A Landslide will bring it down

Happy Memorial Day everyone! Hope you are having a great day. The weather in Pittsburgh is perfect today. I’m going to do some yard work and painting and head on over to the other side of the river for dinner. Maybe relax in the cool breezes high above the river and watch the lights come on in the valley below. Ahhhh….

In the meantime, Krugman is trying to talk sense to the Bernie supporters. Butcha know, I wish he would just stop. He’s doin’ it worng. Take this bit, for example:

It’s true that her lead isn’t as big as it was before Mr. Trump clinched the G.O.P. nomination, largely because Republicans have consolidated around their presumptive nominee, while many Sanders supporters are still balkingat saying that they’ll vote for her.

But that probably won’t last; many Clinton supporters said similar things about Barack Obama in 2008, but eventually rallied around the nominee. So unless Bernie Sanders refuses to concede and insinuates that the nomination was somehow stolen by the candidate who won more votes, Mrs. Clinton is a clear favorite to win the White House.

Gosh, I know some of us were ‘silly’ for refusing to jump on the Obama bandwagon after the 2008 primary debacle. But Paul should know that I continue to run into die-hard, civil rights loving Democrats who absolutely could not, under any circumstances, vote for Obama in 2008 or 2012. The reaction to being pressured to vote for him is instant nausea, a rise in blood pressure and anger. Why?

It’s because Obama’s campaign made zero attempt to reach out to us. No, it was more like roll over us, back up, roll over us again, stomp on our heads, call us racists, threaten us, make fun of us, call us stupid uneducated losers and the people who were going to deprive women of reproductive choice. All this from the campaign of the guy who couldn’t be bothered to immediately rescind the Bush conscience rule when he took office. Was that so much to ask from the Feminist in Chief? They treated us so tenderly, those Democrats for Obama. Bernie supporters are going to get a lot more consideration from Hillary than we ever got from Obama.

The difference this year is, as Nate Silver writes, Bernie has had an unusual advantage in the nominating process due to open primaries and caucuses. He has been given every opportunity to win. And he simply hasn’t had the numbers. As Silver points out, the proportional distribution of delegates, open primaries and number of caucuses allows Bernie to pile up delegates from voters who are not all Democrats through a process that is pretty undemocratic.

By Silver’s logic, the same could be said of Obama’s win in 2008. He piled up a lot of delegates in caucus states and in the Republican states in the south. He won very, very few of the delegate rich solid blue Democratic states. The way the media portrayed it, you would have thought Obama won the primary nomination in a landslide when in truth, he barely squeaked by in delegates, lost the popular vote and was the recipient of a wholesale defection of superdelegates from Hillary to Obama in May 2008. Hmmm, right about now, eight years ago…

My point is, and I do have one, is that the count isn’t anywhere near being close for Bernie. I can see where his supporters see the same patterns of wins and think they can pull off an Obama. But even Obama couldn’t pull off an Obama without a lot of help (cough, *media*, cough). And that help cooled some Clintonista’s support for Obama- permanently.

In other words, stop trying to help, Paul. The only ones who are going to be able to help Bernie supporters to move on are Hillary, Bernie and the party, who needs to make a unwavering commitment to stand behind its nominee. It would be wrong to keep taking Bernie supporters votes for granted. That’s going to make them balk. Well, at least some of them. Just give them time to adjust to the numbers. This is not 2008. It’s not that close. Not even a little bit.

This part Krugman did get right:

And no, saying that the race is effectively over isn’t somehow aiding a nefarious plot to shut it down by prematurely declaring victory. Nate Silverrecently summed it up: “Clinton ‘strategy’ is to persuade more ‘people’ to ‘vote’ for her, hence producing ‘majority’ of ‘delegates.’” You may think those people chose the wrong candidate, but choose her they did.

She did it the same way she did it in 2008. She relied on the solid Democratic machinery, unions, hard work and by excelling in messaging and preparation over the other candidate. She is a good candidate. She knows how to win elections and has proven to win elections to the senate, twice, and in the 2008 primaries. The left blogosphere guys who are freaking out need to calm their tits already.

Let me make this absolutely clear  about where we stand to those of you Bernie Bros (and right wing trolls) who can’t help throwing out word salad nonsense in our comments sections. The people on this blog are some of the most pragmatic voters you will ever meet. They have a set of standards and they challenge their candidates to meet them. They are enthusiastic about Clinton but they are also not carried away by emotion. You can’t win us over by the breathless panic you feel when the demon, female incubus mind controls us to vote for her. I assure you, we did this all on our own by researching the issues and weighing the pros and cons of both candidates. There was no electronic signal to the chips embedded in our brains.

Your attempts to highjack the nomination away from Hillary a second time and nullify our votes will provoke a very strong reaction in us. You really ought to think long and hard about this. I don’t think it’s something you considered. We are not going to just roll over and take it when we do not see Bernie as coming close to winning.

Also, you won’t find commenters here who use a lot of jargon. That’s because they prefer to do their own thinking and don’t want someone with an agenda substituting shortcuts to the thinking process. Try it sometime. I mean, try to write a comment that doesn’t contain the words authoritarians, DLC, neoliberals or corporatists. I challenge you to use real thoughts and words. I might even let some of you out of the spam filter where no one can currently hear you scream.

Otherwise, you are wasting your time here. This blog was created eight years ago so that Clintonistas could feel safe swimming against the tide and saying what they thought without someone bullying them or forcing  them to shut up. We’d like to keep it that way. That doesn’t mean you aren’t welcome here but you need to realize where we are coming from. The vast majority of Clintonistas are no longer persuadable to abandoning her for another candidate. In all likelihood, most Clinton supporters in the remaining primary states are pretty much the same. We are sticking with her no matter what gets thrown at her.

What is important is whether your candidate is damaging his own reputation and legacy. I’ve noticed in the past couple of days that he’s backing off the scorched earth tactics. Probably because he’s a smart man and he also knows that there’s nothing hinky about this process this year and that he is simply losing in the old fashioned way like other people we liked. You know, like Paul Tsongas and Gary Hart. Ok, maybe some of you are too young to know. For some of us, those were our first crushes too.

We learned to love again.

In the meantime, it’s not over yet but this story has a somewhat predictable ending. You may find out that the nominee is better than you thought. I would only ask that you give her a chance with a more open mind.

What we need is to send a clear signal to the right wing extremism that is giving us Trump so that a landslide can bring him down.

Romancing the PUMAs

Lambert posted about the Democrat’s growing election dilemma yesterday with some speculation from an EJ Dionne article. PUMAs are back, baby!  Oh Yeah!

