ben D.  I can see you’re terribly superior and all, but your fixation on 2000 says more about you living in the past than me.

Yeah, who the fuck needs to learn from history, anyway? It has nothing to teach us!

I like a lot of things about America, but I really hate the fact we as a people seem to have no memories at all, of anything, combined with super-short attention spans and a demand for instant gratification.

Yes. It only applies the to leftist votes. That’s because that’s who the system is stacked against to begin with. The state is designed to further the interests of capital owners. Anyone who’s even able to get into politics is already compromised. What happens if a broad coalition of leftists work their asses off to elect people that arise from their own, and will truly represent them, and then win? Ask Spain. That’s what happens. Military coup, terror, the mask of civility falls from state institutions and the true face behind that mask is shown in all its glory.

This.

Seriously give me ONE example of an advanced industrial country with a democratic tradition having a reaction like that to a leftist party taking power.

Give me ONE example of an advanced industrial country with a democratic tradition having a leftist party taking power, then I can possibly go from there.

NONE. That’s the answer.

France: Mitterand transformed the Socialist party into what is called ‘la gauche caviar’. It’s a thoroughly bourgeois capitalist party, with some progressive “let us not kill off our slaves while working them” beliefs, the sort of paternalistic bourgeois capitalist bullshit that passes for left-wing in the narrow world of electoral politics.

Britain: Labour? Tony Blair. Nuff said.

Canada: That’s a joke, right? The NDP never got in power at the federal level and they’re not even truly left-wing anyway. The Liberals are a center-right party based in free trade apologia.

USA: Now you’re just being silly.

Thanks, Ben D (sincerely, no snark), for being the first to admit there’s a problem. I think you have not quite come to grips yet, though, with how serious it may be, especially when Republicans start gleefully running against the mandates. I remember being sure in 1994 that Republicans couldn’t win enough seats to take over the House. Oops.

OPo I have already addressed your lies, I do a fuck of a lot more than sit around, and more I dare say then talk shit on the internet about my powerful friends who are sitting 6 feet away from me.

I’m done with you on this.  Shut the fuck up because I’m not talking to you.

You are a proven liar and a jackass.

That’s my last word to you on this thread.  You’re as welcome as a fart in an elevator.

BlackBlock, if “leftist” for you is “Marxism” and anything short of that is center-right, well, no, I can’t help you there. We’re not even on the same wavelength as to the shape of the political spectrum.

And btw, BlackBlock, I’d consider the system we had in the USA from the ‘30s until Reagan took power as a center-left system, and what Scandinavia has today as one as well. And most of western Europe. No widespread civil war in those examples.

And Canada seemed to get single payer without a shot being fired, yes?

Olaf Palme did for some time, before he got Omar Torrijos’ed

AngiScarlett, at least as of today Joe Lieberman hasn’t managed to remove to expansion of medicaid to 200% of the poverty line, nor has he managed to remove the establishment of Maria Cantwell’s program based on the program in her native Washington state that has on average $60 a month premiums and which is proposed to be open to people within 400% of the poverty line, and Lieberman hasn’t gotten rid of the subsidies to help low income families get care. Last I heard he hadn’t defeated Al Franken’s amendment to make insurance co’s spend 80% of premiums on actual medical care.

Am I thrilled? Fuck no, but you know what is also, in your words “terrible, painful, horrific?” An untreated pre-existing condition that leaves me uninsurable, it’s the sort of pain that makes you writhe and makes your whole body spasm.

The mandate sucks, but the regulations in this bill are desperately needed. Or else people die. Like me, or else I die.

“I’ll take the benefits of everybody being able to get a policy over the danger to the Democratic Party. “

In my opinion, passing a law saying everyone has to buy insurance does not equal everyone having insurance.

What it does mean is that many won’t be able to buy it (yes even with subsidies), but they’ll make the people who told them they have to pay.  And pay. And pay.

Steve, the Republicans aren’t as organized as they were in 1994. Plus the COUNTRY as a whole is further to the left than back then, even if our politicians haven’t realized it yet.

There’s always a lag between the people of a country moving on the political spectrum and their representatives moving. It’s always been that way. We’re in a lag period.

Ben D, look at that Daily Kos post by Markos that I linked to above. The poll numbers for likely voters are really, really ugly. Markos professes himself “terrified”. I think you’re a bit too complacent.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/15/814570/-Demoralized-in-2010

Putting it another way:

Abraham Lincoln and FDR were both seen as squishy double-talking moderates by the left wingers in their parties when they were elected, and for the first few years they were! Because they didn’t realize the people as a whole had shifted yet. But by 1864 the Republican Party platform was calling for an amendment to abolish slavery, and by 1936 we had Social Security. Keep the pressure on.

Jessica, a bill outlawing preexisting condition denials is a no-brainer, and can be passed.  I feel that holding a gun against my head, or anyone’s head, saying you have to support mandates with no counterbalancing option for people, is forcing me into a false choice.

I don’t believe those are my two choices.  I believe that certain very wealthy people want me to believe that they are.  But I don’t believe it anyway. 

and btw, President Lieberman ain’t done yet.  He’s already said that.

We need Dean on the other side saying to kill it.  Or President Lieberman will never be done.  Do you understand that?

Steve if I put my faith in polls ten months out from an election, the 2008 race would have been Clinton vs. Giuliani.

What happened in NY-23 is going to happen in a good chunk of the seats Republicans are hoping to pick up. They’re going to eat their own. They will still pick up seats, but not as many as they could.

My prediction for 2010-2012 are along these lines, if I had to make any:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2009/11/the-next-four-years.html

Ben, at this point I’ll just say I sure as hell hope you’re right, but as another reminder here once again is another guy who should know who thinks you aren’t: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/15/rep-capuano-tells-fellow_n_392685.html

Steve, read the link above the one you just posted.

I’ll also add this: the Republicans don’t have a New Gingrich this time.

I do a fuck of a lot more than sit around, and more I dare say then talk shit on the internet about my powerful friends who are sitting 6 feet away from me.

1.  Really?  Didn’t you just say you “left the peace movement”?  You don’t seem to be involved with electoral politics on any level, either.  You’re just trolling around the internet whining about an election that happened 3 years ago.

2.  I never said anything about powerful friends.  A coworker of mine happens to have actually been there, is all.  I can look shit up on Wikipedia.  He can tell me who said what at which meeting.

3.  If you are “done with” me, you are welcome to stop flouncing around in my general direction anytime you want.  I would prefer to talk to the grownups.

BlackBlock, if “leftist” for you is “Marxism” and anything short of that is center-right, well, no, I can’t help you there. We’re not even on the same wavelength as to the shape of the political spectrum.

Agreed. You have this peculiar American malady of seeing a center-right party like the Democrat as the left-wing. The *minimal* left-wing policy is worker control of the means of production. Purely electoralist social democracy (as opposed to revolutionary socialism) is center-left, because it’s already a very watered down version of that, but it still considers socialism as the end goal. Progressivism and liberalism still hold forward the need for capitalist ownership of the means of production (called ‘free trade’ without any apparent irony, even though capitalism at its root is a coercive relationship), as such they’re center-right. And progressive politics is the *left-wing* of the Democratic party. The *left-wing* of the viable political parties in your country is not even *left-wing* per any non-parochial, global political spectrum meaning of the word.

The NDP, *when it was founded*, could be considered left-wing. Possibly Labour in the UK as well (but it hasn’t been for a long time) and definitly the French Socialist Party, even though it was founded directly in reaction against Marxism.

FDR was not leftist. His policies were designed by industrialists, and were a direct attempt at killing off the labour movement, by easing off the sufferings of the working classes so as to eliminate the biggest draw of the very popular (at the time) American Marxist parties and labour organisations. FDR is practically the *reason* why the Left is dead in America.

@Ben - okay, so if there are any Nadar voters on this thread, then your comment would pertain to them.

It doesn’t pertain to me, and let me say this one more time:

I gave Obama so much slack that I lost friends over it. I could give a shit who believes it or not.  I am not willing to jump off the health care bridge for him.

I am not a purity troll.

I am a person who has given, and given, but who has reached the point where she can’t, for the sake of her own conscience, give any more.

And I don’t appreciate nebulous attempts to discredit me by throwing out bs about Nadar voters.

AnglScarlett, I don’t think we can get the ban on preexisting condition denials without the mandate, because of the exact things you have complained about in this thread. At least a handful of the Democratic senators are corporate owned and would never let it pass, and since regulating insurance companies has diddly squat to do with the budget, it couldn’t even be pushed through via reconciliation.

I do appreciate Dean’s work, same as I appreciate my Senator Roland Burris threatening to block any bill without a strong public option. Their stances can only serve to push things back left.

BlackBlock, if “leftist” for you is “Marxism” and anything short of that is center-right, well, no, I can’t help you there. We’re not even on the same wavelength as to the shape of the political spectrum.

It’s a funny thing, that Overton Window… how about we try moving it a little in the other direction, for a change?

Also, single-payer is not leftist.

What Mirielle said @45.  JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, maybe Ford, probably Clinton….  God, some of us were alive for these people Obama is supposedly more progressive than.  Trust me, he’s sure not looking that way at all.  Other than the fact he is mixed racial, and tehrefore a flag bearer for minority involvement, just how is he more progressive than those I mentioned, rea. 

Idiots, all of you who are telling the voters to grow up.  And Arrogant asses, as well.  Don’t tell them to grow up.  Tell them to write-in real progressive candidates.  Tell them to pack the local elections with new, preogressive people.  Tell them to gut the establishment from the bottom up.  I’d go for that.  That’s something I could vote FOR, rather than just against as the lesser of evils.

“’ll also add this: the Republicans don’t have a New Gingrich this time. “

So?

Exit polls from the 94 election showed that a very small number of voters had even heard of the contract for America.  It was only after the fact that Newt manipulated the MSM and took credit for the R takeover.

In fact, 1994 didn’t have a Newt Gingrich.

Didn’t need one then.  What makes you so sure they need one now?

BlackBloc—

Since you don’t seem to think any European nation or Canada is left enough, either, I’d say it isn’t an “American malady”.

Anyway I don’t want “workers control” over the means of production (or rather I don’t think human society is anywhere near advanced enough to have it). I want strong regulations on the excesses of capitalism, a strong safety net (incl. healthcare for all) a wide middle class, economic growth that is not skewed towards the top but makes EVERYONE’S income rise, and high progressive income and inheritance taxes. I guess that’s “center-right” to you?

If you’re a Marxist, I guess so.

Jessica - well that is what I hope dean will do here.  I am really glad he came out with this, because it seems to me that there is no one drawing the line on the left, which is giving Lieberman free reign on the right.  And he actually came right out and said, he ain’t done yet.  Even with the medicare buy in pulled, that’s not enough for him. He is very open about it.

So we need a fight back from the left.  Or we’re dead.  The bad bill can actually be made worse, and that is what lieberman is going to do.  Maybe this will stop him, maybe not.  I don’t know.

Also, single-payer is not leftist.

Uh, ok. But you’re far-left even outside of America, then, I think.

“In fact I remember back in 2004 the people on the left side of the party dismissing Dean as an “Eisenhower Republican”.

Really, who?  I voted for him in that primary.  I still love the guy.

do you just retell anecdotes to discredit anyone who won’t cross the bridge (more like jump off of it) on health care?

Yeah, I’m with you on that… I’m not remembering that happening that way at all.  I mean, I have some friends who are basically leftist anarchists kinda like BlackBloc who probably felt that way, but Dean was the choice of the progressive netroots base.  Hell, Howard Dean is considered the Godfather of netroots politics.  Moulitsas worked for the man’s campaign.

I’m pretty sure he was the lefty choice that year.  Yeah, he was arguably to the right of Dennis Kucinich, but nobody ever considers Kucinich to be an actual viable candidate.

BlackBloc—

...

If you’re a Marxist, I guess so.

Something tells me he’s not…

Sorry, he’s a left-anarchist. Their rhetoric is very similar so I get confused.

just how is he more progressive than those I mentioned

His foreign policy approach is incredibly liberal, probably more liberal than any of the Presidents you mentioned.  Especially wrt Latin American self-determination.

Here’s Digby.  Again, she’s not someone I always agree with, but I am with her here. I believe she is right.  So obviously we have a rift amongst liberals.  And unlike my opponents, I won’t impunge anyone else’s motives.  But I guess Digby is a purity troll too.

“What this huge electoral mandate and congressional majority have gotten us, then, is basically a deal with the insurance industry to accept 30 million coerced customers in exchange for ending their practice of failing to cover their customers when they get sick—- unless they go beyond a “reasonable cap,” of course. (And profits go up!) If that’s the best we can expect of progressivism for the next generation then I’m afraid we are in deep trouble.

*I realize that the subsidies and the medicaid expansion are meaningful. But they are also going to be subject to ongoing funding battles in an age of deficit hysteria. I don’t hold out much hope for any improvement on that count. Indeed, I fully expect they will be assailed as welfare and eliminated as soon as Republicans gain power. They have learned from their mistakes—- don’t let any liberal “entitlement programs ” become entrenched. That’s why a big comprehensive program would have been better. It’s much harder to disassemble.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

TO, you just opened the whole Afghanistan can of worms there.

