Thursday: These liberals reject Obama

One of the commenters from the previous thread implied that if we didn’t like the Republican candidates, we must be Obama supporters.  This is an example of black-white thinking that used to be the sole provence of the right but has now spread to the left as well.  But I’m going to assume that the commenter was from the right side of the aisle.  So, let me clear up a few things for you.

Obama is not now nor ever has been a liberal.  Nope, not even close.  He’s not anywhere NEAR being a socialist or a communist.  If he belonged to either of these clubs, the membership committee would have stripped him of his special beanie and secret decoder rings by now.  He simply does not promote any kind of policies to help working people.  Period.

He *might* be edging over the dividing line towards fascism with his continual support for large business entities, the wealthy and the finance industry.  But in this political climate with the Republicans pegging the fascist meter up to 11, he looks just like a moderate country club Republican.  I guess that’s where I would put him- in the country club.  That’s where his peeps hang out, that’s where he feels most comfortable.  I don’t know how Glenn Beck and the rest of the right wing managed to convince people that Obama was a socialist or a liberal but it’s not my job to explain the difference to people who insist on being deliberately confused year after year, issue after issue.  You have to do your own research and figure it out for yourself.  Then you will realize that Obama hasn’t been promoting any liberal ideology or implementing any liberal policies.  The reason his policies haven’t worked is precisely because they *aren’t* liberal.  In a lesser Depression, liberal policies are what is called for and he absolutely rejected them early on in the crisis.  So, no, he’s not a liberal.

If the commenter had been paying attention to the news in the past couple of days, he would have learned that the Obama campaign officials in New Mexico took great delight in punching the hippies again with a memo castigating Paul Krugman as a “political rookie” and dissing leftist activists at FireDogLake as being Firebaggers.  Oh, the irony.  It wasn’t that long ago that Jane Hamsher was criticizing the holdouts here at The Confluence as being a “certain type of woman” because we refused to jump on the Obama bandwagon.  I was pretty steamed at Jane’s slavish loyalty to the party in 2008 even though she knew that Obama was not what he was advertised to be.  But now, she is one of us.  Yep, she and ThereIsNoSpoon have finally embraced our voting strategy: downticket Democrats or third party candidates with proven progressive or liberal records only and no soup for Obama and his gang of brutal and unscrupulous campaign operatives.  Rather than rejecting the Firebaggers, I’m glad to see they have finally come around to our position.  Now, we can get on with uniting the left against the destructive infection of the Democratic party by malicious, aggressive “smartest guys in the room” from the center right, wealthy gunslingers of the party.

The commenter, and other political pundits, may be under the impression that Obama is still personally attractive.  Well, his purported oratorical “gifts” never worked on me.  And after the way his campaign trampled 18,000,000 voters in the most blatantly unethical primary season I have ever witnessed, I have not found him to be personally likeable.  Some polls show that the public still finds Obama personally likeable but strongly disapproves of his job performance.  Let me suggest that these numbers are misleading.  I suspect his personally favorable ratings are also in the toilet because, let’s face it, the guy is just not that likeable.  He projects coldness, weakness and careless disconnect from the lives of the citizens he’s supposed to be leading.  Your urgent unemployment status does not constitute an emergency on the part of his re-election campaign.  (Yet)  But people aren’t going to tell pollsters that because they are don’t want to be told that they’re racists.  So, they hesitate when they answer that question, trying to come up with a reason to like him. Well, he’s not a *bad* guy.  I mean, he hasn’t ripped apart live puppies with his teeth on TV while screwing a goat so I guess that means he’s a good family man, and his kids are cute, I’ll give him that.  Yeah, he’s personally likeable {{rolling eyes}}.

One of the things that makes him personally unlikeable to me is the fact that so many of us are questioning our attitudes towards race and questioning our own judgement about his likeability through this filter.  I hate having a gun put to my head with the command to say something nice or have my character called into question.  So, no, I do not like Obama.  It has nothing to do with the color of his skin and everything to do with his personality and his character.