Or should I say, the stupid racist menopausal uneducated working class sino-peruvian lesbians are back.  It’s very weird how the Democrats manage to mine the data and come up with this constituency over and over again.  It’s a distortion that kinda-sorta proves the point of the Mad Men post I wrote yesterday.  Computers can be extraordinarily useful but they also tend to be levelers.  There are descriptors that the guys (and they are almost always guys) did not collect before they ran their analysis.  Now, they may have enough information to get enough PUMAs to the polls in November but THIS former PUMA, and I suspect many others, will be a much tougher sell.  But first, let’s try to clarify what we mean by Clinton voter and PUMA.

From my own perspective, the acronym PUMA, Party Unity My Ass, was only useful through the 2008 election season.  I was a New Deal Liberal style Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.  Unlike a lot of younger Democrats, I have a completely different and more realistic understanding of what the Clintons were up to back then.  I’m a late baby boomer who didn’t benefit from the earlier baby boomers’ advantages.  I was a working mother back in 1992 and I strongly identified with Hillary Clinton.  I saw “ending welfare as we know it” as a very good thing because the idea was only part of a strategy to introduce more of a European style welfare state with a national health policy, educational training, child care and housing.  It was all part of a package deal.  Then I saw both the Democratic party and the Republican party pick that package to bits.  The Democrats helped deep six the healthcare initiatives and Newt Gingrich’s Contract On America destroyed welfare.  That’s what happened guys.  You might have been studying and partying.  The rest of us were living in a grown up world.  As for NAFTA, I’m sorry, I think it’s a good idea to remove trade barriers between your two closest neighbors.  I had problems with some of the details but in general, these were Republican insertions, not Clinton’s.

We can talk about Glass-Steagel and Robert Rubin if you like.  In retrospect, deregulation of the banks and derivatives, etc, was a pretty bad thing but it was also an unstoppable phenomenon.  Clinton was NOT the driving force behind these initiatives.  From what I can recall, Phil Gramm was the nasty on the TV all the time ramming this crap down our throats.  Go look it up.  To this day, I avoid Texas just so I don’t have to run into that drawl.

Ok, so that’s my background.  You can read my credo in the tabs to find out what I value, and from the site statistics, someone(s) has become very interested in those values of late.

Now, when I say PUMA was only a 2008 thing, that means that to ME, after the election was over, it lost its meaning as a resistance movement.  The Democratic party lost me.  I officially rescinded my membership in the party in 2008 and only re-registered as a Democrat in PA last year when I applied for a new driver’s license here in PA after my move.  In PA, the primaries are closed so voters are forced to choose a party when they register to vote, unlike NJ where the semi-closed primary means you can choose a party on primary election day.  I think anyone who reads my credo will see that I am a liberal New Deal style Democrat but my party affiliation, in spite of my registration, is very tenuous.  In other words, if a third party came around that represented my views, I’d jump in an instant.  Also note that I’m not a fan of the Greens and don’t particularly care for the crunchy type’s irrational condemnation of GMO crops, vaccines, pharmaceuticals, nuclear energy and corporations.  I find some of the left to be as black and white in their thinking as the right and, frankly, I am losing patience debating the “religious” beliefs of both sides.  I’m also not a selfish short sighted Libertarian.  That’s where the rebels without a cause hang out. And you will never catch me voting for Republican ever again.  My one vote for McCain in 2008 was purely a protest vote against the Democratic party because of its unethical treatment of its own party voters in 2008.  It was not an expression of support for the Republican party or its cavalier, cruel, heartless, greedy, narcissistically malignant, lying, deceptive, destructive platform of “ideas”.

It was very upsetting to pull that lever and I will never forgive the Democratic party for pushing me to make that decision for a couple of important reasons.  First, I was deprived of an identity and second, I was deprived of voting for the first African-American for president.  But in my very important opinion, voting for the first ANYTHING was not a sufficient excuse to overlook or condone the party for rigging the primary and compromising what the party stood for. Some Democrats were able to overcome their moral resistance to what the party was asking them to do.  I could not.  That’s what made me a PUMA and also explains why PUMA lost its utility after the election.  I felt that that what was required to fix what was broken was something bigger, more organized and longer lasting than a slogan.  And then real life intervened and I couldn’t devote any time to it.

But PUMA did survive in another form on other blogs.  I can’t endorse these other PUMA blogs.  I have a sense that they were compromised by Tea Party and Republican operatives.  There was an irrational embrace of birtherism and a weird support for Sarah Palin.  This blog struggled with some of those holdouts for awhile until their presence got to be unbearable.  These are the people that I think EJ Dionne is referring to in his post.  What I think they have in common is their extreme anger at what happened to them in 2008.  They were completely ignored by the Democrats who circular filed their votes and topped it off with a smug, “we’re smarter and know what’s best for you, you ignorant working class ‘gits” attitude.

Oh really?  Those PUMAs who are still fuming on the Tea Party friendly blogs may not have Ivy League degrees or know someone who works in a “creative class” field but when it comes right down to it, the election of Barack Obama has done more to solidify the strangle hold of the oligarchs on the American public than any previous president we have ever had.  We have actually devolved as a progressive nation.  I will go so far as to say that Obama’s presidency has sped up that devolution.  You could argue that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have been different but my intuition (which hasn’t failed me yet in this whole mess) tells me that you would be wrong.  In any case, when it comes right down to it, the “creative class” that got fooled into voting for Obama in 2008 and 2012 is no different from the working class voters it dismissed so senselessly. To the oligarchs, you might as well be living on a rice paddy in Bangladesh.  Your ultimate fate is no different than the bitter gun toting church goers in rural Pennsylvania.  You can be economically ruined and made politically impotent just as easily.  That truth is just now dawning on you as you read The Divide and Piketty’s Capital and the latest study that says you don’t have enough money to make a dent in the lobbying shield wall of the 1%.

As for me, I don’t know if I would support Clinton in 2016.  My sense is that so much has happened to fundamentally change the nature of our country in the past 20 years that there would have to be a personality much bigger and more visionary than Clinton’s to drag us back onto the right track.  Could she do it?  Maybe.  But maybe she also recognizes the political landscape that she would be entering.  I saw her evolve during the primary season.  She was forged by fire and was gaining momentum when the party cut her off.  That was a mistake the party made out of fear but it made it prematurely.  By September of 2008, Elmer Fudd could have gotten elected as the first cartoon Democratic president, the situation was that dire.  In a sense, the election of Barack Obama was not a triumph of identity politics as much as it was one of panic and desperation.  But I have no doubt that under Hillary Clinton, there would have been more rehab and less codependence.

Slightly off topic, I find it interesting that so many people on both the right and the left are ramping up their anti-Hillary rhetoric.  Those Democrats who are still on the fence about her should take a moment to think about what’s going on there. Both parties are pawns of the oligarchs right now.  And someone in the Democratic party has pushing hard on the idea that if we just let Obama have his 2 terms, we could have Hillary in 2016.  That push acknowledges two things: 1.)People want someone to do something already and they’ve decided that the most likely person is Hillary and 2.) if you treat voters like children and make them delay their gratification, you can make them focus on some future uncertain reward while taking their minds off what they can do to help their own desperate situations in the present.  Whatever the left is currently spewing about how bad the Clintons are bears a striking similarity to the right’s mindless invectives against them to me.  And that suggests that there are some very powerful people who do not want Hillary to be the next president.  If she were already in the pockets of these very powerful people, you would expect less vilification, wouldn’t you?  Think about it.