@259- It may seem like splitting hairs to someone coming from the center-right mainstream media approach to the left wing, but that’s the whole problem with the overton window stuff.  We’re all indistinguishable libruls and commies, therefore easy to write off.

The point is, universal health care isn’t radically left-wing.  Only here, where they’ve been so successful at making it sound scary, is it dead on arrival.

DTG - that is how I remember it too.  But I don’t doubt that Nader-like diehards didn’t support Dean.  I just feel, like you, that it wasn’t widespread.

Jamie I can tell the difference between a liberal and a Marxist, or a liberal and a democratic socialist, but Marxists and left-anarchists sound very similar to me.

I would prefer to talk to the grownups.
Comment #246: The Opoponax on 12/15 at 04:16 PM

Shit.  That’s me out, then.

(Leaves room; goes to make tea.)

Oh!

and I forgot.

LBJ, and for damn certain Eisenhour-Nixon, were not more liberal than Obama.  They simply had different systems and different pressures to deal with.  I mean…Nixon?  Seriously?

Nixon probably not, Eisenhower debatable… but LBJ?

What the fuck has Obama done thus far to indicate that he’s more liberal than LBJ?

You’re fucking high if you actually believe that Obama’s presidency has been more progressive than LBJ’s at this point.

And I don’t care if you believe Obama’s internal beliefs to be more liberal than LBJ’s… policies define a presidency, not internal beliefs.  We don’t get judged by our potential, we get judged by our performance.  Good intentions mean jack shit if they aren’t being realized.

The records of accomplishment of the two aren’t even worth having a conversation over, because Obama can’t even sniff LBJ’s jockstrap at this point in terms of enacting liberal policy.

Absolutely nothing that Obama has done policy-wise is more liberal than the Great Society programs implemented by Lyndon Baines Johnson.  Where is Obama’s Medicare?  Where are his Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts?

That’s some goddamn craxy-assed revisionism if I ever saw it to claim that Obama has been a more liberal president than LBJ.

You seriously want to stack the records of accomplishment of their two presidencies side-by-side?

That’s a debate that you will lose… badly.

You can’t compare Obama to anyone because he isn’t even a year into his Presidency. It’s silly at this point. We don’t know the whole picture.

Since I can only speak for myself, I will vote against Obama in the 2012 election.  The 2012 primary election.  I voted against him in the 2008 primary, so that shouldn’t be surprising.  In the general, if he’s the Democratic nominee, I’ll vote for him.  Any Republican nominee will inevitably be worse, and any 3rd-party candidate will be in effect a vote for the Republican.  This is common sense, amply demonstrated through history.

It’s of course silly to think that the Democrats ever had 60 votes for serious health care reform, or for anything else.  There aren’t even 60 Democrats; 2 of the senators that make up that notional 60 are “Independents,” and as has been shown repeatedly Lieberman is really more of a Republican.  What’s more, some of the remaining 58 “Democrats” are DINOs to more or less of an extent depending on the policy in question.  So there are even less votes than you’d expect.

In that sense, I think it’s a good thing if the Dems lose a few seats in the Senate.  It would put an end to the “but you have 60 votes” lie.  That’s been very damaging and we should never have accepted that framing.  We don’t have and never had 60 votes.  That needs to be repeated and explained over and over until it gets through people’s pointy little heads.

As far as what to do now, all we can do is keep on keeping on.  As a voter I’m doing my part, voting for the most progressive candidates I see on the ballot.  As activists, what you need to do is get me more and more progressive candidates to vote for.  I know that’s a tall order and easy for me to say but that’s my opinion.  I don’t see any other way forward.  Figure out what needs to be done to get progressives on the ballot, and do it.  Then figure out how to get them through primaries.  It will probably have to be done slowly, especially in the Senate.  One district, one seat, one state at a time.

Squabbling amongst ourselves about pragmatism vs. idealism isn’t going to get us anything.  We need a synthesis of both.  Pragmatic idealism.  Know what we stand for, and work deliberately to get it.  President Obama is sacrificing our ideals for expediency, and that can’t be accepted; not if we have any self-respect.  Asking us to accept half-measures because “that’s what we can get” is very pragmatic but tastes like ashes in the mouth of the idealist who expected more.  The Sir Charles method of telling the idealists to “grow up” is like telling a kid there is no Santa Claus so there’s no presents this year.  That’s not how you do it, Sir Charles.  You can’t demand that people give up their ideals at the drop of a hat.  You need a better reason for them to give them up than “we don’t have the votes.”  Get the votes, then.  Or prove that’s it’s out and out impossible to get the votes.  Then we can talk about trying something else, if the political system is unresponsive and unchangeable.

The fact is, single-payer is inevitable.  We know it.  The American people want it; they’re just scared of the taxes involved.  But there’s more people who want it than who don’t want it, and in the end the majority will win out.  It’s just a matter of time.

I don’t think it’s silly.  I think DTG makes a convincing case.  And LBJ is our most underrated liberal president because of Vietnam.  Maybe he deserved that, he certainly deserved something for that.  Though I will point out that it killed him.

I mean, he didn’t walk away whistling like Bush.

But I’d have to say unless there are drastic changes in Obama’s approach to policy, he’s never going to be able to shine LBJ’s shoes when it comes to domestic policies.  Sure there’s still some time, I guess I can’t argue that. But it seems very unlikely all things considered.

Jamie I can tell the difference between a liberal and a Marxist, or a liberal and a democratic socialist, but Marxists and left-anarchists sound very similar to me.

That’s why I keep bringing up that overton window business.  They’re really very different.  Both are far extreme compared to the “mainstream” of American politics, and as such they are easily written off without further examination of the deep divides between them, wnd without consideration for what those divides mean for the rest of us.

By insisting that universal health care is extreme left, they’ve been successful in moving the window of what is possible to the right so far that we can’t appreciate how fundamentally different Marxism is from Anarcho-syndicalism.  And that’s sad, not just for the leftists, but for the rest of us who are now looking at the likelihood of our government choosing between a corporatist nightmare and a fascist hell, and calling it “moderate”.

TO, you just opened the whole Afghanistan can of worms there.

I wasn’t talking about Afghanistan.  I’m also not sure how any of the Presidents helen w. h. mentioned would have handled the situation there.  Neither LBJ nor Nixon handled similar situations much differently.  Clinton was only slightly less hawkish than either Bush. 

Carter is the only President I can come up with in recent memory who might have tried to do the right thing for the Afghan people regardless of political expedience, but that’s a hypothetical.  And I probably only think that because of his post-presidential career.  Which is not unlike the Gore situation.

Liberalrob, that’s a great post. 

I too believe singlepayer is inevitable.  Our existing system will collapse under its own weight, and soon.  Sadly many will die before then, because our system and our whore politicians are so corrupt.  how they sleep at night is beyond me.  I don’t mean that as a throwaway.  Imagine, falling to sleep at night knowing that there are people dying, suffereing, and you caused it, or blocked someone else from alleviating it. 

I may very well go third party in the general too though.  Of course, I live in NY.  So I can afford to send a message.  If I lived in a border state, I will admit that I would not do so.  But I agree with the other things you say.  Getting more progressive candidates is key, and it’s why I donate to groups who field and run those candidates rather than to the DNC.

I think that’s important.

Well, the playing field is still shifting- I think Dean’s opposition (among others) and the unfriendly noises coming from Raul Grijalva are probably going to end up killing Liebercare, so perhaps we need to put aside our differences on a bill that’s rapidly becoming irrelevant and think about plan B.

Here’s a practical suggestion. What should be passed now is a “clean” insurance regulation bill, no mandates to piss off voters, no subsidies (very, very regrettably) to extend coverage but give phony fiscal conservatives an excuse to filibuster (or a place to hang Stupak language).

The insurance companies will hate it, of course, since it will cut into their profits without compensating them out of our pockets. But if their opposition prevents Democrats from passing something that simple and that broadly popular, we’re doomed.

In fact, 1994 didn’t have a Newt Gingrich.

Uh, what?  Gingrich was first elected to the House in 1978.  He was front and center in 1994, as co-author of the Contract on America.

Check out his Wikipedia entry.  He’s been poisoning our national discourse since 1974.

“I mean, he didn’t walk away whistling like Bush. “

Because he actually gave a shit about the casualties, unlike W.

rob, I meant that as a rhetorical tool.

See, if you read my whole post, you’d see that I pointed out a little known fact:  exit polls in the 1994 election actually proved that very few voters had even heard of the contract with america.  Yet, the MSM quickly massed around Newt’s proclamations that he had engineered the 94 takeover with his contract on America.

that in fact, was not true.  And that is what I mean when I say, that 1994 didn’t have a newt gingrich.  Of course he was there, I don’t need wikipedia to tell me that.  But the Newt who engineered the takeover never existed.  It’s a myth.

Seeker - yep, that is exactly how I feel.  I think that Vietnam actually killed LBJ because he did care.  He was wrong, and it was right he pay a steep price for it.

But he did a lot of good domestically, and he felt that war.  And just that last part makes him a better man that W could ever dream of being.

LBJ is going to be like Truman—the more time we get away from his Presidency, the higher his stock will rise in history.

Progressivism and liberalism still hold forward the need for capitalist ownership of the means of production (called ‘free trade’ without any apparent irony, even though capitalism at its root is a coercive relationship), as such they’re center-right.

Not in any political science text I’ve ever read.  But this whole left vs. right hoopla is a distraction anyway.

I had a longer post, but it got eaten. But it was basically this:

Here’s a practical suggestion. What should be passed now is a “clean” insurance regulation bill, no mandates to piss off voters, no subsidies (very, very regrettably) to extend coverage but give phony fiscal conservatives [no] excuse to filibuster (or a place to hang Stupak language). (note - I’m assuming the an was a typo.)

With the addendum that Dems then push through a public option or medicare expansion under reconciliation afterwards. The biggest argument (as I understand it) against the use of reconciliation is that it wouldn’t be applicable to the insurance reform and prevention aspects that progressives want. So why not split the bill into two bills?

What frustrates me about the arguments being made that liberals should just suck it up is that the serious political junkies (like the people who read these blogs) are not the issue in off-year elections. The issue is turnout. The political junkies are going to vote (no matter how much bitching I do there’s no question that I will), the question is whether the Democratic party can motivate their base to get out the door and whether they can hang on to even a fraction of the first-time Obama voters. And with the healthcare bill that we currently have I can’t imagine they will. For good or ill the President ran on and sold the idea of a public option with no mandate. He convinced the base that it was an awesome idea. The currently bill has a mandate with no public option. Nothing much for the base to get excited about. And the base isn’t happy about Afghanistan (even if we knew it was coming), his continuation of Bush era civil liberties positions, the failure to reform Wall Street and the failure to create jobs, not to mention the lack of visible support for women and the LGBT community.

What’s worse is that the individual mandate (without extensive premium controls, subsidies and a public option - none of which are in the current Senate bill) is going to hit the young and working poor the hardest. Who were a lot of the first-time Obama voters? The young and poor. What’s happened to them over the last year? Record unemployment. Forcing those voters to buy private health insurance is a dandy recipe for keeping them away from the polls (or voting Republican if they can come up with a populist argument).

Not in any political science text I’ve ever read.

Then get some new political science texts that actually know what ‘liberal’ means (i.e. in economics terms, the difference between conservative i.e. protectionist economic policies, and liberal i.e. free trade economic policies).

The 2012 primary election.  I voted against him in the 2008 primary, so that shouldn’t be surprising.  In the general, if he’s the Democratic nominee, I’ll vote for him.

Not to quibble too much, but is there going to be a 2012 Democratic Presidential primary?  I thought incumbent Presidents automatically got the nomination for a second term?  Or if not, isn’t it considered political suicide and a sign of severe party instability for another candidate to challenge that seriously for the nomination?

Ben D, look at that Daily Kos post by Markos that I linked to above. The poll numbers for likely voters are really, really ugly. Markos professes himself “terrified”. I think you’re a bit too complacent.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/15/814570/-Demoralized-in-2010

Moulitsas giving props to Marcotte, nice to see…

For what it’s worth, here’s the bottom line that Yglesias and Sir Charles are missing… it ain’t us wonkish lefties whining here on Pandagon and elsewhere in the blogosphere that Democrats have to worry about in 2010.  It’s the folks whose lives are appreciably no better in November 2010 than they were in November 2008… it doesn’t matter how many economists say that we’re coming out the recession right now if you are one of the 10% who are unemployed, or one of the 17% who are in the “real” unemployment ranks.

They might not be voting for Republicans next year, but they sure as hell aren’t gonna vote for the folks who promised them the world and then delivered what feels like nothing to them.

Joe and Jane Average American Voter are who is gonna cost the Democrats dearly next November, because they aren’t gonna bother voting next time.  And no high-minded argument that they should vote, ya know, just because, is gonna change that fact.

Forcing those voters to buy private health insurance is a dandy recipe for keeping them away from the polls (or voting Republican if they can come up with a populist argument).

Worse than that. It will sour them on the Democratic Party, in many cases for a lifetime. Every political scientist knows that party preferences once formed at a young age tend to be quite “sticky”.