I also can’t stand to hear him speak.  His attempts at folksiness sound phony to me.  I hate the way he breaks concepts down into manageable puree when he likens the debate over the budget to his household budget debates with Michelle.  He must think we all have the mental capacity of children.  Why can’t he talk to voters like they’re adults?  His attempts to discuss policy just grate on my nerves.  I have been conditioned to look for the logical inconsistencies, misdirection and things left unsaid and his endless, labyrinthine, prepositional phrase-studded, run-on sentences lead to too many blind alleys.  The fact that I can’t understand the point he’s trying to make is not an indication of my inability to think but of his propensity to deliberately obscure with rhetorical shiny objects.  And this is not a recent phenomenon, oh former Obots, he’s always been this way.

But whatever.  He’s not a nice guy, he’s a lousy speaker, his job performance has been terrible (the vast majority of my well-educated friends are un or under employed for going on two years now) and he’s no liberal.  All of these things were clear and present dangers back in 2008 but they were ignored because he was new and exotic.  He’s not new and exotic anymore and his “historical moment” has passed as quickly as an orgasm.

The left is so over him.

Netroots Nation learns about “Free Milk and a Cow” the hard way

{{snort!}}

It appears that Netroots Nation is dissatisfied with Obama:

The message to those in the room for “What to Do When the President is Just Not that Into You,” a Netroots Nation panel, was be more demanding, don’t take no for an answer and compromises aren’t good enough.

Lt. Dan Choi, who was discharged from the military for running afoul of its anti-gay Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, provided a visual when an Organizing for America volunteer stood up and asked him to support Obama in 2012. The man said he did not support gay marriage — “civil unions?” he offered weakly — and Choi promptly ripped up an Organizing for America flyer he had been given and threw it back in the man’s face.

The four panelists — Choi, immigration reform supporter Felipe Matos, America Blog writer John Aravosis and Fire Dog Lake Founder Jane Hamsher — said they are planning to hold the White House’s collective feet to the fire for its decisions on civil rights, whether it would hurt Obama’s reelection chances or not.

Yes!  Ok, you’re 3 years too late.  Some of you knew that he wasn’t the Azor Ahai and Prince who was Promised back in 2008.  Remember the sad little letter that Jane Hamsher and friends published in The Nation back in the summer of 2008 when they pleaded with Obama to take the left seriously?  And how did that work out?

What’s really funny is that it wasn’t too long ago when Jane Hamsher was characterizing us bitter holdouts as “a certain kind of woman” and now she *are* one.  I’m willing to forgive, Jane, and I certainly don’t want to single anyone out, but it’s time you guys acknowledged that we’re not the trailer trash knuckle draggers you thought we were.  We’re just a whole lot quicker on the uptake.

But it seems like the newly minted bitter knitters don’t quite understand how to implement the strategy:

“I would probably vote for the president in the end, but I’d also do everything that I can to shame him,” said Aravosis, who writes about gay rights issues. “But I don’t think they realize how damaging that is.”

{{cue the Streisand}}

Oh, my man I love him so, he’ll never know

All my life is just despair, but I don’t care

When he takes me in his arms, the world is bright, alright

What’s the difference if I say, I’ll go away

When I know I’ll come back on my knees someday

For whatever my man is, I am his forever more!

No, John, that is not how you do it.  If you signal 16 months out that you are going to give Obama your vote no matter what he does, then he doesn’t have to do anything for you.  Oh, sure, I understand you’re scared.  We’re all scared shitless about Republicans getting the upper hand.  But if their policies are going to get implemented anyway under Obama, you can’t lose by opposing him.  Strenuously.

There are a couple of ways to do this:

1.) Direct your political contributions to an escrow account to be given to a politician that wants to run next year, either as a primary candidate to Obama or as a third party candidate.   Do the same with incumbent Congressional Democrats who keep drifting right.

2.) Find that third party candidate or primary opponent.  If you can’t find one, promise to vote as a bloc for the Green Party or Socialist or America’s Renewal (I made that one up).  You have to gird your loins and tell the Democratic Party that they are finished if they don’t start toeing the line. Then, you have to do it or they will never take you seriously.  This is how Republicans do it.  You will never get your mojo back until you learn to say “No!” and mean it.