In the meantime, I will leave you with this link to Phillip Zimbardo’s steps for overcoming situational influence.  The Democratic activist base should have read this before they flattered themselves that they were not at all like Kansas and couldn’t be fooled into doing anything against their own best interests.  I only recently discovered these steps but I think I’ve been wise to them since YearlyKos 2007 in Chicago when something just didn’t seem right.

As to the Democrats winning the election in 2014 and 2016, I’m almost getting to the point where it doesn’t feel like it will make a difference which party wins in November.  Having the Democrats in charge only slows down the slide to the right.  It doesn’t stop it.  And as destructive as the slide might be, I see very little evidence that the Democrats are motivated to prevent if from happening.  In fact, the dangerous collapse of the Republicans into crazyville only makes it easier for the oligarchs to get just about anything they want from the Democrats with very little effort.  Like I said before, I would gladly jump to a third party that is more responsive to my values.  At this point, appealing to me as a former PUMA is probably a waste of time because I see what I am to the party- a faceless data point projected onto a latent structure.

When the party starts treating me like an enfranchised citizen again, then we’ll talk.

 

Topics off limits at TC for 2012, topic 1: Hillary 2016

Why wait?

I’ve brought this up before but those of you who keep hoping for Hillary in 2016 and are clinging to any assurance from the party leadership and media that she will run, do not yet understand just how powerful you are.  Otherwise the party leadership and media wouldn’t keep floating this nonsense.  In fact, it is precisely because you former Clintonistas are so powerful that the idea keeps surfacing the minute the economic news turns sour.

But I don’t want to talk about it here.  Nope.  As far as I’m concerned, the Hillary 2016 meme is a Democratic party talking point and you should know by now that I don’t repeat party talking points here, no matter which party.  The Confluence is not a platform for spreading party propaganda or memes or psychological manipulation.  In the case of Hillary 2016 or it’s partner, Hillary as VP, this is exactly what I’m talking about.  Let me explain how this works:

1.) This is 2012.  What happens in 2012 is important.  The election of 2012 will determine what will happen in the next 4 years.  The “presumptive” nominees in this race are Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.  Please note the use of the word “presumptive”.  They are not formal nominees and their names are not yet on the ballot in November.  Let’s dispense with the idea that the party primaries mean anything to the Democratic party.  That myth was exposed in 2008.  They’ll nominate whoever brings in the most money and/or who they think can win.  Obama was a historic candidate in 2008.  They could very easily replace him with another historic candidate at the convention. We already know that the party and the Obama White House floated the idea of replacing Jon Corzine with Richard Codey after Corzine won his party’s nomination in NJ in 2009 so, let’s not pretend that there is an obstacle to replacing candidates.

2.) There is a lot of discontent in the Democratic party.  The former Clintonistas have a very good reason for being mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore.  Obama was forced down our gullets against our strenuous and legitimate objections.  Whenever there are headlines in the news about how the unemployment rate stays stubbornly pegged at 8.3% or that the economy is about to take another downturn, the party starts to worry.  It can throw all kinds of crap at Romney but none of it will stick if pressure on the middle class continues unabated.  If Obama can’t be shown to have effected positive improvement by November, the Republicans will be more motivated to go to the polls to oust him than the Democrats and their independent supporters will to be to make sure he stays.

3.) So, whenever the headlines are bad for Obama, the Hillary 2016 meme gets floated.  I saw it make an appearance recently, along with Ed Klein calling Hillary fat.   Here’s what this former editor of the NYTimes said about Hillary.  Um, he calls her fat and tired looking:

At this very moment that we’re speaking right now, Brian, [they] are already thinking seriously about running in 2016. She’ll be 69 years old. And as you know — and I don’t want to sound anti-feminist here — but she’s not looking good these days. She’s looking overweight and she’s looking very tired. […]

I think she’s going to take some time off, get back into shape. And if her health holds out — that’s a big if, of course — if her health holds out, there’s no question in my mind she and Bill — two for the price of one — will run in 2016.

Yeah, that’ll work.  Like half of the population will be delighted by some political jerk calling the most admired woman in America fat.  By the way, why is this former NYTimes editor so dead set against a Hillary Clinton presidency? He has to be because I can’t imagine him thinking she’s svelte and youthful in 2016, can you?  Whatever.  The reason it gets floated is because the party wants you to postpone your demand for Hillary until 2016 and make you accept the presumptive nominee for 2012, Barack Obama.

Here’s why you are powerful:

The party has to keep doing this because they think you will defect.  Don’t be surprised if the Hillary VP thing comes up between now and the convention too.  But that’s not going to happen either.  Hillary is not a stupid woman.  If you put her in as VP you relegate her to political oblivion and she knows it.  She will be powerless.  And you can bet that the minute that such a thing happened, the Republicans would be all over it, pointing out that the Democrats took their strongest politician and made her a nobody just to get the Clintonistas onboard.  They’d make a field day of the fact that nothing will change policy wise.  Obama and his banker loving dudes will still be in charge.  They will laugh and say how we’ve been had. Not only that but they will have buried the most powerful feminist in America.  How will that make you feel?  It will suck in a monumental way.  In fact, it will underline the fact that the Democratic party thinks that it’s best woman politician is only good as a second fiddle to a man.  Would you really vote for that hoping that Obama met with some crisis that would force him to spend more time with his family?  No, of course you wouldn’t.  Hillary VP is not going to happen.

But if you accept the Hillary 2016 meme, you allow the Democratic party to treat you like children.  When Pelosi or Hoyer or someone else says wait until 2016, that’s the equivalent of mommy saying, “we’ll see”.  You know how it goes, you want something so badly and you keep asking for it because you know it will change your life and the parental unit keeps putting you off with “We’ll see”?  You know damn well they’re just stalling, hoping you’ll forget all about it.

And the reason they have confidence that Hillary will never run in 2016 is because she won’t be a viable candidate in 2016.  Forget her age.  Ronald Reagan was 69 when he ran for president.  If people really want her in 2016, her age wouldn’t be a problem.  The problem is that by that time, there will be other candidates who might be more viable and in the public eye, like Kirsten Gillibrand or Elizabeth Warren.  But this version of the Democratic party will never let them run.  This version of the party is definitely not into representing the people.  It’s into the moneyed class.  So, by 2016, the destruction that Obama has wrecked on the party and the way he will have fundamentally changed it, will be too far gone to turn around with a Hillary Clinton.