TO—

Presidents don’t get automatically nominated. Ask LBJ (who dropped out after it was obvious he wouldn’t win the nomination, or at least couldn’t win cleanly), Ford, Carter, and George H.W. Bush.

And yes, it means your party is going down the toilet. In all those examples the incumbent party lost. In fact, the ONLY time a sitting President loses re-election, going back since WWII, is when he is challenged in a primary first. Ford, Carter, George H.W. Bush. If there’s no challenge, he wins.

BlackBloc—

Pat Buchanan is a HUGE protectionist. So is Lou Dobbs. I’d hardly call them “liberals”.

See, if you read my whole post, you’d see that I pointed out a little known fact:  exit polls in the 1994 election actually proved that very few voters had even heard of the contract with america.  Yet, the MSM quickly massed around Newt’s proclamations that he had engineered the 94 takeover with his contract on America.

I think you can stop at “exit polls proved.”  Exit polls prove two things, jack and shit.  It’s kind of hard to look back on that year and say that Newt’s Nuts had nothing to do with the 1994 takeover.  More Wikipedia goodness:

“The Contract with America was introduced six weeks before the 1994 Congressional election, the first mid-term election of President Bill Clinton’s Administration, and was signed by all but two of the Republican members of the House and all of the Party’s non-incumbent Republican Congressional candidates.”

I saw it plastered all over TV day in and day out, the talking heads went on and on about it.  It’s just unbelievable that people would not know about it.  Maybe your fact is little-known because it’s not actually a fact?  And maybe people hadn’t heard of the Contract on America, but they damn sure had heard of Newt and his Nuts.  Newt was a leading figure in that campaign.  It made him Speaker, for crying out loud!

Man, people sure have rose-tinted glasses when it comes to LBJ. 

But then I feel that I understand the history and context of LBJ well.  Great Society (and civil rights for that matter) was fundamentally Bismarkian in outlook.  Sure, it was progressive, and quite needed—but those social programs were instituted to enable a highly militarist outlook.

Er sorry I got that ass-backwards. I meant to say that while some conservatives like Buchanan and Dobbs are protectionist, George W. Bush and John McCain are for free trade and I wouldn’t call them “liberals”.

Not in any political science text I’ve ever read.  But this whole left vs. right hoopla is a distraction anyway.

that’s probably because our political science texts are written, by and large, with a center-right definition of the status quo.

The biggest argument (as I understand it) against the use of reconciliation is that it wouldn’t be applicable to the insurance reform and prevention aspects that progressives want. So why not split the bill into two bills?

this.  very this. 

...the question is whether the Democratic party can motivate their base to get out the door and whether they can hang on to even a fraction of the first-time Obama voters.]

And again, yes, back to the topic of the original post.  Will they, or will they not, find the political will to stay relevant in some meaningful fashion to the people who put them in office?  Because this whole thing is going to determine whether or not the people feel like their trust was well-placed.

Comment #292: jamie d  on  12/15  at  07:15 PM

You can’t compare Obama to anyone because he isn’t even a year into his Presidency. It’s silly at this point. We don’t know the whole picture.

That’s reasonable, but it is fair to compare Obama’s first year to the first years of those who preceded him.

And compared to a lot of the well-known more progressive presidents we’ve had throughout history, I ain’t that impressed at this point.

Sure, Obama could turn out to be the most progressivist bestest president in history.  And that would be neat-o.  But I’m not holding my breath on that happening, and I’m done with showering him with praise for what I hope he accomplishes rather than giving an assessment based on what he actually has accomplished.  And thus far, he ain’t accomplished much.

He could get re-elected in 2012, and that’s way too far down the road to really speculate about at this point.  But I certainly don’t accept that it is a foregone conclusion that he’ll be a two-term president anymore, whereas a year ago I kinda did.  Naively.

I’ll say this much… if 2010, 2011, and 2012 follow the same trajectory for President Obama as 2009 has followed, then the dude is truly gonna be the 21st Century Jimmy Carter, and we’ll be witnessing the inauguration of President Palin/Pawlenty/Huckabee/Romney on January 20, 2013.

Then get some new political science texts that actually know what ‘liberal’ means (i.e. in economics terms, the difference between conservative i.e. protectionist economic policies, and liberal i.e. free trade economic policies).

I think you’re confusing economic liberalism with political liberalism.  They aren’t the same thing.  The “left/right” dichotomy is specific to political theory, not economics.  Liberal political thought is quite often diametrically opposed to liberal economics.  Witness that free trade is seen as a Republican policy, while protectionism is characterized as liberals (with all their regulations and tariffs).  Clinton took heat from the left for NAFTA, not the right.

DTG I think he’s looking more 21st Century Bill Clinton myself. Which means he will be a decidedly average President who gets re-elected but doesn’t do much.

Trade policy cuts across party lines, liberalrob. It’s one of those weird political issues that does that, like abortion.

There are protectionist Republicans, and protectionist Democrats. There are free-trade Republicans, and free-trade Democrats. Really it has to do with what region of the country you’re from, more than anything. Rust-belt residents and blue collar workers are protectionists, people in the big cities on the coasts and white collar workers that depend on international trade are more for free-trade.

Sorry I meant to say “like immigration reform”, not “like abortion”.

Need more coffee…

Splitting the bills is only going to allow a defeat in detail (with more reasonable sounding excuses).

Look, at the end of the day Lieberman, Nelson, et al fundamentally do not want health care reform at all, no regs, no subsidies, and especially no empowerment of people through things they can choose, like Medicare buy in or public options.

It’s looking like it’s going to take Olympia Snowe to flank these guys to have a health care plan at all.  I don’t look forward to that process.

liberalrob...

you are actually, in fact, wrong.

In all those examples the incumbent party lost. In fact, the ONLY time a sitting President loses re-election, going back since WWII, is when he is challenged in a primary first.

Which strikes me as a pretty crappy omen in terms of supposed progressives throwing it out there that, 3 years from now, they plan to be supporting a different candidate for President.  In other words, they are looking forward to the Palin administration.  Eleven months of Obama, and supposedly-progressive folks would rather have a Republican president.

TO—

I doubt he will be seriously challenged. Really, who is going to do it? Hillary? She’s Secretary of State and too moderate for them anyway. Nobody else has a big enough national profile. Ted Kennedy was, well, a Kennedy, Pat Buchanan was a national talk show host.

But I certainly don’t accept that it is a foregone conclusion that he’ll be a two-term president anymore, whereas a year ago I kinda did.  Naively.

A year ago he wasn’t even President yet.

A year ago, I was getting invitations to Inauguration viewing parties.

It is virtually impossible that Obama could have lived up to your hopes at that point.  Unless he was a unicorn who shat diamonds and puked climate change treaties.

liberal rob, that’s what the exit polls said, and in the same country where exit polls also showed that a majority of voters did not know which policies were Kerry’s and which were Bush’s in 04, i find it surprising that you find this hard to believe?

In fact, Eric Alterman has written extensively on this charade that Gingrich has pulled off, and discredited it.

You seem to be very heavily invested in the idea of Newt orchestrating the takeover though.  I guess that’s a personal issue.

Your hostility however, is very unwarrented.

Stuff it up your ass asshole.

Some of the people on this blog are just big dicks.  Boy.  Really big dicks.

anyway rob, I found Eric Alterman, ph.d.‘s argument more convincing than, the argument of rob, anonymous internet blowhard.

Sorry

It is virtually impossible that Obama could have lived up to your hopes at that point.  Unless he was a unicorn who shat diamonds and puked climate change treaties.

Yup. A year into Lincoln’s Presidency, he was still mouthing platitudes about how he didn’t want to interfere with slavery where it existed and how he was going to be nice to the South and not really wage a total war. There’s lag-time between what the people already feel and what politicians do.

You seem to be very heavily invested in the idea of Newt orchestrating the takeover though.  I guess that’s a personal issue.

Gingrich having been at the center of the 1994 Republican wins in congress is pretty much the agreed-upon historical narrative at this point.  You can quibble as to whether it’s really truly 100% factually TRUE, but then you can quibble similarly about most anything.

There aren’t even 60 Democrats; 2 of the senators that make up that notional 60 are “Independents,” and as has been shown repeatedly Lieberman is really more of a Republican.

Just a minor quibble on the implications of that statement - those two Independents are polar opposites in just about every way ideologically, so they really shouldn’t be lumped together.

Joe Lieberman is arguably nothing more than a Republican who the spineless Democrats let caucus with them, but Bernie Sanders is actually more in line with “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” than a good number of senators who are actual Democrats.  The reason he isn’t a Democrat is because they aren’t left-leaning enough for him.

I’ll take 5 Democrats and 55 Independents anyday, if those 55 Independents are all of the Bernie Sanders variety rather than the Joe Lieberman variety.

Not to quibble too much, but is there going to be a 2012 Democratic Presidential primary?  I thought incumbent Presidents automatically got the nomination for a second term?  Or if not, isn’t it considered political suicide and a sign of severe party instability for another candidate to challenge that seriously for the nomination?

It’s not automatic.  Kennedy vs. Carter in 1980 comes immediately to mind; I’m sure there are other examples of sitting Presidents being primaried.  As to whether it’s political suicide, that’s debatable.  Kennedy did pretty well for himself after losing the primary, but he was a Kennedy.  It certainly would be a sign of party instability, but isn’t that what progressives want?  Don’t we want to upset the status quo?  It’s early to speculate about this, but…what if we don’t start drawing down troops by summer 2011?  What if we don’t get reform on DADT?  What if we don’t ever get real regulation of the financial industry?  What if the recession doesn’t end next summer?  In short, what if we see the rest of Obama’s campaign promises and feel-good speeches one by one go down the tubes just as we’re seeing health care reform and human rights investigations scuttled now, what’s to prevent a serious primary challenge being mounted against him?  If he doesn’t do half the things he said he was going to get done, I can see it happening.  And unlike in 1980, we won’t have a charismatic Republican opponent riding a wave of nostalgia for the good old days waiting to vulture the election (could Kennedy have beaten Reagan in 1980?).  He won’t have the cachet of being the first serious African-American candidate for President to bail him out (been there, done that, have the t-shirt).  He’ll be just another President who didn’t do what he promised to do, and a primary challenge is very conceivable.

(could Kennedy have beaten Reagan in 1980?)

I think so. Even Carter was tied until the very end, when anti-incumbent feeling overwhelmed him (combined with an assist from John Anderson who took away liberal votes). It certainly is probably that Kennedy could have beaten Reagan.

This country would be 1000% better today. No Reagan, no George H.W. Bush, no Dubya.

Anyway, I need to get off this thread.  I used to get into huge blood-pressure raising political arguments on the internet, but I don’t anymore.  I only did here because Health care was the one thing I really had my heart set on. 

The point is, whether you believe the myth that Gingrich orchestrated the takeover, or whether you have read and been convinced by Doctor Alterman’s historical arguments that he wasn’t, doesn’t much matter.

I don’t believe the right needs a gingrich, man or myth.  The fact is, as I see it, if real people don’t get real relief from Democrats, and the base is depressed, and the right stays angry and motivated, the Dems are going to lose the HOuse, and maybe the Senate.

And the crazy Republican party, will have subponea power.

That’s all.  good night.

And yeah Opo @305, that’s what a myth is you moron.  The widely accepted narrative.  Jesus Christ.  Never have so many been so proud of so few working brain cells than on internet blogs.

And unlike in 1980, we won’t have a charismatic Republican opponent riding a wave of nostalgia for the good old days waiting to vulture the election

the argument is that we do, in fact have palin.  it’s something of a stretch to say, but seems to be the line nonetheless.

Liberalrob the recession is already over. Job growth is the LAST thing to return.

First the stock market goes up. That happened in March. Then GDP grows. That happened in the Third Quarter. Job growth follows shortly.

If single payer was inevitable I would think it would have happened by now.  Nothing in politics is inevitable. 

LBJ’s achievements on the domestic front from 1964-66 are second only to FDR’s in the history of the country.  Unfortunately, that pesky Vietnam War kind of destroyed the old liberal coalition and shattered the country.  We’re still paying for it in some respects.

I do think Obama should make a point of taking direct action on job creation and do so in a way that makes clear that he cares deeply about the issue.  I think unemployment is the biggest pitfall he faces.  If that can get turned around everything else on the agenda will be that much easier. 

As for 2012, just remember that Reagan in 1982 was less popular than Obama is now and unemployment was slightly higher than it is now.  He took 49 states in 1984.

Sir Charles part of the reason I think people buy into the “1994 all over again” story is because of laziness, especially in the MSM. The story is already written. They just have to change the names.

Same thing with wanting to see health care go down.

Kevin Drum on the bill:

Ten years ago this bill would have seemed a godsend.  The fact that it doesn’t now is a reflection of higher aspirations from the left, and that’s great.  It demonstrates a resurgence of liberalism that’s long overdue.  But this is still a huge achievement that will benefits tens of millions of people in very concrete ways and will do it without expanding our long-term deficit.  Either with or without a public option, this is more than Bill Clinton ever did, more than Teddy Kennedy did, more than LBJ did, more than Truman did, and more than FDR did.  There won’t be many other times in our lives any of us will be able to say that.  So pass the bill.  The longer we wait, the worse it will get.  Pass it now.