3.) You’re not going to like this last one, John, but here goes: Start talking up Hillary Clinton.  Yep, there’s no one Obama fears as much as Hillary.  She’s the only legitimate candidate who could challenge him in a primary and then scoop up all the working class people the Democrats left on the table last time.  I have no idea if she would run but a Hillary threat is your best bet.  Not only would she get Democrats’ attention, the Republicans will start to worry too.  Plus, you owe us for being such an egregious misogynist twit in 2008 when she was hands down the most ready to lead.  (Wow, that was really embarrassing.)  Her candidacy would be equally historic. And I never say never.

You guys are going to have to get over the number the anti-Hillary people did to your heads in 2008.  She is a politician, one of the best we have, who really knows her stuff and isn’t afraid to take on her enemies (Ooo, she told him.  Still gives me chills).  Being a political person is not a bad thing- when you are trying to elect a politician to work for you.  That’s where you guys made your mistake in 2008.  You wanted a political virgin.  And you got one.  Not only was he inexperienced, he sold his maidenhood to a bunch of bankers.

They used places like DailyKos and FireDogLake as big focus groups to figure out what makes lefties tick and then they used those things against you in 2008 so you would turn to the person they picked for you.  Obama never did run on Democratic principles.  His whole shtick was to run as an aspirational candidate.  He was whatever you wanted him to be, like Belle de Jour.  And you guys ate it up and doomed the rest of us.

I warned you in 2007 at YearlyKos2.0.  I told you that the appeal to the emotion and the response to it would be dangerous to us and that it was very important focus on what we value and not how someone makes us feel.  You are very slow learners but you are finally where we were in 2008.  Better late than never.

Welcome to the light.  Now, don’t fuck it up.

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

THIS is the song you want to sing to Obama:

The Democratic Party’s two halves: Is Detente Possible?

Ok, here’s my attempt.  Be gentle.  It’s my first time.

From Stirling Newberry’s blog post “The Truth, an Open Letter on why this American and This Left are Doomed” at Corrente:

A country is doomed when its opposition is so corrupt that it cannot be trusted to oppose. Let me name some names.

Let’s start with Jane Hamsher. She’s been called out to run for office by some of her zombies. But let me tell you some, though by no means more than an tiny fraction, of truth about Jane Hamsher. She’s sold the left out over and over again. Back in the early days of the Obama administration, many of her own writers wanted to oppose Obama, sensing, or in some cases have positive knowledge, that Obama was a marketing campaign wrapped around a messiah complex. She stopped it. Got people taken out.

Then she went into opposition, to collect the donation stream that keeps her afloat. Suddenly, in the abstract, unattached to anything, she looked like she was principled. But that lasts only as long as her interest does. Given a chance to have the mandate taken out of the health care bill, her young and stupid hatchet man Jon Walker is on the case, doing what is good for Jane and himself. Instead of taking the moment to say “single payor, nothing more, nothing less,” which would be the principled thing to do, she goes for getting the mandate with universal issue. Let me connect the dots for you. It is no secret that Jane Hamsher is a cancer survivor. She needs universal issue, out of all the things in the bill. Jon Walker is young, he would benefit by not paying the mandate. So does Jane, because FDL could not afford to pay the mandate, and making her own people eat the penalty would be one hypocrisy too far out of her legion of hypocrisies.

Will it stop the mainstream media from treating Jane and “chickenshit” Digby and their buddies like they are spokespersons for the left blogosphere?  No, probably not.  But at this point, anyone who is still bopping over to FDL with the idea that they’re going to get opinion reflecting what is good for the country, is probably chasing rainbows.  Stirling says Jane knew after the administration took office.  I contend that she knew when Obama was just a candidate for the nomination.  Digby admits to having serious doubts but didn’t want to piss off her commenters, some of whom, no doubt, were Obama operatives who inflicted themselves on many blogs at the time, including ours.

If you have a megaphone of any size and you do not exercise it to tell the truth to your readers, you’re no better than Fox.  To this day, Jane’s frontpagers continue to wale on the Clintons, reflexively, without a second thought as to whether a Hillary Clinton administration would be better for working class Americans than what we got.  If it even slowed down the rapidly accelerating descent of the middle class that we got with Obama, it would have been worth it.  But Jane and Digby and Markos did what was profitable than what was right.