Not only that, the Clinton legacy will be 16 years behind us.  That’s 5 presidential elections.  Now, I am not a political scientists but I’m going to bet that there is some kind of metric that indicates the dissipation of the effect of a presidential term over time and 5 election cycles seems like a pretty long time to me.  Someone with better poli sci creds should jump in here.  In other words, you will be so consumed with the present that the legacy of a president 16 years ago is going to look unfamiliar to you, or to a lot of newer, younger voters.  I’m willing to bet that the metric, if it exists, will need to be updated to account for the effect of technology.  Since Bill Clinton took office, the internet has had an astounding effect on the culture at large and has sped up the way we operate.  Our culture is undergoing a period of rapid change even though we don’t realize the full effects yet.  Our generation will be the most influenced and influential of any since the invention of writing.  And in this period of rapid change, all bets are off but you can be sure that the political landscape will look completely different 4 years from now.

The question is, will we evolve in a positive or negative direction?  Towards more or less authoritarianism?  Perhaps the recent push towards more authoritarianism is a consequence of this rapid change.  From where I sit, it looks like the authoritarians have taken advantage of the recent chaos causing technological effects by putting in their candidate to make sure they will be in charge from this point forward.  This is what you are voting for when you vote for either Obama or Romney.  The authoritarians have the most to lose if any other candidate gets to be too popular, especially one that is not beholden to them.  So, it is to their advantage to make sure that Hillary 2016 is floated out there for the Clintonistas to cling to so that they will abandon that hope in 2012.

As Rocky Anderson said in his video, this election is about morality.  If you were paying attention to the Occupy movement, ie actually going down to their sites and talking to them or marching with them, you would have known this.  Who does this country belong to?  Who has a say in how it is run and how we spend our money?  Who is accountable to whom?  What do we value?  Where is our moral compass pointing?  Do the richest and most powerful get the final say or do the hard working people who live here?  Where is our compassion?  Are some people more equal than others?  Are some children more equal than others?  And do the American people have the right to speak on these issues and petition the government about its grievances?  This is what Occupy was about. If share these concerns and you are not one of the 1%, then you Occupy. You are an American citizen with a vote, your life is valuable, you have dignity and you have a right to be heard.  If you didn’t bother to go to a site, if you instead listened to the cable news programs who you know lied to you in 2008, do me the favor and shut up about what you *think* Occupy was all about.  You would only know if you had first hand experience.  You should know better when if comes to listening to anything the media says.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah, when you former Clintonistas see the “Hillary 2016” meme in the papers, you should be secretly delighted.  Yep, that’s the moment when you should get on your blogs and beat relentlessly on the Hillary 2012 theme.  Replace the top of the ticket altogether.  Urge the party to go bold.  Say that you KNOW that if they don’t even consider it, they aren’t really serious about making the country work for real, working people.  Hillary 2016 means that working people will stay invisible to the party power brokers.  Hillary 2012 means the party knows it is beholden to the voters.  At the very least, you will be exposing the hypocrisy.

Which message would you prefer to project if you were the Democrats?

You can only make this power work for you if you Don’t Settle.  Don’t give into Hillary 2016.  Tell your elected representatives that you aren’t buying that bullshit.  What do they take you for?  Someone who just fell off the turnip truck?  Tell them you’re going to start looking for a party that will treat you with more respect and like a real thinking person with a brain, not a slow child that can be easily fooled or distracted.  Same with the Hillary VP rumor.  Please, not that shit again.  Turn your back on that.  Tell them you want the truth in all of it’s ugliness- the party wants to stick you with Barack Obama for four more dismal years and you will get nothing from it.  Nothing.  The party intends to do nothing for you except cooperate in giving you the biggest haircut on Social Security that you PREPAID because it can’t afford to force a well deserved haircut on its donors in the banking industry.

You’re not stupid.  You’ve got power.  Tell them to STFU about Hillary 2016, get to work on saving the middle class or face the consequences in November.  If they really think that Hillary is worth having for president- some day- then why wait? There is no time like the present to make that happen. And if they don’t do it, then they’re not really serious.  You have options and you don’t have to put up with the condescending attitude anymore.  Tell them who the real parents are and where they’re going to end up if they continue to misbehave.

In the meantime, I am going to moderate any commenter who promotes the meme Hillary 2016. You know who you are. I don’t care if you’re thinking out loud.  You don’t even have to be a paid troll. Your out loud thoughts look an awful lot like some kind of persuasive argument for those Clintonistas who may be debating whether to stay or leave for other candidates.  I repeat, this blog is not a platform for party propaganda whether it is intentional or not.

**************************

And here’s that blast from the past for the Clintonistas who may have forgotten just what and who we are dealing with.  The people who are working on Obama’s behalf gave us this:

Choices, clarified

The Hillary2012 robocalls have spread to swing states and while we’re not really sure who is doing them or for what purpose (it could be that they just want Hillary in 2012), there’s something that the Obama contingent should keep in mind.

We have heard over and over again that Hillary has no plans to run in 2012.  Plans can change but we’ll take her at her word, for now.  However, just because the person most likely to succeed in capturing the White House for the Democrats is staying out of the race (for now), that doesn’t automatically mean that we have to vote for Obama.  All it means is that the Democratic party persists in offering me a lousy choice of a presidential candidate who does not meet my standards of executive leadership, performance or ethics.  That’s all it means.  My position has not changed.

If Bill Clinton wants to lower his standards and vote for Obama, that’s his choice.  He is a loyal Democrat and his opinion is still of value to the Democratic party.  But I don’t have to follow his advice.  My vote is my own and I am no longer a member of the Democratic party.  After 2008, I feel no sense of obligation or loyalty to the party.  The party hasn’t scored any points with me and I’m fairly moderate in my liberalism.  I’m not a tree hugging, vegan, anti-nuke, anti-genetically modified corn crunchy granola type.  That doesn’t make me an independent by choice.  I only mean to say that I don’t accept a lot of left dogma as part of my tribal identity.  I find Chris Hedges types to be pompous, pseudosincere, impractical bores who I would not want to chat with at a cocktail party.  I might want to sit in a dark corner and watch him do his thing but I’m not going to submissively approach and touch him like he’s the alpha male chimp of my unit group.

Here’s the bottom line, if Hillary jumps in the race, I’ll vote for her.  I’m not so pure that I blame her single vote out of 99 for the Iraq War Resolution (because that would be stupid, illogical and hypocritical especially if I had planned to vote for John Edwards in 2008 before he dropped out).  I also don’t blame her for the fact that the wars didn’t end on January 20, 2009.  That was never going to happen even if Gandhi had been elected because the Bushies intentionally destabilized central asia before they left.  I also don’t think she is the only person in the world who has accepted money from lobbyists but I do give her credit for not allowing that money to cloud her judgment or mess with her principles.  So, yeah, I’d vote for her if she got in.