It certainly would be a sign of party instability, but isn’t that what progressives want?

Sure, but I’m not sure I want Bush Administration Parte Deux.

This dance didn’t really work in 2000, and either not enough time has passed or my political memory is too long to be ready to go there again.

This is part of why I’d consider myself a left-anarchist in my heart of hearts, but a liberal Democrat pragmatist in the voting booth.  I’m not willing to court massive death and destruction in the hope that maybe some people in this country will drift further to the left politically.  I’m an anarchist softie, there, I said it.

I’ll take 5 Democrats and 55 Independents anyday, if those 55 Independents are all of the Bernie Sanders variety rather than the Joe Lieberman variety.

Me too, absolutely.  The point was that we don’t have 60 Democrats and we don’t have 60 votes, and never did.

liberal rob, that’s what the exit polls said, and in the same country where exit polls also showed that a majority of voters did not know which policies were Kerry’s and which were Bush’s in 04, i find it surprising that you find this hard to believe?

I don’t find it hard to believe that the exit polls said people didn’t know what the Contract was.  I do find it hard to believe that the exit polls showed people hadn’t heard of the Contract and didn’t associate it with Newt Gingrich.

In fact, Eric Alterman has written extensively on this charade that Gingrich has pulled off, and discredited it.

That’s why in “Why we’re liberals”, on page 51 he referred to the “debacle of the 1994 midterm elections when [Clinton’s] party was humiliated by Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America.”

You seem to be very heavily invested in the idea of Newt orchestrating the takeover though.  I guess that’s a personal issue.

Newt’s a scumbag.  I blame him and his ilk for the failures of the Clinton administration, and for helping make it so much less than it could have been.  Damn straight it’s personal.

Your hostility however, is very unwarrented.

What hostility?  I’m just saying I disagree that Newt Gingrich wasn’t part and parcel of the 1994 debacle, as the esteemed Prof. Dr. Alterman characterized it (quite accurately).  I’ve been agreeing with you all along on everything else.

Stuff it up your ass asshole.

ROFL.  And after you said I made such a great post.  My, how my fortunes are changed.

you are actually, in fact, wrong.

Gee, I’ve never heard that one before.

Man, I love the Internets.

Not to quibble too much, but is there going to be a 2012 Democratic Presidential primary?  I thought incumbent Presidents automatically got the nomination for a second term?

No, they do not.  It has generally appeared that way in every election involving incumbents in the past 25 years or so, but even Bush had several challengers in the 2004 Republican primaries.  You’ve probably never heard of any of them, and none of them even won so much as a single delegate, but in every state, a primary or caucus was held, and someone besides George W. Bush was on the primary ballot.  Same thing in 1996 with Clinton.  George H.W. Bush faced a somewhat more serious challenge as the incumbent president in 1992 from Pat Buchanan.

And of course, while he really didn’t get that close to winning the nomination, Ted Kennedy made the 1980 Democratic Convention a nightmare for Jimmy Carter.  As did Ronald Reagan for Gerald Ford in 1976.  And in 1968, had he decided to run for another term, LBJ very likely would have lost a primary challenge that year.

There hasn’t been an incumbent president to lose a primary in over 100 years, but the possibility always exists, and there is no rule stipulating that a nomination for a second term is automatic, though the nature of the system has made it nearly impossible for anyone other than the incumbent to win the nomination.

The odds of Barack Obama NOT being the Democratic Nominee in 2012 are probably 100:1 against.  It’s not impossible for someone else to beat him in a primary, but given the nature of th system, it is extremely unlikely for that to occur.  And even more than that, the odds of someone beating Barack Obama in the Democratic primary and then being able to pick their bloody selves up off the ground to win the presidency are even slimmer… I’d say 10,000:1 against that happening.  Particularly when you consider the fact that the African-American vote would probably be severely depressed in the general election if the nation’s first African-American president were to be primaried out of the party nomination by a white opponent - and the reality is, there is no viable black candidate who could successfully primary Obama at this time.  So you would have a situation where a white Democrat defeats the black Democratic incumbent - that’s an electoral nightmare that the Republicans would love to see happen.

In the real world, either Barack Obama will be re-elected in 2012, or a Republican will become the 45th POTUS in 2012.  It’s extremely, extremely unlikely that another Democrat will be able to both defeat Barack Obama in the 2012 primary AND still have enough gas left to win the 2012 general election after having expended their entire campaign financial warchest getting the nomination.

Anyway, I need to get off this thread.  I used to get into huge blood-pressure raising political arguments on the internet, but I don’t anymore.  I only did here because Health care was the one thing I really had my heart set on.

Angl, honey, just fyi but I believe it is official internetz policy that you only get three flounces per thread.  You should probably use your next one wisely.

while some conservatives like Buchanan and Dobbs are protectionist, George W. Bush and John McCain are for free trade and I wouldn’t call them “liberals”

W. was not for free trade. Just ask Canadian lumber companies. Conservatives seek a chauvinist national economic policies, which means protectionism where the economy is weak and shoving liberal trade policies into the throat of other countries where the economy is strong. In practice this means conservatives are pro-free trade most of the time in the United States, since it is an economic powerhouse.

I think you’re confusing economic liberalism with political liberalism.

I think you’re confusing political liberalism with social liberalism. Economics = politics, in my world. It’s the only part that counts. (And yes, I know Amanda and a lot of the regulars will not agree with me here.)

Witness that free trade is seen as a Republican policy, while protectionism is characterized as liberals (with all their regulations and tariffs).

Liberals don’t propose regulations and tariffs. They oppose them.

Clinton took heat from the left for NAFTA, not the right.

Yes. From *socialists*, not liberals.

I think the Republican Party is more likely to crack-up in 2012, especially if Palin runs. I don’t see Palin graciously conceding if she loses a primary. She’s going to run as an independent if that happens. you can bank on that.

Of course that’s IF she even tries to get the nomination, which I don’t think she will. But if she does, watch out.

You don’t consider Dennis Kuccinuch or, well, the entire Democratic Congressional delegation from the rustbelt to be “liberals”?

Mnemosyne: Mother Jones must be rolling in her grave if that magazine is her legacy. Jesus FUCK.

You don’t consider Dennis Kuccinuch or, well, the entire Democratic Congressional delegation from the rustbelt to be “liberals”?

Actually, I don’t consider the mealy mouthed whining they did to be ‘heat’.

Ok, but Dennis Kuccinuch is now a conservative because he is a protectionist?

I would say so, yes. I don’t understand the Left’s fascination with Kuccinich, he’s clearly just another populist.

I mean, he was seriously floating the idea of going on a ticket with Ron Paul. That should tell you something right there.

The thing is that in America, because of slippery use of words by the Republicans, ‘conservatives’ now mean ‘fascists’, ‘socialists’/‘Marxists’ now means ‘liberals’ and ‘fascism’ means ‘anything scary that black man in the White house is doing’.

W. was not for free trade.

That’s why he was pushing CAFTA so hard.

Economics = politics, in my world. It’s the only part that counts.

OK, so long as we all know that’s where you’re coming from.  For those of us who don’t live in your world, it’s very confusing for you to refer to liberals being free traders.  Most political liberals as I know them support free and fair trade, regulated trade, not laissez-faire free trade (or laissez-faire anything else).  My understanding of economic liberalism is that any restrictions on trade are bad policy because they inhibit the operation of the “invisible hand” fairy who magically makes everything work out for everyone.  (Except the losers, who can just lump it.)

Liberals don’t propose regulations and tariffs. They oppose them.

That’s why “in May 2006, [Sen. Dick “one of the most liberal members in congress”] Durbin campaigned to maintain a $0.54 per gallon tariff on imported ethanol.” (From Wikipedia again.  Such a useful resource.)

Yes. [Clinton took NAFTA heat] From *socialists*, not liberals.

Some would argue there is little difference.  Anyway, this liberal-but-not-quite-socialist disagreed with it.  (In fairness, the radical right also pilloried him for it, as has been mentioned.  But that just means they aren’t economic liberals either.)

Let me quickly add that I disagreed with NAFTA but at the same time felt it or something like it was inevitable and had to be implemented.  Sooner or later we had to accept the reality of the huge economic differences between us the rest of the world, and that at some point that had to be addressed.  Free trade agreements like NAFTA are one way of starting the process of rebalancing that disparity.  Not necessarily the best way, though.

I feel like I’ve helped derail the thread.  Dammit.

Everything Amanda said:  agreed.

No, liberalrob

seriously, you *are* wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

Man, people sure have rose-tinted glasses when it comes to LBJ. 

But then I feel that I understand the history and context of LBJ well.  Great Society (and civil rights for that matter) was fundamentally Bismarkian in outlook.  Sure, it was progressive, and quite needed—but those social programs were instituted to enable a highly militarist outlook.

Are you contending that those programs were merely a means to an end… a way for LBJ to be able to escalate the folly of Vietnam?

Perhaps that’s true, I don’t really know.  I don’t ask questions about what motivates someone to pass the right policy.  I just care that they do whatever it takes to get the right policy passed.  LBJ may have been the biggest racist of all time for all I know, but the fact is, he passed some of the most racially-progressive policies of any president ever.  And he addressed healthcare in a more meaningful way than any president ever had before him, or has since him.

But it’s all besides the point… what makes you believe that Barack Obama is more liberal than LBJ?  What can you point to specifically that indicates he’s more liberal than LBJ?  What SPECIFICALLY has he done thus far that makes the claim that he is more progressive than LBJ have any shred of credibility?  I don’t care about you think he’s going to do, or what you hope he does, or what you think is in his heart… what has the man actually done that makes him the progressive giant you portray him as being?  Idealistic, inspirational speechifying and rhetorical flourish don’t count as accomplishments.

As for LBJ’s increasing militarism, that’s a totally fair criticism.  But remember when assailing that position of LBJ, that you are defending the supposedly more liberal policies of a man who is going to have increased our military presence in Afghanistan to more than three times as big as they ever were at the highest point during Bush’s presidency.

As Steve pointed out above… Obama has taken on the worst characteristic of LBJ’s presidency - increased militarism in foreign policy - without having adopted the far more progressive domestic ideals of LBJ.

Saying that he’s proven himself at this point to be a better progressive than LBJ is just laughably stupid in every imagineable way.

If you want to argue that he has the potential to be more progressive than LBJ, fine.  Maybe he does.  And I’ll be the first in line to praise him for it if he ever implements that potential through progressive policy.

He doesn’t deserve to be praised for what he could do, he deserves to be critically assessed based on what he has (and hasn’t) done.  We’ve gotten a few crumbs here and there.  And yes, I’m sure he’s “not as bad as McCain would have been”.  I’m not feeling inspired by it.  2009 hasn’t been that impressive.  I really hope 2010, 2011, and 2012 look much different, or there might not be a 2013 for him, not in the White House, anyway.

I want him to emulate the best FDR and LBJ gave us, not the worst Clinton and LBJ gave us… and right now, he’s running his White House as if he were Bill Clinton’s protege.  He even has half of his Cabinet stacked with Clinton Administration leftovers, all the way up to his horrifically bad CoS, Rahm Emmanuel.

Well, part of the situation was that America was changing and the US’s emergence as a global superpower in a superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union has meant that institutions like Jim Crow were an obstacle to certain goals in the Third World.  If you’re in a fight against communism, elderly poverty in the world’s most powerful state is a really bad thing.  If your political framework is a regional patchwork of political loyalties and both parties have big tents, you have margins for political armtwisting.  LBJ’s world is just really different from today, not to mention that political institutions worked much cleaner.  Not to mention that there was a strong Left…  And the dead hero president who’s program you’re gloriously carrying on effect…

BlackBloc—

Pat Buchanan is a HUGE protectionist. So is Lou Dobbs. I’d hardly call them “liberals”.

Actually, BlackBloc (correctly) classified protectionism as a conservative principle, in economic terms.  And free trade is a liberal principle, in economic terms.

A classic liberal is someone like Tucker Carlson.  I know he often gets characterized as libertarian, but he’s really more of a classic liberal, in economic policy anyway.

In America, we’ve come to equate leftism and liberalism, and rightism with conservatism… it doesn’t work exactly like that.  The ultra-capitalists are EXTREMELY liberal in their view of trade policy, because the fewer government restrictions we place on trade policy means the more they can exploit Third World labor for their benefit.  As much as Clinton gets skewered (and rightfully so) because of NAFTA, it wasn’t even remotely a conservative position, in economic terms… that was pure, unbridled, liberal economic policy in all its glory right there.

Watching/reading this makes me wish I had a bag of popcorn.  But I’m still at work so I can’t get one…

RE Kennedy beating Reagan, if he was the ‘80 Democratic candidate — I really don’t think it would have happened.

I loathed Reagan at the time, and was disgusted by the Nixon Administration, but neither would have made Kennedy look any better in 1980.

Carter was really only elected because of a delayed reaction to Nixon’s crimes (1976 being the first election after Nixon won easily in ‘72 and then was forced to resign), Vietnam fatigue, and Ford looking ineffectual and still had the taint of his pardon of Nixon.  (Those SNL skits with Chevy Chase playing a bumbling Ford really did not help him either.)