How does that make them different than Hannity and Colmes?

We’ve tried detente.  They don’t want to join with us and push back.  They’d rather cling to their excuses for their crazy advocacy of Obama that lead to the ripping apart of the party and the destruction of their own political force.  They want to justify their tepid support of Obama using reasoning that made absolutely no sense at the time given the information at their disposal, let alone in retrospect.  And they want to continue to differentiate themselves from us by calling us names and racists as if whistling past the graveyard is going to somehow protect them from the taint of their working class status.

Whatever.  Just don’t come looking for support from us.  I used to think an apology wasn’t necessary.  But I’ve changed my mind about that.  They have insulted me in every possible manner.  Their actions have resulted in the worst recession in the past 70 years and one that is going to be longer and tougher than it had to be because Obama is president.

They owe all of us a big apology.

“A Tragic Setback For Womens’ Rights”

Via Vastleft at Correntewire

That’s what NOW president Terry O’Neill calls the bill that the House passed last night.  Here’s more from her press release this morning:

The health care reform bill passed by Congress today offers a number of good solutions to our nation’s critical health care problems, but it also fails in many important respects. After a full year of controversy and compromise, the result is a highly flawed, diminished piece of legislation that continues reliance on a failing, profit-driven private insurance system and rewards those who have been abusive of their customers. With more than 45,000 unnecessary deaths annually and hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies each year due to medical bills, this bill is only a timid first step toward meaningful reform.

Fact: The bill contains a sweeping anti-abortion provision. Contrary to the talking points circulated by congressional leaders, the bill passed today ultimately achieves the same outcome as the infamous Stupak-Pitts Amendment, namely the likely elimination of all private as well as public insurance coverage for abortion. It imposes a bizarre requirement on insurance plan enrollees who buy coverage through the health insurance exchanges to write two monthly checks (one for an abortion care rider and one for all other health care). Even employers will have to write two separate checks for each of their employees requesting the abortion rider.

This burdensome, elaborate system must be eliminated. It is there because the Catholic bishops and extremist abortion rights opponents know that it will result in greatly restricting access to abortion care, currently one of the most common medical procedures for women.

….

Fact: The bill permits age-rating, the practice of imposing higher premiums on older people. This practice has a disproportionate impact on women, whose incomes and savings are lower due to a lifetime of systematic wage discrimination.

Fact: The bill also permits gender-rating, the practice of charging women higher premiums simply because they are women. Some are under the mistaken impression that gender-rating has been prohibited, but that is only true in the individual and small-group markets. Larger group plans (more than 100 employees) sold through the exchanges will be permitted to discriminate against women — having an especially harmful impact in workplaces where women predominate.

We know why those gender- and age-rating provisions are in the bill: because insurers insisted on them, as they will generate billions of dollars in profits for the companies. Such discriminatory rating must be completely eliminated.

Read the whole thing.

The propaganda catapulters have been out in force in the past couple of days, trying to shape consensus reality so that it will appear that a.) anyone who praises the bill will look intelligent, modern and sexy and b.) anyone who opposes it, especially women, will be told that they’re being selfish, self-centered, hard-hearted bitches because they would rather let 32 million uninsured people die than give up their access to a cheap and easy abortion that they should be able to pay for themselves.

But even people such as myself who were in favor of health care reform and wanted to fix, not kill the bill, will find that the impact that this bill will have on women goes beyond abortion.  It appears that it will mean higher rates for women and those higher rates may make an employer think twice about hiring and firing and promotions, as if women don’t have enough to worry about.  Our salaries are lower than mens’ but we will be forking out more  to pay for our health.  As cost sharing goes, this is a raw deal for women.  It makes us a liability and drag on our employers’ bottom line and makes our lives harder.

And by the way, you propaganda artists, we happen to be among those 32 million uninsured.