I’d also vote for other Democrats should they decide to run.  Like Sherrod Brown.  Or Ed Rendell.  Or even Al Franken, though most Americans don’t understand how serious and committed he is and he’d have an uphill battle there.  But still, if he decided to run, I’d vote for him and campaign for him and walk the streets for him- gladly and with much enthusiasm.  Same with Bernie Sanders.

But if the DNC thinks I will just fall into line behind Obama after his poor performance, then they can kiss my ass.  Putting him out there for a second run is easy for the Democrats but I’m not accepting easy from them this year and neither should anyone else. If Obama had run for president on some obscure party ticket and ended up on the ballot in 2008, no one would have voted for him. Go on and do a thought experiment on this.  Imagine Barack Obama running for president as the nominee of the Green party in 2008.  The Green party has had African American candidates before.  Some of them might have been pretty good candidates.  But have you ever seen the media go nuts over a Green party candidate?  Of course not.  If Hillary ran for the Green party in 2008, that would be news. Obama running as a Green in 2008?  Snore. The Green party hasn’t reached the threshold of electoral numbers and victories that would give it the proper gravitas.  Neither has any other obscure established party.   It was only the fact that Obama scored the Democratic party nomination that made him seem like a legitimate and serious candidate.

Come to think of it, the “third party test” will now become a part of my criteria for evaluating major party candidates for office during the primaries and general election.  I will now ask myself, if this candidate was running for office on an obscure third party instead of a major party, would I still vote for him or her based on their level of experience, positions on issues and voting record?  If more people had asked themselves this question back in 2008, Hillary would be president right now.  For incumbents, I might apply the Jack Welch “rank and yank” criteria.  On a scale of 1-5, with 5 being best, how does this incumbent stack up against the past 5 presidents?  If he scores a 2 or below, he’s outta there.

So, next year, I expect Democrats to raise their standards and work hard to win me back.  Obama ain’t going to cut it for me because I already know that commodity and his attitude towards hard working middle class STEM workers (he believes the garbage that the executives tell him) and women (he doesn’t seem to think they have quite the moral authority of men) and I’m just not interested.  But if they offer me someone else, I might take a good hard look.  Otherwise, I might as well take a chance on some third party candidate.  Those third parties can’t be offering anything *worse* than Barack Obama or the Republican nominee, and there’s a good possibility that they have someone who is better, or at least able to do his or her own thinking.

I expect the Democrats will come back screaming about how we’re slitting our own throats but what they are really objecting to is the loss of their own power.  From where I sit, I don’t benefit by giving my vote to either one of the current major parties at the presidential level.  I *might* benefit if I give my vote to another party.  I have nothing to lose, but possibly everything to gain.  I feel no sense of obligation to help Democrats retain power if they have no sense of obligation to help me keep my job, health care or my house.  This is not a game.

So, while I don’t know what the robocallers are up to, I encourage Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats to make a little mischief.  Color outside the lines.  Push the envelope.  Subvert the dominant paradigm.  If you don’t want Obama either, do us all a favor and pick someone who isn’t on the ballot yet.  Occupy the primaries.  You know what to do.

Dear Democratic Party

Will you please get your shit together?

The NYTimes is reporting today that some of you want to break up Obama’s (less than adequate but at least it’s something) Jobs Bill into tiny pieces that you think *might* pass.  Do any of you remember your party’s history?  This is a Lesser Depression.  Maybe we’re not all starving in some turf home in Dust Bowl Oklahoma but this is very serious.  It calls for a comprehensive plan and courage to see it through, even if the morons on TV convince the Republican base that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

I don’t know what you guys are up to but from the outside, it looks like a bunch of chickens who just cut their own heads off.  You guys were once dominant in politics and gave us Medicare and the Peace Corps and Sesame Street.  You looked after the post office (BTW, do you have any idea how expensive it is to send a high school logo sweatshirt and a pound of Skittles to your former French exchange student in Avignon by FedEx?  I sent it USPS for a small fraction of the FedEx quote.  Yeah, put THAT in some campaign ads.)

The optics are not good.  There is no unity.  There doesn’t seem to be a plan.  And your leadership is too busy kneecapping its own players to pay attention to how it’s being rolled.  Amateur hour is over.  We in the rest of the country, particularly the unemployed, do not have the luxury of 14 more months of this incompetence.  Our COBRA payments are going to suck 50% of our unemployment checks and our kids still need to be fed and educated.  And it’s incredibly heartless the way you have overlooked the plight of families who have been broken up by distance or have lost their houses when a wage earner has lost his or her job.

I’m disappointed.  I was hoping you would rally and make this jobs bill greater than the sum of its parts.  Instead, you seem determined to save your own asses first.  We care very much whether a jobs bill passes this year, don’t underestimate its importance, but what we really want to see is some kind of spirited effort on your part to challenge the Republican message machine.  As a commenter on another blog said yesterday, “If I want to vote Republican, I’d rather do it directly”. Your efforts to accommodate the Right Wing Noise Machine is never going to be enough for them.  Know why?  Because you’re Democrats.  No matter how much you come over to their side, they are still going to hate you and take great delight in making your life miserable and your attempts to get things done come to nothing.  They want a one party system and they are perilously close to getting one.

Maybe you guys need therapy.  You’ve been shouldering the guilt so long that you’ve lost perspective.  These problems are not insurmountable.  It will not be a catastrophe if you lose your seat.  What will be catastrophic is if you don’t put your collective heads together and put together a bill to end all bills.  If you’re so convinced you’re going to lose the argument anyway, why not go big?  Add health care provisions to it, reform the patent system in an unexpected way that encourages long term investment to save our jobs, crack down on visas, create a pharmaceutical company to discover therapeutic areas abandoned by the big guys.  Challenge these bastards.  If they tell you government can’t create jobs, give them a “Oh, yeah?  Says who?”.  Stop handing over our social safety net to stop the beatings.  TAKE the beatings and stand up and keep on going.  It matters that a bill pass but not if it’s so watered down that its effects are negligible.  Much more important is that we actually see you fighting for the right things even if you fail.

Don’t let us down.  Turn off the TV monitors.  They’re only going to distract and discourage you.  Besides, it’s not your job to make Fox News happy.  That’s impossible anyway. Your job is to pull the country back up and put it on its feet.  Shut every other distraction out and focus solely on that.

Do it this way:

Thursday: The Ass in the Room

Digby has a new frontpager.  By the way, the Ass in the title doesn’t apply to Digby.  She’s a great writer.  No, really.  And I think her heart is in the right place.  It’s just that she’s a bit, um, chickenshit.  SHE called herself that, not me.

Anyway, what brought about the addition of ThereIsNoSpoon to Hullabaloo?  I don’t know but I have occasionally read her comment threads lately and many of her readers are fed up and ready to throw in the towel on Obama.  Not only that, there seem to be a lot more commenters expressing regret about how they blew off Hillary Clinton for Mr. Schmoozy McMashieniblick.  Well, we can’t have that, can we?  So, ThereIsNoSpoon dons his “Howard Dean Mantle of Imperviousness” and says, “Step aside, Digby, *I’ll* handle this!”.  Either that or someone at Advertising Liberally told her to get her house in order or she was going to get cut off.  (One can not accuse me of having a deficit of imagination.)