Carter seemed like a breath of fresh air at the time.  But when Carter turned out to be a moderate/conservative Democrat, the economy continued to be bad, and he looked ineffectual RE Afghanistan and the American Embassy takeover in Iran, his fate was sealed.

So the smiling old asshole with the dyed and slicked back hair became pretty much an inevitable part of America’s political tapestry… goddammit…

Ah, I supppose I should have mentioned this:  Obama is not LBJ.  He’s certainly not especially liberal.  I remember Steve Gilliard trashing him as just another Cory Booker or Nagin.  I agreed with those sentiments, which was why I was interested in John Edwards.  Giving up on him politically, and then being seriously dissappointed in him later on—that sort of thing just made me emphasize a general predictability and ability to get things done.  I certainly approve of the way Obama won, etc, etc, etc.  I also pay attention to the consequences of “liberal” politician’s actions.  Is Ted Kennedy a liberal?  I suppose so, but I don’t really think Ted Kennedy was every particularly *constructive* as a liberal.  I mean, NCLB?  His primary of Jimmy Carter?  Ultimately he’s just one of those paternalistic rich and powerful person who wants to think better of himself.  As with LBJ, you simply cannot seperate the militarist programme from the social programme.  They were instituted to support one another.  Would Obama have done similar things in LBJ’s place?  I think so.  I also think Obama would have generally have made more of an effort to “rationalize” the vietnamese conflict and he certainly would have welcomed the public pressures for civil rights (assuming that he was white).  At bottom, LBJ is just more thoroughly an opportunist than Obama is, and that opportunist sensibility was a large reason behind his downfall.  Therefore, I *do* think Obama, given that the dominant factions in US society would never tolerate a truly leftist/progressive president, would have been more progressive than LBJ if he was president in LBJ’s times.  LBJ *today* would look an awful lot like a combo Bob Graham and Sam Nunn.  And probably roughly about as effective as those two if they were President today.

As to whether it’s political suicide, that’s debatable.  Kennedy did pretty well for himself after losing the primary, but he was a Kennedy.

You sort of left out the part where Jimmy Carter was completely decimated by Ronald Reagan that November, and loses in a landslide that made Obama’s win last year look pretty generic.

It might not have been political suicide for Ted Kennedy personally, but it sure as hell fucked the Democratic Party pretty bad in 1980.  Given the margin that Reagan won by, it’s probable that he wins that election even without the primary by Ted Kennedy, but he sure as hell wouldn’t have won with the political mandate that he did, and the Democrats wouldn’t have been nearly as demoralized as they were.  I mean, there were more college kids voting for Ronald Reagan that year than for Jimmy Carter.  If you can’t even capture the youth vote as a Democrat, you know you’re party is in the toilet.

Primarying an incumbent president has meant exactly one thing in presidential politics in the last 100 years - the party out of the White House will be retaking the White House in the general election.  Even when the unpopular incumbent president stepped aside to avoid a contentious primary (1968), the incumbent party still lost the White House that November.

If Obama actually gets a serious primary challenge in 2012 in which he’s forced to campaign and fight for his nomination, we will very likely have a Republican president taking office in January 2013.

I think it’s crappy that the system has become what it has in that regard - I wish the primary were an effective tool to keep an incumbent president in line - but it is what it is.  Primarying your own party’s incumbent POTUS is political suicide for the party in the White House.  Reagan fucked Ford, Kennedy fucked Carter, and Buchanan fucked Bush 41 when they primaried them… none of the three primary challengers won the presidency at the time, but they did help make their own party’s incumbent presidents one-termers.

Incumbent presidents either get re-elected, or someone from the opposing party takes over the White House… that’s been reality for more than a century.

He won’t have the cachet of being the first serious African-American candidate for President to bail him out (been there, done that, have the t-shirt).  He’ll be just another President who didn’t do what he promised to do, and a primary challenge is very conceivable.

And what exactly do you think happens to the black vote that November when a white Democrat primaries out the very first African-American president in history ?

Sorry, in a country that has never had an African-American president in its entire 230 year history, a country that was built by slaves, the whole “first African-American president in history” thing still has a ton of cachet to at least 13% of the population.

You primary Barack Obama out, you can pretty much count on virtually no support from the black community whatsoever in the general election.  I mean seriously… yeah, we liked your guy back in 2008, but we think he sucked, so we’re gonna dump him after one term and go back to another white candidate this time.  And sorry, the Democratic Party can’t afford to alienate the entire black vote and still expect to win the presidency.

And no, there is absolutely no African-American in national politics today who could conceivably challenge Barack Obama in a meaningful way 2 years from now (Iowa Caucus is less than 25 months from today), so it most certainly would be a white candidate who would challenge him.  And that’s a setup for electoral disaster.

Additionally, the amount of money required to primary out a sitting POTUS today would basically leave the challenger broke after the party convention, and the party would easily be characterized as fractured by the opposition heading into the general election.

Either Barack Obama gets re-elected in 2012, or a Republican will become or 45th president in 2012.  Those are the only two reality-based outcomes that exist.

Can I ask what is probably a really stupid question?

Would it even be possible to legislatively change the electoral system in the USA to make voting compulsory? (ie, there is a fine for not voting)

I know that’s not a popular idea with, well, pretty much anybody really, and I get the sense that it might be especially offensive to American sensibilities. But it would correct a massive skew in the incentive system that politicians face, where they end up catering to the wealthier and more powerful and more white and more male and more Christian and more batshit crazy voting blocs because those are voting blocs that actually vote.  I’m not sure that countries with compulsory voting actually have more progressive governments overall than countries that don’t but it would be bound to push things in a progressive direction in the US. It just seems like it should be something American progressives should want to happen. But maybe it would be seen by a lot of the country as a fascist assault on individual liberties or something. Hell, maybe it actually would be one of those. I’m not convinced it’s a good idea, but i’ve never even seen anyone suggest it.

Would it even be possible to legislatively change the electoral system in the USA to make voting compulsory? (ie, there is a fine for not voting)

I don’t think so.

I mean, I can’t say or sure, but that just sounds like something that would be filled with constitutional challenges a mile long.  I imagine if such a law were ever actually enacted, it would get struck down unanimously by SCOTUS before it could even get implemented.

Again, I’d have to do some research to back that up, but like I said, that just sounds completely unconstitutional on its face.

Would it even be possible to legislatively change the electoral system in the USA to make voting compulsory? (ie, there is a fine for not voting)

Alas, no. Even apart from the weird only-in-America cultural revulsion that would inspire all across the political spectrum, it directly threatens the electoral interests of both Republicans and conservative Democrats, who would unite to block it.

Even apart from the weird only-in-America cultural revulsion that would inspire all across the political spectrum, it directly threatens the electoral interests of both Republicans and conservative Democrats, who would unite to block it.

Kind of like serious campaign finance reform (and no, McCain-Feingold wasn’t “serious” CFR) that actually succeeds in keeping corporate money out of our electoral process?  Or efforts to term-limit Congresspuppets?

I said it on another thread, but sometimes I think we need a new Constitutional Convention (or at least the THREAT of one, threatening to have one is what go the Senate to finally vote for it’s own direct election) to get things like CFR and single payer.

Would it even be possible to legislatively change the electoral system in the USA to make voting compulsory? (ie, there is a fine for not voting)

I don’t think it would ever happen, in pragmatic terms, but I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t.  You would probably need a constitutional amendment, though.  And, again, in a pragmatic sense it’s just totally unfeasible, because it’s not really in the interests of the political status quo at all.  Not to mention the toxic party politics of the whole thing.

That said, I’ve always thought that compulsory voting would be a good thing if the process could be reformed in the right ways.  I just don’t think that would ever happen.  Then again, we didn’t used to directly elect Senators, and now we do.  225 years ago, only property-owning white males could vote.  Things can change in unexpected ways.

225 years ago, only property-owning white males could vote.  Things can change in unexpected ways.

Hell forty-five years ago Barack Obama wouldn’t have been allowed to have a meal in a restaurant in
three of the states he won (VA, NC, FL).

”Primarying an incumbent president has meant exactly one thing in presidential politics in the last 100 years - the party out of the White House will be retaking the White House in the general election.”

I disagree, in a “which came first chicken or egg?” kinda way

Weak incumbents with poor re-election prospects are more likely to draw strong primary challenges, so I don’t think it’s the primary challenge that weakens them, but the fact that they are weak that brings on the challenge

Would it even be possible to legislatively change the electoral system in the USA to make voting compulsory? (ie, there is a fine for not voting)

I vote. I consider it as useful as crossing my fingers when waiting for my name to be drawn in some lottery. But some superstitions are hard to get rid of.

But the day they make it compulsory to vote in Canada is the day they arrest me for publicly protesting by burning my vote slip.

BTW BlackBloc, what exactly is wrong with the NDP? Why do you not consider them left-wing?

Just curious.

I certainly wouldn’t boycott the next election solely on this issue alone.  What’s distressing about this is that this clearly sets the playbook for the obstructionists on any other major pieces of legislation that come up.  The White House has behaved wimpily and refused to show any leadership.  The Senate leadership refuses to call the bluff by either forcing a filibuster, going around it through reconciliation, or simply eliminating the filibuster from the rules.  Unless the White House and the Senate leadership learn something from this debacle, every major piece of legislation from here on out will be stymied by finding a handful of “moderate” Democrats to refuse to vote for cloture. 

Unless the Democratic leadership is willing to show that there are at least somethings that they won’t bend on, then there will truly be no difference between the parties.  Not because there is no policy difference but because they will have proved that they don’t have what it takes to govern.

Tom Harkin, who is someone I respect (unlike Kevin Drum) just made a fairly convincing case for passing the Senate bill. Also, we should remember this is NOT THE LAW Obama will sign. There’s conference committee after this.

BTW, how the hell can the same state elect Tom Harkin on one hand, Chuck “pull the plug on grandma” Grassley on the other? Weird. I can’t think of any other state with that kind of disparity between their two Senators.

I vote. I consider it as useful as crossing my fingers when waiting for my name to be drawn in some lottery. But some superstitions are hard to get rid of.

Enh.  I mainly vote because I think it’s actually important to do so in local races.  Or my favorite, local-level primaries (they’re my favorite mainly because NOBODY ever shows up for those, even in my super-liberal ultra-politicized neighborhood).  I relish the idea that it actually matters if I show up in the elementary school gym to flick a lever for John Doe who’s been standing outside at the greenmarket every Saturday chatting with the neighborhood folks, trying to explain why he’s better than Jane Roe the incumbent who Supports Eminent Domain In The Atlantic Yards and Is Bad On Low Income Housing. 

But voting for President and such?  Meh.  Though it was exciting this time to wait in a two hour line and eavesdrop on the elderly black men who were SO FRAKKING EXCITED to vote for the first black presidential candidate.  They told really good stories. 

Also, there are bake sales.  While I may be anti-capitalism, I’m decidedly pro bake sale.

But the day they make it compulsory to vote in Canada is the day they arrest me for publicly protesting by burning my vote slip.

Maybe that should be allowed, as long as you shove the ashes into one box or another.

BTW BlackBloc, what exactly is wrong with the NDP? Why do you not consider them left-wing?

They support NAFTA, for one. With vague feel-good rhetoric that they want to “renegotiate a fair NAFTA”, which is the sort of feel good bullshit that aging ex-social democratic parties are good with.

But I’m being hard on the NDP. I guess they are center-left. They’re just not a viable party. They’re closer to a third party, with some delusions of grandeur.

Well, I’m center-left on the world stage then just not in America. Trust me, I know what “center-right” is in Europe and Canada—Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Harper—that sure as shit a’int me!

Weak incumbents with poor re-election prospects are more likely to draw strong primary challenges, so I don’t think it’s the primary challenge that weakens them, but the fact that they are weak that brings on the challenge

I think it’s actually a both/and thing.

I agree, strong incumbent presidents who enjoy popular support in their own party don’t get primaried, so obviously their candidacy was already weakened before they received the challenge when they do get primaried.

That said, I think the primarying of a sitting president only serves to weaken them further, and greatly increases the chances that they will lose in the general election.

Case in point, 1996.  Bill Clinton was not primaried that year.  And yet, his base of support in the Democratic Party was clearly weakened because of his loss of Congress in 1994, his passage of DADT and DOMA, NAFTA, and Welfare Reform - all of which happened before he was re-elected in 1996.

He won that November with 49.2% of the vote, while milquetoast GOP candidate Bob Dole took 40.7% and nutbar Reform Party candidate Ross Perot took 8.4%.  Take Perot out of that election, and Clinton probably still wins, but it very likely gets shaved down to a 2-3 point win instead of a nearly 9 point win.  And Dole may have still pulled off with an electoral college victory and popular vote loss.

Give Bill Clinton a serious primary challenge in 1996, and Bob Dole may have become our 43rd POTUS, assuming Ross Perot stays out of the general election.

Same holds true for 2004 - even if you take the Ohio results at face value, that election was close enough that George W. Bush might have lost the general election had he been forced to expend resources fighting for his own nomination beforehand.

My point being this - yes, it’s true that one must already be somewhat of a weak president to get a serious primary challenge in the first place, but primary challenges to incumbents have never resulted in victory for the incumbent party in November at any point in recent electoral history.  They only wind up making the party more fractured and embittered, and ultimately hurt whoever gets the nomination in the general election campaign by driving down base turnout.  You primary Barack Obama out of the Democratic nomination in 2012, and I guarantee that you are gonna lose a huge percentage of the African-American vote that November.