So, ThereIsNoSpoon made his debut on Hullabaloo to get those morons back in line and toeing the party line.  And let’s throw in a little learned helplessness in there.  We don’t want them to get ideas.  Take them down memory lane.  Howard Dean!  Howard Dean!  Remember how we all wore orange and sang the Marseilles and vowed to purge Washington of the Bushies?  Were those times great or what?  {{this Clarkie rolls her eyes.  I can’t stand Howard Dean}} ThereIsNoSpoon goes on to say how much he doesn’t want to go over 2008 because it’s so five minutes ago and then he loses me forever:

 For those who may not know, I’m 1st Vice Chair of the Ventura County Democratic Party in California, and a recently elected member of the California Democratic Party Executive Board. To many, that would be considered an asset. To others, it might be a curse, a straitjacket preventing free expression of ideas and forcing a toeing of the “party line.” It shouldn’t bear reminding that it was none other than Howard Dean, no slouch in the progressive movement, who first asked of all of us who were upset with cowardice and corporatism in the Democratic Party not to shun the Party, but to actively get involved with it.The reason for Howard Dean’s call to arms was not so that progressives might be co-opted and sell out, but rather that they might storm the gates and force real changes in the Party. I am not alone in having done this in California: my brother Dante is a vice-chair in the L.A. County Dem Party and a CDP E-Board member; Robert Cruickshank, a superb netroots activist and constant and forceful Obama Administration critic, was a vice-chair in the Monterey Dem Party for a long while before moving to Seattle to work on progressive mayor McGinn’s communications team; Brian Leubitz, owner of progressive California blog Calitics is a CDP Regional Director in the Bay Area. Getting involved in this way has been for all of us not a professional consideration, but an ideological one. The entire purpose of being involved is to force changes in the way the Party thinks and the way it behaves in every aspect: from the values of candidates endorsed, to the nature of field operations, to the aggressiveness of communications, and everything in between. These changes do not happen overnight. Often they take years to gestate. Almost invariably they are met with fierce opposition from the comfortable, institutional powers that be, as well as their ideological allies who prize being “nice” and “reasonable” as a greater good than actually solving the problems that face the country.

If even 1/10 of the progressives writing online would become similarly involved and demand that the institutions of the Democratic Party be accountable to the progressive base and the well-polled progressive preferences of the majority of Americans, it would be a boon to our political system. This is why Howard Dean asked us to do it. Nor for the most part would it hamper our ability to speak openly and honestly about our beliefs. What I say here or elsewhere is not the official position of the Democratic Party at any level, nor should be it construed as such. The onlyconstraint on a Party official’s personal positions is that one grant that, at a fundamental level, voting for Democrats is advantageous over voting for members of other parties. That’s a big one, of course, and a non-starter for many in the progressive movement. Which is fine. Reasonable people who want the same things (single-payer healthcare, an end to pointless foreign wars, a decent safety net, a reduction in income inequality, equal rights for all Americans regardless of race, age, gender, orientation, etc.) will certainly differ on the best tactics we might use to get there.

Oh, brother, where to start? I have nothing against people getting all “Student Body President!” in the party at the local level.  Good for him.  I used to attend those meetings. But let’s talk about the party faithful voters who supported Clinton in 2008, or do those people, more than half the party, still not count like the Obama contingent does?  Did THEY not get involved?   From what I could see, they were plenty involved.  I phone banked and canvassed (a LOT in Pennsylvania) for Clinton.  She had no shortage of volunteers.  The weekend before the primary in NJ in 2008, her office in Trenton was jammed with people.  There was nowhere to sit so I had to sit in a backroom with a campaign finance person who was fielding calls from all over the state of NJ.  I tried not to listen but from what I could tell, Obama’s campaign was employing “walking around money”, a lot of it.  From what I could tell, it was an ungodly amount in the millions and millions of dollars.  The Clinton person was saying that the budget for NJ was exhausted and it couldn’t match Obama’s spending there.  The campaign people would have to make do with what it had.  OMG, Clinton was going to have to rely on the strength of her candidacy and not obscene gobs of cash!  (And it worked.  Well, we can’t have that, right?) I think the campaign was even out of bumper stickers.  My car has a spanish one because the English versions were all gone.  She was very, very popular here.  Hillary Clinton won NJ by 10 points anyway, which just goes to show you that money can’t buy you love.  But Jon Corzine ignored all of that and gave our entire delegation to Obama at the Convention.  No, I won’t get over that-ever.

I went to YearlyKos in 2006 and 2007.  I volunteered for Linda Stender in NJ-07.  The party supported her in 2006, completely abandoned her in 2008 even though she could have won this district with their help.  She lost the 2006 election by something like 4,000 votes, which in NJ is *tiny*.  I mean, REALLY tiny.  She could have been a very successful candidate here.  But she was unabashedly liberal and the party didn’t cotton to liberals in 2008.  Would ThereIsNoSpoon like to hazard a guess why that might be?

I stood there in the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas when Wes Clark jumped up on a table and told everyone that blogging was not enough.  He said that if we wanted to win back Congress in 2006, we would have to get out there and meet people and convince them and work our asses off.  So, I tried that.  And my candidates lost anyway.

And why did they lose?  Well, it wasn’t for lack of effort or popularity or policies.  What I have learned about the latest incarnation of the Democratic Party is that they want you to express your opinion and work for your candidates.  But if your candidate is not the one they selected beforehand, then too bad for you and all of your effort.  ThereIsNoSpoon, the voice of the Democratic Party, lays it out to the readers of Hullabaloo:

For various reasons locked into the nature of our winner-take-all Constitution, we have a two-party system, not a parliamentary one. That is very unlikely to change. Further, putting efforts into third parties to the left of the Democrats has not been shown to pull the party to the left, but rather to the right (outside of small, liberal states like Vermont.) Democrats did not look at the votes for Nader in 2000 and move to Party to the left to win those voters; instead, the Bush Presidency shifted the Democrats farther to the right. Theoretically, one could try to bury the Democratic Party in the same grave as the Whigs and start over anew–but what happens in the meantime during Nihilist Republican rule? Will the country survive? Frankly, there are too many deeply vulnerable people in this country and around the world to take that chance.

Which means that for better or for worse, the Democratic Party is what we have to work with. In the short term, that means that Barack Obama, for better or for worse, is what we have to work with at this time (primarying him being pretty much a fantasy, particularly given his still soaring approval rating among the vast majority of self-described liberals.) It’s not pretty, but it’s reality.

It’s therefore our job as progressives to work both from within the Democratic Party and from outside the Democratic Party to make the changes to it we would like to see, to refashion the Party to fit the ideals that the American people deserve. That requires an aggressive, uncompromising stance.