I realize that we had a highly contentious primary just last year, but we were facing an incumbent party that was monumentally unpopular… John McCain was guaranteed a November defeat from the moment the economy cratered in September, and it really wouldn’t have made a difference had the GOP nominated someone else or had he chosen someone else as a running mate.  Last year the deck was stacked enormously in the Democrats favor - we could have run Bart Simpson and probably still would have won that race.  We won’t be able to so effectively use George W. Bush’s many failures against the Republicans again in 2012.

Sarkozi, Berlusconi and Harper are far right conservatives. Center right? Fuck it. Sarkozi is basically LePen lite. He’s more right-wing than Chirac for instance. He’s been directly antagonistic towards racial minorities in France, calling them ‘racailles’. Berlusconi is basically a fascist, but it’s cool again to be a fascist as long as you’re not killing minorities people will just call you a conservative. Harper is the only one that even comes close to the center, and he’s from the old Reform wing of the conservatives which was basically an Alberta Uber Alles far right populist party.

I do know Alberta is basically North Texas.

Looks like Markos Moulitsas has a pretty scathing couterpoint to Ezra Klein’s obnoxious slobbering love affair with this pile of shit bill:

Ezra Klein is satisfied with the Senate bill.

“Insurance companies win,” Markos Moulitsas tweeted last night. “Time to kill this monstrosity coming out of the Senate.”

This was, for progressives, a frustrating vote. But the flip side of it being morally unconscionable for Joe Lieberman to put the bill at risk over something as small as Medicare buy-in for 3-or-so million people is that the absence of Medicare buy-in—and of the weak public plan—is not reason enough to oppose the bill, either.

Klein’s argument seems to be:

1.If we need more money for subsidies, we can later throw more money at the system,
2.If costs aren’t held down, then there’ll be a better argument for a public option in the future.

My take is that it’s unconscionable to force people to buy a product from a private insurer that enjoys sanctioned monopoly status. It’d be like forcing everyone to attend baseball games, but instead of watching the Yankees, they were forced to watch the Kansas City Royals. Or Washington Nationals. It would effectively be a tax—and a huge one—paid directly to a private industry.

Without any mechanisms to control costs, this is yet another bailout for yet another reviled industry. Subsidies? Insurance companies are free to raise their rates to absorb that cash. More money for subsidies? More rate increases, as well as more national debt. Don’t expect Lieberman and his ilk to care. They’re in it for their industry pals.

If you want a similar model, watch how universities increase tuition to absorb increased financial aid opportunities. And since the Senate and its industry-bought Senators won’t allow insurance premium caps or an end to the insurance industry’s anti-trust exemption (much less a public option to compete against them), there is nothing keeping those companies from jacking up rates to screw people. In fact, that’s been their modus operandi for years.

Provisions prohibiting rescissions are fine and dandy, and fairly non-controversial, but they are toothless. The legislation allows rescissions based on “fraud” and “willful misrepresentation”. I’m still not sure what that means, but if the insurance company doesn’t want to pay for your expensive care, seems they can assert those clauses and refuse to pay. Then what? You have to fight for coverage, get lawyers, hit the courts, hope you survive long enough to resolve the issue. Looks a lot like the status quo, doesn’t it? Indeed, insurance companies already cite fraud or misrepresentation as the excuses for rescissions.

The insurance industry began 2009 fearing genuine reform that would force them to become responsible corporate citizens, and they are exiting it on the cusp of a dramatic government-sanctioned windfall. It pays to be an industry that’s too big to fail.

Spot on, particularly the analogy about universities continuing to hike tuition costs to coincide with student loan limit increases and federal grant increases…

The more money the government makes available in subsidies, the more the insurance companies will raise their premiums - because there is absolutely NO CAP on the rates that insurance companies can charge for their “product”.  Cost savings will not be getting passed on to the consumers, and additional federal dollars that attempt to reduce rising premium costs will simply get swallowed up by the shitstains that run Aetna, UHC, and their evil brethren.

And rescissions will continue exactly as they already do… the insurance company will cite fraud or misrepresentation as an excuse to not cover expensive claims, and it will be up to the consumer to get lawyered up to try to fight the claim denial in the courtroom, if they can scrounge together the time or money to undertake such an effort.

This bill IS worse than the status quo.  It may be bad politically for the Democrats to not get it passed, but it will likely be even worse for American citizens if it does pass.

It is nothing short of a corporate bailout for one of the country’s most reviled industries, only this time it will come directly out of our pockets to pay for it, and if you refuse to hand the insurance companies your money, the government is gonna spank you with a $750 fine.

Fuck this.  If this passes and the Democrats get absolutely destroyed in 2010 by an angry electorate, then they fucking deserve it.  This ain’t the Republicans killing the Democrats, this is the Democrats committing political suicide.

Blackbloc, Berlusconi *does* do racial pogroms—against gypsies.

And while I respect the rights of everyone to vote as they please, I, like Amanda, vividly remember the 2000 election and the 8-year reign of Bush II.  If you are really so tunnel-visioned over this one issue as to not vote for Obama in 2012, then you are myopic.

I wholeheartedly agree.  2000 was the first election I voted in.  I was a low information voter.  I was 20.  9/11 had not happened yet and I voted for Gore despite not seeing too much difference between the candidates.  The Daily Show and I were on the same page at the time.  Watch the old episodes…they painted both candidates as two sides of the same coin and it was the common wisdom amongst many of us who had not discovered blogs, etc.  My main reason for voting Gore at the time was, “Republicans seem to be much more greedy and into money…and I don’t like that in politicians.”  I know, I was a genius.  Thank god I discovered the internets!

I am an Obama supporter, and have been since his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention when I said to my friends, “That guy is going to be President!”.  I agree with many criticisms of his strategy.  I never had any illusions about his centrist ways and I am much more progressive than he.  I am not saying he hasn’t made mistakes, failed in some ways I find stupid and heartbreaking…that said I believe he has a plan and an intelligence to learn from these mistakes unlike our last dear leader.  I remember what he said during his first or second press conference…federal governance is like steering an ocean liner.  It can only be turned in small degrees.  I know big changes are possible certainly, but it is December 2009 and I am not flat out withdrawing my vote for 2012 over whatever happens with healthcare, even if it crushes my own hopes for change on the issue.

I have a life threatening illness…and if I lose my job and this bill is not done right I will be in big trouble so it is personal for sure.  However, Obama is the first President I have seen TRY achieving healthcare for a long time or even reach to higher ideals of changing the conversation (which is a noble goal despite it’s current ineffectiveness).  I do not feel despair over his errors, oddly enough.  I am not a sycophant and I do not believe he is a leader who is going to save us from any of the disasters of the Bush years.  He could completely fall on his face with healthcare as is historically the case in America.  My hope is he will steer us a few degrees back to normal by 2012 and that is all I ask.

The damage Bush II wrought on us could not be magically healed by any President or a corrupt Senate.  We can only hope to get back to normal eight years from now.  That is the price we pay for 2000 and 2004 as a country.  I really think if Obama is re-elected in 2012 we will see some big things happen.  I haven’t made up my voting mind yet, but like I said I think he has a plan and much of it depends on re-election.  Cynical or not (b/c I know we need help NOW) this is politics and that’s how it works…slooooowly, because of Lieberman roadblocks, the media, etc.  Things that seem small now will be important later, like 2010 elections, etc.  Many of my friends never voted before 2008 and I kept telling them it’s important.  Let me tell you, they ALL voted this time and the Democrats won.  I will continue to vote in every election local and national and write to my reps to express my opinions on policy.  Obama is not our only hope, activism is and getting information out there effectively.  I tend to agree with Howard Dean…go for reconciliation and even if it seems like a blow to Obama politically at first, it will work out better for all in the end, including his re-election chances.

Pandagonians, I give you Senator Roland Burris (D-IL), in his own words:

“I am committed to voting for a bill that achieves the goals of a public option: competition, cost savings and accountability, I will not be able to vote for lesser legislation that ignores those fundamentals.

My colleagues may have forged a compromise bill that can achieve the 60 votes that will be needed for it to pass. But until this bill addresses cost, competition and accountability in a meaningful way, it will not win mine.

As Mohandas Gandhi once famously said, `All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender.”

If the man actually follows through on his words, he just might be a hero to the progressive cause.  Some might call the man a fool with nothing to lose.  I call him a proud representative of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.

Blackbloc, Berlusconi *does* do racial pogroms—against gypsies.

Well okay then. Full blown fascist it is.

And I think the proper term is ‘Roma’, IIRC.

Know what?  I’ve read through hundreds of comments in this thread now, some by people who are snotty and sarcastic and not worth the time to respond (life’s too short to discuss serious issues with infants like Ben D.), and the bottom line is that the people who think we should still go out and vote for Democrats take that position because they think the Democrats are better than the Republicans.  That is the only argument they have.

The Democrats still don’t represent me.  They still haven’t done any better than the Republicans at governing.  They are still just as much committed to letting corporations run the country and still just a pretense of protecting Americans or serving Americans.  Fuck ‘em.  I’m staying home on election day.  We have the country we deserve, I suppose.

Well, yeah, that’s kind of what they’re going to do.  The Democratic party apparatus is going to funnel the most money and resources into the incumbent with a track record of winning elections.  Anyone who hopes to challenge an incumbent in a primary has to be prepared to do so without party backing.

Opopanax,
The party supported Leiberman, the incumbant, in the primary; he LOST to an upstart for the spot.  The Party continued to back their buddy, the INDPENDENT candidate, not their own Democtratic candidate, for the general.  If I hadn’t already stopped giving them my money and changed to unenrolled, that would have been the last straw.  Instead, it made me disbelieve anything they promise.  Individual politicians, I look at what they say and do, the Party can go hang.

The Party continued to back their buddy, the INDPENDENT candidate, not their own Democtratic candidate, for the general.

I’ll repeat that one of my coworkers is extremely active with the Connecticut Democratic party.  I can always shoot him an email and ask what really happened there.  He was a hardcore Lamont supporter, too, so I’m sure he’ll have a lot to say about it.

Considering his stance at the time, and the fact that 3 years later he’s still heavily involved with the same state political party apparatus that supposedly flushed his candidate down the toilet (and, yeah, he considers himself a progressive), I would be pretty surprised to find out from him that the Democratic party specifically declined to support their own candidate in a general election in a meaningful way. 

Though, sure, there were probably all sorts of conflicts of interests and misplaced loyalties and the like - there always will be when you’re dealing with situations where one candidate has a long history of holding a certain extremely powerful position.  This is yet another reason it’s so hard to make any real change in American politics at the national level.

It’s hardly a grand scandal deserving of our outrage several electoral cycles later, however.

the bottom line is that the people who think we should still go out and vote for Democrats take that position because they think the Democrats are better than the Republicans.  That is the only argument they have.

1.  Vote for whomever you like.  Or, hell, stay home for all I care.  There’s probably a really great episode of How I Met Your Mother on that night.  But if you don’t participate in the American political system, you have no say in who is running the country.

2.  Democrats are, by and large, better than Republicans.  And since there are very few legitimate third party options, I have to say I’d rather see Democrats running the country.  Which is why I vote for them.  The day it really actually seriously seems like the Democrats are doing just as bad a job as the Republicans are, I might stop voting for them.  But the Bush administration is a pretty easy act to follow in that regard.

3.  Again, if you hate your electoral options, put your money where your mouth is.  If you’re that dissatisfied, you should become MORE involved, not take your ball and go home.  Work to help a third party of your choice become a viable option.  Work to get more liberal Democrats into office (or, heck, even into the inner circles of the party).  Hold the Blue Dogs in your area responsible.

They still haven’t done any better than the Republicans at governing.

I’m going to assume by this statement that either:

A.  You are a teenager who doesn’t actually remember a time before the Bush administration,

B.  You have spent your entire life ignorant of American politics and only just this year decided to get on the BOO OBAMA bandwagon, probably because he’s black,

C.  You’re not an American (or at least weren’t living in the US during the last 8-9 years) and are also particularly ignorant of world affairs,

or

D.  You’re an agent provocateur and/or troll from the Republican side.

Because it’s really impossible to remember the Clinton administration, and then remember how the 2000 election went down, and then remember the Bush administration, and additionally remember who the candidates and their running mates were in the 2008 election, and actually come away with the idea that the Republicans and the Democrats are equivalent and it makes absolutely no difference at all who one votes for or if one votes at all. 

I mean, I’m a radical and will happily admit that both parties are corporate controlled, that the Democrats are really only a center-right party, and that even their most vague “liberal” impulses are kept in check by the way politics works in America.  But I’d still rather have the defanged moderates at the helm while I sit here and read my Bakunin, Illich, and Chomsky. 

If nothing at all, having a Democratic president this year has probably saved countless Iranian lives.  And I like Iranians and think they should get to live another year, at least.

Because it’s really impossible to remember the Clinton administration, and then remember how the 2000 election went down, and then remember the Bush administration, and additionally remember who the candidates and their running mates were in the 2008 election, and actually come away with the idea that the Republicans and the Democrats are equivalent and it makes absolutely no difference at all who one votes for or if one votes at all.

Bloodbaths in Iraq, Kosovo, Sudan. Welfare reform. NAFTA. DADT.

Some of us on the Left DO still remember the Clinton years.

Basically it seems the pro-Democratic side’s argument is “We’re still imperialists, but we’re competent managers.” Maybe some of us who aren’t Americans aren’t feeling too bad about mismanagement causing the crumbling of Empire.

My followup gotten eaten, Opoponax.
The local Party was fine.  The friends of Lieberman, who happened to be senior members of the PARTY (nationally) lamented how sad it would be to lose a great statesman like Lieberman and tiptoed around anything that might offend him.

The Democrats still don’t represent me.  They still haven’t done any better than the Republicans at governing.  They are still just as much committed to letting corporations run the country and still just a pretense of protecting Americans or serving Americans.  Fuck ‘em.  I’m staying home on election day.  We have the country we deserve, I suppose.

Progression through regression (“let the Republicans take over, then things will get bad enough that people will vote progressive”) is a theoretically viable course, if you’re willing to endure the pain of the regression phase.  The problem is that people get hurt during the regressive phase.  If we can fix the Democratic Party and get it to be progressive, we might be able to get the progressivism without the regressive pain.

You are basically arguing that the Democratic Party is unfixable.  It’s not yet time to throw in the towel, I think there’s still a chance we can make it more representative and progressive.  Certainly it isn’t right now.  It will take time.

shah8, where am I wrong?

Economic liberals today stress the importance of a free market and free trade, and seek to limit government intervention in both the domestic economy and foreign trade. Social liberal movements often agree in principle with the idea of free trade, but maintain some skepticism, seeing unrestricted trade as leading to the growth of multi-national corporations and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few.

I believe that’s almost verbatim what I said.  Blackbloc is saying that Social Liberals (actually, all Liberals) are all about unrestricted free trade, and I’m saying no they’re not.

Bloodbaths in Iraq, Kosovo, Sudan. Welfare reform. NAFTA. DADT.

Some of us on the Left DO still remember the Clinton years.

I’m not saying the Clinton years were awesome. 

I’m just saying that they were better than the Bush years. 

I’m aware that, on paper, in a history book, in the grand scheme, there’s not really a whole whole lot of difference.  But history books tend to leave out the part about how your cousins couldn’t go to school for a year because New Orleans was left to rot off the map. 

If given the choice between disaster and “enh, well, this pretty much sucks but at least it’s not an all-out disaster”, I’ll pick the latter in the voting booth.

And what exactly do you think happens to the black vote that November when a white Democrat primaries out the very first African-American president in history ?

They vote for the white Democrat, as they have done overwhelmingly throughout recent history, because the white Democrat is much more likely to work in their interests than the batshit insane white Republican.

What do you think happens?  They all stay home and pout?

Vote for whomever you like.  Or, hell, stay home for all I care.  There’s probably a really great episode of How I Met Your Mother on that night.

and then

A.  You are a teenager who doesn’t actually remember a time before the Bush administration,

D.  You’re an agent provocateur and/or troll from the Republican side.

As I said, life’s too short to waste it arguing with sarcastic, snotty infants who are so desperately trying to show off how clever they are.

However, liberalrob is not one of them and had something worthwhile to say.  To that I can respond.

You are basically arguing that the Democratic Party is unfixable. wrote liberalrob.  Yes, pretty much I am.  I would say, further, that short of something very wrenching on the order of revolution, the political system is irreparable.  It is bought and paid for and I don’t have the money to repair that.  In fact, the whole lot of us do not have that kind of money when the top 1% has a greater financial wealth than the bottom 95%.  The bottom 95% was forced to pay off the debts and failures of the banking industry.  Imagine that.  The force of the federal government was used to extract money from us (well, borrow, truth be told, but the bottom 95% is going to pay the majority of that debt back) in order to repair the bottom lines of the wealthiest Americans because they were “too big to fail”.  You speak of the pain of regression, but the recent financial crisis actually represented an opportunity to fix the system, to some degree, by going through exactly that sort of pain, and we didn’t because it would have really hurt rich people.  If it really hurts everyone but the rich, we are allowed to experience that pain, hence the massive number of foreclosures, about which Congress has done little to nothing.  Hence the bankruptcy bill, passed with great support from the current vice president who was, then, the senator from the state of MBNA.  Did you see all those Democrats voting against the Authorization of the Use of Force in Iraq Act in October of 2002 (my memory may be a little fuzzy on the precise details of the name of the bill)?  Did you see that one get filibustered in the Senate?  The Democrats had at least 41 senators at the time, and as we all know, the Senate cannot pass anything without at least 60 senators from one party or the other.  So why was invading Iraq so popular?  Because there were no Iraqi oil contracts with US or British firms, and the wealthy wouldn’t stand for that.

liberalrob, I made a promise to my wife some years ago that I would never vote for a Republican again for as long as I lived, a promise which I have lived up to.  I make another promise here: if meaningful health care reform is not passed during the next six months, I will never vote for another Democrat either.  If Obama signs the current bill and there is no public option, I won’t vote for him even if he switches to an independent party.

“I don’t know if there needs to be a superpower, but there’s definitely a middle ground that says that it’s better to be a superpower that’s got its shit together and is all about funding some microlending than to be a superpower that, say, tortures people and supports third-world dictators.”

You confused me there.  Which one was the US and which one was China?  That’s a serious question.

“basic labor protections and freedom of speech and movement aren’t that important”

Are you sure you’re talking about the US?  The country where the air traffic controllers were fired en masse?  The one where people were arrested for wearing a T-shirt to a Bush rally that said something negative about Bush?  The one where the Harlan County strikes were just 37 years ago (that’s not very long ago, and decades after the labor movement supposedly was so successful).  The country where unions are disappearing, wages are stagnant for the middle class, and the wealthy are just getting richer and richer?  The country where the people have been cowed by the exporting jobs, so you hear, “I’m just happy to be working” over and over?

I accept the premise that China is more oppressive than the US, but this isn’t some joyland of ponies and gladsome days for all.  Personally, I loved France.  And the Chinese get health care and jobs.  Here, try this link:
http://watchingamerica.com/News/38996/poor-america/

Just something to think about.

Personally, I loved France.

Was that while they were screwing over Algeria or now that they’re screwing over their suburbs?

Canada helped out DuVallier and the elite’s opposition to Aristide in Haiti. We’re currently screwing over Afghanistan. We’re also the second largest armament producer (you have one guess to find out which country is first). Good guys we ain’t. The best thing you can say about us is that you can name *ONE* general who disobeyed his own Canadian government to attempt a desperate act to stop the Rwandan genocide (the fact that this is the best any Western country did is shameful beyond belief).

The “Cleavon Little Strategy”? What does that mean, exactly? I mean, I’m black, I’ve been black for what is getting to be quite a while, and I didn’t know that black people were all corporate neoliberals.

The “Cleavon Little Strategy”

I think you’re in the wrong thread, but where I’ve heard that term used is the President telling all the Dem Senators that they need to get behind him or he’s going to be damaged politically, and thus not able to help them.  It’s from Blazing Saddles, if you don’t get the reference.

Also “Sir Charles” uses it as a metaphor for Rahm Emanuel telling “progressive bloggers” to “grow the fuck up” and stop badmouthing the President, because of all the good things he would be able to do in the future if they would just STFU and support him.  We’re not buying it.  We’ll support the President when he does good things and badmouth him when he does bad things, because we don’t want him to be doing the bad things.

Okay, liberalrob, I don’t have much respect for you, and I suppose that shows, but I’m going to answer that last question.

I made the link to wiki so you could look at the etymyology of the term *liberal*.  “Social Liberalism” is mostly a case of word rot and fairly unique to US political and economi discourse.  Dollars to donuts, pedals to the metal, liberalism /= socialism.  They aren’t even analogues of each other and when used together, it’s generally meant as a temperer of one or the other term.

Moreover, economic liberalism ==political liberalism.  They are the same Protestant ideology of work and personal agency.  When it got started, it was fairly progressive for its time—and we have tended to carry on the progressive implications of the term.  That implication would be misleading if you were to take the US outlook on “liberalism” to other anglophone countries.  We think of liberalism the way we do because of the vast size of the country and resulting powerful xenophobic (sometimes populist, sometimes not so) agencies that contrast with an international class with geopolitical ideas in a way that isn’t really true of Canada or Australia.

I care about this sort of thing because of people like John Emerson who play games with terms, like populist, such that it means what he wants it to mean and imbue his rhetoric with a greater meaning.  BlackBloc is absolutely correct in his use of the term, and in this context, the layer of genuine meaning (good and bad) is increasing in importance as time goes on.  Social liberalism doesn’t really mean a social variant of liberalism.  It’s just a cover term for the proper term, which is socialism because the original is demonized in the US.

“Was that while they were screwing over Algeria or now that they’re screwing over their suburbs?”

Um, no, it was when my wife and I took our dream vacation and had five wonderful days in Provence and then four wonderful days in Paris.  We stayed at La Mirande in Avignon for the first part of the trip, got down to Arles and St Remy, bought some Chateauneuf-du-Pape wines. We stayed at the Weston Paris in Paris.  Saw the Louvre and Versailles.  Really had a wonderful time, and everyone was very nice, except for two Americans we met at dinner in St Remy.  They saw my Bluejersey t-shirt and had to strike up a conversation about how much he didn’t like France.  I sort of grunted at him twice and then turned my back on him.  As I have said before, life is too short to waste my attention on unpleasant people.

For instance, I just noticed this from shah8:  “Okay, liberalrob, I don’t have much respect for you, and I suppose that shows, but I’m going to answer that last question. ”  Why would anyone bother to respond to that?

/me shrugs

...because I wanted to get the obvious out of the way and really answer why I think something is so, and why what I think this is important.

Yes, I know.  Egotistical.

Shoot Me.

Um, no, it was when my wife and I took our dream vacation and had five wonderful days in Provence and then four wonderful days in Paris.

Ah. LOL. In the context I thought we were discussing which imperialist countries you loved in the role of Empire.

Also you have Coffee Crisp.

Oh yeah. We rulz!

Well, that was what some people were discussing.  I was talking about France, which I may have mentioned that I loved.  The train trip back to Paris, cracking a bottle of Roget Sabon on the train, eating our paninis and drinking wine from plastic cups as the countryside rolled by after spending five days having the most delicious time in Provence in the spring…that was heaven.

I hear tell the Chinese don’t treat second children well or something like that.  The US has a whole lot of starving people, many of them children, but that’s okay because we’re Number One.  I think I saw a foam finger that said something to that effect, or maybe it referred to some football team.  I’m not sure.  I really couldn’t say which imperialist country is the best or the worst, but I know that China’s culture is far older than ours and I really loved France.  We ate at Gerard Besson when we were in Paris one night.  There was a government minister of something or other at the next table but my French wasn’t good enough for eavesdropping, so I don’t have too much to say about their imperialism.  The Metro was very good, though.  Much better than the NY subway system, though I give good marks to the Washington, DC train system.  All this comparison of imperialist countries in the role of empire strikes me as so much dick waving, to put it bluntly.  Any country that has had enough power to be an oppressor, of others or internally, has been pretty much a right rotten old bastard when it could.  Id’ join a revolution or something, but the new boss always winds up the same as the old boss.

shah8:

because I wanted to get the obvious out of the way and really answer why I think something is so, and why what I think this is important.

We all profit from being clear what we mean in our discussions.  I appreciate the gesture.  No, not that one!

BlackBloc is absolutely correct in his use of the term, and in this context, the layer of genuine meaning (good and bad) is increasing in importance as time goes on.  Social liberalism doesn’t really mean a social variant of liberalism.  It’s just a cover term for the proper term, which is socialism because the original is demonized in the US.

Well, that’s something to consider.  I never equated economic liberalism with political liberalism in that way, and I still don’t.  I’m not an academic and only have a BA in Political Science, so current terminology and usage may have changed since I graduated in 1990 (and I may have misunderstood it at the time, though of course I don’t think so).  “Social/political liberal” and “economic liberal” I always thought to be two completely separate realms of philosophical thought, one relating to relations among people and the other relating to relations among markets and money.  I think erasing that division and declaring economic liberalism the only true liberalism because money is all that matters when describing human relations is a mistake.  It’s also a fundamentally different characterization of “liberal” than what is in current usage in most political discussions.  So if you’re always just assuming that definition of “liberal” when people talk about liberals you’re just setting yourself up to be misunderstood.

At the risk of making this all about me (I’m waiting for Gypsy Lee to weigh in any minute), I personally have a philosophy more aligned with Democratic Socialism.  A professor once assigned readings of Michael Harrington and I was hooked.  So I guess calling me a socialist wouldn’t be completely inaccurate.

I’m saying that your sentiment is functionally an americanism.  This isn’t typically a problem since we all understand what we are talking about to each other.  BlackBloc, if I grasped what he said correctly, is talking about liberalism in a more global sense.  Therefore, to make your response truly intelligible, you need to map onto (or aknowlege the difference) the terms more crisply. 