Ahhh, so what ThereIsNoSpoon is saying is that if you work within and from the outside of the Democratic Party to make the changes you want to see, the party will just ignore you and tell you that your insistence on a primary candidate for Obama is a “fantasy”.  In other words, the Democratic party doesn’t want participants.  It wants children.  It is going to be very parental about this.  You aren’t going to get a Democrat who represents you and that’s final.

And what are the ideals that the American people deserve?  The American people have said, pretty definitively, that saving our jobs is at the top of its priority list.  What has Obama done about that?  Nothing.  The American people have said overwhelmingly that they don’t want anyone messing around with social security or Medicare.  And what has Obama proposed?  He proposes raising the eligibility age on Medicare and reformulating social security payments so as to screw recipients out of a sizeable chunk of benefits that they paid and paid and paid for.  He proposes $4 *trillion* in spending cuts.  He didn’t have to propose these changes.  He *volunteered* them.  The austerity measures were gifted to the Republicans for very little in return.

ThereIsNoSpoon goes on to the proven scare tactics to force people back into the fold.  If you don’t vote for Democrats, Michelle Bachmann will win and then what will happen?!?  Jeez, I dunno, how much worse can it get?  I mean really, would crucifixion be that bad after we’ve been drawn and quartered?

Centurion: You know the penalty laid down by Roman law for harboring a known criminal?
Matthias: No.
Centurion: Crucifixion!
Matthias: Oh.
Centurion: Nasty, eh?
Matthias: Could be worse.
Centurion: What you mean “Could be worse”?
Matthias: Well, you could be stabbed.
Centurion: Stabbed? Takes a second. Crucifixion lasts hours. It’s a slow, horrible death.
Matthias: Well, at least it gets you out in the open air.

I’m firmly of the belief that “Friends don’t let friends vote Republican” but by the time Michelle gets the nomination, the damage will be done, by a DEMOCRAT.  In that eventuality, I might just vote for Michelle.  She and I share almost nothing in common but our XX chromosomes but heck, if the entire Democratic party can use race as a reason for slipping a stealth candidate into the White House in 2008 (no, don’t even try to deny it.  We have the spam), why can’t I vote for Michelle to get MY underrepresented cohort to the pinacle of power?  If Barack Obama doesn’t start representing American New Deal Ideals during The Little Depression, why should I vote for him?  It can’t get any worse with Michelle and if the Democrats get a clue and win back Congress, they might have to play defense for awhile.

I’ve noticed that the “let’s all jump on Michelle” game is getting cranked up by both parties.  Migraines? Oh, please.  Why don’t we just come out and accuse her of letting her raging hormones disqualify her from keeping a cool head during a rough week in the situation room.  I’m already pre-disgusted by this crap.  The Democrats have already lost their credibility with women, why make it worse for the voters who have to continue living as women?

It’s all in vain, Dems.  You will not get me back until you give me a real choice.  I won’t play this game where you pretend to listen to my concerns and still serve me the same breakfast cereal day after day anyway.  I’ve made my feelings known to every campaign financing org that the Democrats have.  Lately, I’ve even heard from the Democratic Party of New Jersey (that’s a first) who solicited me for funds.  This is my message: “I am not contributing to your organization because of the disgraceful way the party treated voters of Hillary Clinton in 2008.  Barack Obama turned out to be a weak president and I do not approve of his policies or performance.  I want a primary challenger for Obama.  Do not bother me again until you get a clue.”

So far, they haven’t gotten a clue.  I am unperturbed by the specter of what will happen next year.  I have my own personal problems, ie joblessness and a fascinating but difficult gifted teen to raise, to worry about what some clueless and disconnected Democrats are going to do.  My vote is my own and next year, I will bestow it upon who I choose and who I think can shake things up the most.  If the Democrats are starting to worry, then good!  But I suggest they stop trying to make it sound like they are concerned with the plight of the poor and most affected during this economic downturn.  *I* am one of those people, a liberal, New Deal Democrat in Exile, and I do not care to keep the current cohort of Democrats in power.  The party still needs votes to win and continuing to ignore the concerns of average Americans in order to not lose face for shoving Obama down our throats is not a winning formula.  So, bring on the disaster.

The lack of planning on their part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

PS: Check out the comment thread on ThereIsNoSpoon’s post.  It’s amazing.  Methinks the party is too late to fix this.  Obama appears to have jumped the shark.

Oh. My. God. We are so screwed.

Get up out of that bathtub, Democrats

Paul Krugman and Anglachel have two important posts up.  After you read them, you’ll get a sickening feeling that things are about to get worse.  If anyone expected Barack Obama to use his veto pen to stop the Republican Horde from wrecking havoc, they might want to rethink that notion.  As Paul says in Freezing Out Hope:

It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure — that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right.

The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response?

What’s even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

Hoodwinked?  Bamboozled?  Is Obama making fun of the Obots?  Or did Anglachel accurately assess Obama’s political compass?  From Season’s Greetings, she writes:

Obama is not a Reaganite, no matter how much he enjoys fellating the corpse of the Gipper. If he really were a Reaganite, he’d know how to preserve and expand power.

I’ve written before that Obama lacks any sense of or taste for politics, and think I have his political philosophy identified, namely a very patrician Hoover-ish progressivism, but something Krugman wrote today made me have a very bad thought

[…]

What it looks like to me is Obama methodically reversing the desires of the people who voted for him, inverting every virtue and intention they projected on to him. If someone was trying to deconstruct the Democratic Party from the inside – betray its hopes, derail its changes, destroy its legacy – you couldn’t ask for a better example.

Almost like an act of revenge.

I said in Primary Objective that Obama was not mortally unpopular with the base, but I’m having to rethink that claim much more quickly than I imagined given the way he has increased his pissing on the Democrats since the mid-term losses. If he has no loyalty to any part of the party and is eager to walk around with a big “Kick me” sign taped front and back, then it makes no sense for the party to follow him off the cliff. Krugman closes by saying, “It would be much easier, of course, for Democrats to draw a line if Mr. Obama would do his part. But all indications are that the party will have to look elsewhere for the leadership it needs.”

Anglachel urges a primary.  Well, that’s to be expected.  She’s one of the “shrieking band of paranoid holdouts”.  But Krugman writes for a large megaphone.  Oh, sure, who listens to Krugman?  Obots came –>this<– close to calling him a racist for not kissing Obama’s, er, whatever, when he took office.

But for the good of the country, Obama must be primaried, regardless of the perceived incivility and the probability that the entire op/ed page of the Washington Post will get the vapors.  I think even Atrios is coming around:

One thing that’s been true since I’ve been paying attention is that everything The Left does is wrong. By The Left I mean everyone to the left of the basic governing power. Third Parties are bad, sitting out elections are bad, putting pressure on elected reps is bad, protesting is bad, primary campaigns are bad, media criticism might hurt their feefees and is bad, saying mean things about Rush Limbaugh is bad, actually discussing your views honestly is bad, etc. Obviously the failure of The Left to take control and run the country does suggest that it is doing something wrong, but no one ever really offers much constructive advice other than…please STFU.