Sometimes the discussion does have to be more precise.  We do not live in a democratic state, we live in a state that is structured like a Republic, and practically, we live in a state where the representative government is only nominal and the personel is rent-captured.  I mean, Joe Lieberman is still around after losing an election.  How likely is it that anyone can depose, say, Dianne Feinstein?  Not very likely, at least not without extreme effort and lackluster backing from her patrons.  So practically speaking, we do not live in a republic either.  So some situationally appropriate term is needed like plutocracy or kleptocracy or oligarchy might be needed, in the soft form.

However, we *talk* in ascending untruth, going from president is the boss of the free world, all the way to we’re a democracy.  When we have problems, we have to unravel each of those untruths and use the truest words possible in our analysis.

DTG @ 359

OK, good points, I concede

And what exactly do you think happens to the black vote that November when a white Democrat primaries out the very first African-American president in history?

They vote for the white Democrat, as they have done overwhelmingly throughout recent history, because the white Democrat is much more likely to work in their interests than the batshit insane white Republican.

What do you think happens?  They all stay home and pout?

Will they stay home?  Absofuckinglutely.

They always voted for the white Democrat before because there was never a viable black Democrat to vote for.  There will be in 2012.  You don’t get much more viable than being the sitting President of the United States, who historically speaking, gets re-elected way more often than they don’t.

We’ve only had four sitting presidents since 1900 lose re-election after having been elected to one full term beforehand.  And only eight in our entire history.  Incumbent elected presidents have a large historical record of beating non-incumbent challengers in their re-election campaigns.  It’s hard to not win two terms, if you were elected to your first term.

No, they won’t pout.  But they will hold a tremendous sense of resentment towards their own party who gave the boot to the nation’s first African-American president in history, something that’s never been done to ANY white incumbent president in the past 100 years, and only once to any incumbent president in American history.  And the guy who successfully primaried the sitting president turned out to be a man who most presidential scholars argue was the worst president we’ve ever had - James Buchanan.  As in James “worse than Dubya” Buchanan.  He was the dude who almost singlehandedly destroyed the Republic by fanning the flames that led to the Civil War, he was such a craptastically awful president.

What happens if Democrats primary Barack Obama out of the nomination 3 years from now for a white challenger?  A huge chunk of the African-American vote collectively says, “Fuck it, voting is pointless if this is how our supposed party is gonna treat the country’s first black president.  We still ain’t good enough for our white massahs.”

(combined with an assist from John Anderson who took away liberal votes)”

<sheepishly raises hand> Guilty

But I’ll tell you the same think I told my wife when me for Bush because I voted for Nader, CT’s electoral votes were never up for grabs, I could have voted for Bush and not helped Bush win.  The same dynamic held in 1980

As far as the whole “grow up, your throwing your vote away” goes, well, unless you live in a swing state,  most American voters do anyway.  Obama was going to win NY and McCain was going to win Miss.  If John from NY or Jane from Miss voted R, D or the “extremely silly party” they didn’t affect the outcome one bit

I only cast one vote that I’m ashamed of in my entire life – in 88 (86?) I pulled the lever next to “Joseph I Lieberman” instead of the one next to “Lowell P Weicker” and I will not do it again, ever, under any circumstances

I voted for Nader because Gore had Lieberman’s name next to it, so that lever could not be pulled

shah8:

I’m saying that your sentiment is functionally an americanism.  This isn’t typically a problem since we all understand what we are talking about to each other.  BlackBloc, if I grasped what he said correctly, is talking about liberalism in a more global sense.

That’s very possible.  I am not immune to thinking in American terms by default.  Since we are discussing domestic American policy here, though, I think it’s more incumbent on those who “think more globally” to adjust their terminology than for me to adjust mine.  If we were talking about foreign (to America) affairs it would perhaps be different.

I agree with you on the rest of your comment.

DTG:

They always voted for the white Democrat before because there was never a viable black Democrat to vote for.  There will be in 2012.

Not if he loses the primary.

What happens if Democrats primary Barack Obama out of the nomination 3 years from now for a white challenger?

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what actually happens.  I agree that there might be resentment, but I still think they’d vote for the Democrat.  Unless yet another option presents itself…maybe 2012 is finally the year we get a viable 3rd party.

Think of it, a coalition of sane Republicans and disillusioned Progressive Democrats.  The “left wings” of both parties joining together.

”Think of it, a coalition of sane Republicans ...”

What? All 3 of them?

Wow.  Now Keith Olbermann is about to do a Special Comment ripping this healthcare bill to shreds as well.  And all of Countdown has been talking about how craptastic this shit sandwich really is.

Howard Dean, Markos Moulitsas, Jane Hamsher, Jerome Armstrong, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Arianna Huffington… they are all saying this thing is a ginormous pile of shit that will wind up being the Democrats biggest nightmare in the next two election cycles.

I’ve heard only a tiny handful of folks from the progressive media come out and say we should actually support this thing as it is currently written… Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, and Matt Yglesias, off the top of my head.

This thing is a steaming turd the more and more I read about it.

It isn’t real reform of the health insurance industry, just a mandate that we all have to buy their shitty product and watch them continue to deny claims wantonly when we actually get sick.  And they rake our money in by the truckload, and have an even bigger pot of gold to fund their lobbyists should we get buyer’s remorse and try to change it after it gets passed.  Sure, they can’t exclude anyone for having a pre-existing condition.  But that doesn’t mean they actually have to pay for treatment for that pre-existing condition.

NBC/WSJ Poll just released:
Better to pass this bill: 41%
Better to pass nothing: 44%

Yup… America would rather have nothing at all than this piece of crap.  This is AHIP’s and PhRMA’s wettest fucking dream.

They always voted for the white Democrat before because there was never a viable black Democrat to vote for.  There will be in 2012.

Not if he loses the primary.

Right.

And I’m sure they’ll just magically forget that WE THREW THE FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN PRESIDENT IN HISTORY UNDER THE FUCKING BUS AFTER ONE FUCKING TERM after just a few months when the general election rolls around.  Yup, they’ll all just rally around their beloved Democratic Party, because surely we’ll throw them some crumbs once we elect the new, better, white Democrat into the presidency.

By the way, where the fuck is this magical candidate who is gonna successfully primary President Obama in three years?

ANSWER - in your “fantasizing about things that have about a 0.000000000000001% chance of actually happening” imagination.  You’ve been talking about primarying Obama in 2012 for more than six months on this blog.  It was a delusional fantasy six months ago before he screwed anything up, and it’s still a delusional fantasy today, despite the fact that he’s screwing healthcare up.

This is a ridiculous debate that I can’t believe I’m still actually having.  Tell you what… I’ll cut off my genitals and shove them up my own ass if Barack Obama isn’t the Democratic Nominee for POTUS in 2012.  That is of course, barring something horrifically awful happening to him between now and then.  And if, Discoball forbid, something awful did happen, we’ve got way bigger problems than quibbling over the stupid 2012 Democratic presidential primaries.

Barack Obama will be re-elected in 2012, or a Republican challenger will be elected in 2012.

The end.

”Howard Dean, Markos Moulitsas, Jane Hamsher, Jerome Armstrong, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Arianna Huffington… they are all saying this thing is a ginormous pile of shit that will wind up being the Democrats biggest nightmare in the next two election cycles. …
NBC/WSJ Poll just released:
Better to pass this bill: 41%
Better to pass nothing: 44% “

Count me with Howard Dean, its telling that after all the town hall screamers, tea baggers, and socialist death panel scares this still had majority support, but a bill that Lieberman is ok with (for now, … maybe) is a net negative
Yet Chris Mathews reads this as “the american people think Obama is moving too far to the left”

Count me with Howard Dean, its telling that after all the town hall screamers, tea baggers, and socialist death panel scares this still had majority support, but a bill that Lieberman is ok with (for now, … maybe) is a net negative
Yet Chris Mathews reads this as “the american people think Obama is moving too far to the left”

What a douchenozzle.

This bill is lot less popular today than it was one week ago… precisely because of anger FROM the left, not because it moved too far to the left.  Liberals are now saying they’d rather pass nothing than pass this.

What a moron.

Oh, and now both Sen. Burris and Sen. Sanders are threatening to join the Republican filibuster, not as a show of unity with them, but as a show of opposition to an ostensibly God-awful shit sandwich of a bill.

I like this.  The lefty Bernie Sanders is now gonna make the Democratic Caucus kiss his ass and throw him some bones like they did with Joementum if they want to move the bill forward.

I don’t care if this liberal obstruction sets us back into the New Year, and Mr. President, with all due respect… get over it.  The only way this bill should ever be enacted into law is if it provides real health care reform.

Yeah, but don’t forget that Mathews was the guy who said that only the far left nuts didn’t like Bush … at the time that Bush slipped below 30%

You know I used to think of Burris as a joke, but if he does this, his stock will go up a lot
And I used to think that Dodd would pull out a victory, but sticking by Joe will kill him

By the way, where the fuck is this magical candidate who is gonna successfully primary President Obama in three years?

I dunno, ask me again in three years, assuming Obama fucks everything up.  If he doesn’t, if somehow things start to work out and he eventually keeps some of his campaign promises to change how Washington works, then he won’t get primaried.

You’ve been talking about primarying Obama in 2012 for more than six months on this blog.

Baloney.  This is the first time I’ve mentioned it, on ANY website, that I remember.  BS flag thrown.

Matthews is indeed a douchnozzle.

I just heard on tv that Reid was asked about punishing Lieberman and he said “I don’t get impatient with anybody”

Why do I get the feeling that Burris and Sanders will get their committee assignments pulled for violating party discipline mighty soon?

“Matthews is indeed a douchnozzle”
Something all people of good will can agree on

I dunno, ask me again in three years, assuming Obama fucks everything up.

You mean this robust primary challenger is gonna emerge in December 2012, a month after the general election has already been held?

I’m sure that’ll work out well.

The Iowa Caucus will be taking place in the first week of January, 2012 - less than 25 months from now.  To be a viable challenger, an opponent would have to announce AT LEAST 6 months before then, in summer 2011 - a year and a half from now.  But given the MASSIVE amount of money that would have to be raised to be able to defeat the incumbent president in a primary (a few hundred million dollars), they would probably have to declare much sooner.  Obama and Clinton both announced their candidacies nearly one year before the primaries began, in January and February 2007 - and everyone already knew that they were going to be running in late 2006.  Fred Thompson was the last major candidate to announce his candidacy in either party, in September 2007 - a decision all pundits agree probably destroyed his chances before the race even started.

A serious primary challenger for Obama would emerge from the shadows LONG before 2012 even gets here - if such a person even exists, we’ll likely know who they are this time next year.

But it’s almost certainly not gonna happen, so whatever.

I just heard on tv that Reid was asked about punishing Lieberman and he said “I don’t get impatient with anybody”

Why do I get the feeling that Burris and Sanders will get their committee assignments pulled for violating party discipline mighty soon?

The more I look at it, the more I see the polls, the more I realize just how truly awful this current bill really is.  This is Obama’s Medicare Part D, if it passes as currently written.

Think about it… at the beginning of 2009, when we first started talking about HCR, the idea of overhauling our whole healthcare system enjoyed widespread popular support.  Virtually all Democrats were on board, a strong majority of centrists were with us, and even a few moderately sane Republicans (citizens, not officeholders) thought it was a good idea.  Fast forward to December and what the Senate has on the table - zero Republican support, even among the sane ones, zero support from moderates, and a huge rift among Democrats.  If the current Senate Bill were placed to a vote by the American public, I have no doubt that it would be overwhelmingly defeated at the polls.  Not because Americans don’t really want rfeform, but because most Americans see this so-called “reform” as being a worse option that leaving things as they are.

How in the fuck did we take something that was once a wildly popular idea - comprehensive healthcare reform - and turn it into such a godawful piece of legislation that it could practically have been written 4 years ago in the middle of the Bush Administration?

Obama’s not only lost virtually all of the moderate support he once had strongly supporting him, he’s starting to see his own base turn on him.  I don’t blame him personally for this lousy HCR bill, but I do blame him for settling for mediocrity and not acting like a real leader in steering the dialogue.  He had the opportunity to draw an absolute line in the sand several months ago - he could have said, “Without a public option, I will not sign this bill, period.”  But he didn’t.  And now he, and we, are all paying the price.  Thank God the presidential election isn’t for another three years, because I’m starting to think that if it were held tomorrow, Obama would be out raising money for a presidential library sooner than he had hoped.  I want him to be a two-term POTUS and think that he can be one… but gaaaah - this isn’t helping his re-election chances even slightly.  It’s making them worse.

  I dunno, ask me again in three years, assuming Obama fucks everything up.

You mean this robust primary challenger is gonna emerge in December 2012, a month after the general election has already been held?

Man, you’re slick.  I really walked into that one.  Let’s dial the Wayback Machine to post #409, Sherman:

By the way, where the fuck is this magical candidate who is gonna successfully primary President Obama in three years?

Boy, is my face red.

Whatev.

Continue living in your fantasy world that says “Let’s mount a magical primary challenge against a sitting president”, even though it’s only been successful once in American history, 150 years ago.  And it resulted in electing the president who basically caused the Civil War.

I’ll continue living in reality, Sherman.