Is the base going to STFU and graciously commit sepukka in order for politeness to flourish?  “Let good table manners reign!”

Update: Ian Welsh pounds the drum for primarying Obama too.  He goes even further than we do and says Obama is a bad man.  Amoral or Immoral?  Does it matter?

If the party base and the hung over Obots really have a political philosophy and if they really want the democratic values of the Democratic party to triumph, they’d better join us toot sweet.  Because, like it or not, there is only one person *at the present time* who can take on Obama and win.  Even if you are still suffering from CDS psychosis, I urge Obots for the sake of UNITY to join with us and push back.  Because until you give Obama a serious threat to his political career, he is going to take the party and the country down with him.  We have always said that our objection to Obama had nothing to do with his skin color.  It has everything to do with his lack of political convictions, his inexperience, his unpreparedness, and his contempt for the voters.

Howard Dean may be the alternate candidate for Whole Foods Nation but Obama knows that Dean poses no legitimate threat to him.  He has absolutely zero appeal to the working class.  Democrats cannot win in 2012 without the working class.  And the reason Obama is not going to push back at the Republicans is because he thinks the working class has abandoned the Democrats to join the Tea Party.  This is partially correct.  The working class would be more than happy to get behind a Democrat who supports the FDR style programs they love and who shows leadership qualities in the face of adversity.

As long as the Obots won’t even entertain the notion of supporting someone like that for president, Obama will continue to drown Hope in the Potomac.  Once you start to roll the idea of a popular primary challenger around in your heads and let Obama know you’re seriously thinking about it, you will start to get the Change! you voted for.  Don’t believe me?  Go ahead and try it.  Start making some noises that you’ve changed your minds and now “she who must not be named” is looking pretty good right about now.  Make it sound convincing.  Praise her statesmanship, her presence on a world stage, her calm and steely resolve.  See what happens.

He doesn’t fear you, Obots.  That’s why he’s giving you the finger and brushing your dirt off his shoulders.

She’s baaack!

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Nancy Pelosi survives Democratic revolt

Bruised but not beaten, Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday locked up the votes needed to transition from speaker to minority leader in the new Congress, topping Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.), 150-43, on a secret ballot in a private Wednesday meeting of House Democrats.

The 43 votes against her — and the 68 cast in a losing effort to delay her election — reveal that a caucus bloodied by the loss of at least 61 seats and control of the House no longer bends to her will the way it once did.

But Pelosi was defiant as ever in her post-election press conference Wednesday afternoon.

Asked why she should remain Democratic leader after the election wipeout, Pelosi said: “Because I’m an effective leader, because we got the job done on health care and Wall Street reform and consumer protection. Because they know that I’m the person that can attract the resources both intellectual and otherwise to take us to victory — because I’ve done it before.”

Since it’s that time of year I’ll use a football analogy. If any NFL coach led his team to such a disastrous season as the Democrats just had he would be fired even if the team owner had to eat a multi-million dollar contract.

Nobody is cheering this news harder than the Republican party. That alone tells you all you need to know.

Nancy Pelousy lost my support four years ago when she said “Impeachment is off the table.” I won’t even go into her involvement with what went wrong in 2008.

So after the worst mid-term beating in modern history Obama is still in the White House, Dirty Harry Reid is still Senate Majority Leader, and Nancy Pelosi is demoted but still has a job. No personnel changes, no new blood in the Democratic leadership, no change of direction.

The Democratic party must have a death wish.

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And we get?

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Anglachel discusses the Catfood Commission’s “disingenuous calls for sacrifice.”

The general criticism of the class bias in how the commission weighted the sacrifices (most for the little people, few for the monied elite) has been done by other commenters, so I’d like to focus on the last, rather amazing sentence in the above quote. The work of the New Deal is delivering value and providing economic security almost a century after it was done. It is an investment that continues to pay out.

Consider that at least 30 of those 80 years have occurred while a political party explicitly opposed to the New Deal has been in power, and that it has been under fire from that same faction since the early 1960s, more than half its life. We’re talking some institutional resilience. When a program provides material benefits to large portions of the population with little overhead and minimal intrusiveness, it’s going to be a winner. This is deep strength of Social Security and Medicare – they deliver. [There’s also the incredible infrastructure investments of the WPA that continue to deliver, but those are less easy to identify as a personal benefit.]

This is why the attacks on them have failed thus far. Main Street can see the benefit these programs deliver. Main Street in this case is not just families, but also small business. Cost efficiencies for business is also a reason why these programs persist. How many small business owners can provide a retiree pension or medical insurance system with the cost efficiency as SS and Medicare, for example? People also see that these New Deal programs are about the only thing still delivering to them in the face of 35 years of continual and deliberate economic degradation

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Same old, same old

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Jonathan Alter at Newsweak has a post that is full of fail:

Why the Midterms Matter
The GOP’s agenda has to be stopped.

But elections aren’t just about who wins. They’re about what happens when one or the other party wins. We’re so eager to promote ourselves with the smartest take on how President Obama and the Democrats got themselves in this pickle that we haven’t done a good job explaining the stakes. We manage to sever cause from effect.

Let’s say you’re an independent voter who wants to send Obama a message on Nov. 2. Have the media told you what that would say? Here’s a clue: moderate Republicans are extinct. With big wins, the Tea Party will transform itself from an insurgency into the driving force within the GOP. Gains in statehouses and legislatures will allow right-wingers to use the 2010 census to redraw district lines that will entrench them in power until 2020. Back in charge in Washington, they will likely block even centrist choices for courts. Extremist senators like Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn will move from being irritants on the fringe to players at the center of our politics.

The Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress for four years, including a period when they had a filibuster-proof supermajority. They have held the White House for nearly two years following eight years of George the Lesser.

So, leading into the midterm election the best argument Alter can make is “ZOMG! The Republicans are worse!!?”

That’s pathetic.

The Democrats are not facing a GOPer tsunami because of the Tea Partiers or the Chamber of Commerce. They are gonna get a big can o’ Whoop-ass opened on them by the voters because they failed to do what they were elected to do.

In 2006 and 2008 people voted for change, but all they got was more of the same old, same old.

Here’s the worst part:

Health insurers flirted with Democrats, supported them with money and got what they wanted: a federal mandate that most Americans carry health care coverage. Now they’re backing Republicans, hoping a GOP Congress will mean friendlier regulations.

The bankers and all the other malefactors of great wealth are doing the same thing. The Democrats sold out their constituents (that’s us) thinking they had some wealthy BFF’s to replace us with.

They got hustled, but we got screwed.

Hopenchange motherf**kers!

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