Last night, Jane Hamsher put up a poll on FDL asking who was most to blame for selling out our  abortion rights in the health care bill.  The multiple choice answers included a number of culprits and probably all of them were responsible from Nancy Pelosi caving to Bart Stupak to Planned Parenthood staying silent to Barack Obama himself.  But she left out the people who were really responsible and whose decisions two years ago were the genesis of the erosion of their rights today.  That would be women such as Jane Hamsher herself who did not forcefully advocate for fairness in the primaries and who rejected a sure thing womens’ advocate in Clinton for a cipher in a mens suit.  Barack Obama had a history of voting present on abortion legislation in Illinois.  He met with evangelicals throughout the election season.  The Democratic candidates who ran the same year scrubbed their support of reproductive rights from their websites.  The effect was to give the illusion to swing voters and religious voters that Barack Obama and the new Democrats were open to negotiation where womens’ reproductive rights were concerned.

I caught Jane on several occasions going head to head with conservative bloggers on C-Span and other programs, warning viewers that Republicans were going to take away their rights to abortion and that only Obama and the Democrats would protect them.  And a lot of women, young women of child bearing age, listened to Jane and Jessica and Ariana and others like them, rejected Hillary Clinton in the primaries due to her Iraq War Resolution vote and heaped scorn and derision on Sarah Palin because of her anti-choice stance and supposed stupidity.  But they utterly failed to look carefully at what Barack Obama was doing or had done.  They refused to look at the evidence and draw conclusions about what the evidence meant. The final insult was Ms. Magazine itself proclaiming that Barack Obama was some sort of superhero feminist on its cover after a year of the most brutal and obscene misogynism we have ever witnessed in a national campaign.

Jane is responsible for that.  We, the newly unaffiliated liberal Democrats, were not distracted and fooled.  We knew Obama by watching him.  We believed our lyin’ eyes.  And once again, we were proven right.  It makes us villains to Jane.  Instead of asking for our help, she gives us her scorn and disrespect.  Jane calls us “A certain type of woman”.  What kind of woman is that, Jane?  The kind that isn’t duped by appeals to their emotions and terrorized to vote against their best interests?  This is what happens when malicious forces act to divide us.  Women, like the rest of the impotent left, can only watch in dismay as we are now relegated to the same socio-economic status we had 40 years ago.

I don’t know if this country can be healed.  From what I know, women have very little status in truly fascist regimes.  That word, fascism, is not one to throw around lightly or it will lose its meaning.  Maybe a fascist political system that isn’t one we necessarily planned but towards which we drift, propelled by the evolving nature of our media, finance system and millenialist religious views.  But last night’s vote looks like it brought the real impact of that word a little closer to our everyday reality.  We are now locked into a law that gives our money to private entities, we are told that our individual and gender grievances must be subordinate to the glory of the bill and the status of more than half of the citizens of the country has been diminished.

I wanted health care reform.  Just not this one.

Jane said Lieberman should have abided by the results of the CT primary

Yep. She was pretty steamed when Joe Lieberman decided not to abide by the results of the CT primary back in 2006. Jane was majorly pissed off. The woman just wouldn’t let up. It was an outrage when Joe Lieberman decided to substitute his judgment for the Democratic primary voters of CT in 2006. Jane was a woman on a rampage with missionary zeal. She would not stand for it. How dare Lieberman, Rape-Gurney Joe, ignore all of those Lamont voters and flip them the bird? How dare Chuck Shumer turn a blind eye to the innocent voters of CT?

Even before the primary, Jane was screaming for Joe Lieberman to do the right thing if he lost.  This is from Jane’s infamous blackface post:

E.J. Dionne repeats a piece of conventional wisdom that irks the hell out of me every time I hear it – if Lieberman loses the primary and runs as an independent it will distract everyone from the true villain, the GOP, and therefore we should just give him a pass.

Balderdash.  Lieberman has been an integral part of the GOP’s bully machine for the past six years, the Democrat useful for his willingness to dicipline his own kind.  Ned Lamont is running a legitimate primary contest and Joe is refusing to abide by the results of that primary.  As Lowell Weicker said the other day, when he became an independent he didn’t screw with the Republican primary first (my words not his) he just left.  Joe is mucking up the Democratic primary and then abandoning the party to attack it from the outside.  How this is the fault of Ned Lamont or his supporters I would very much like to know.

Tsk-tsk, Jane.  You sound bitter.  Odd, I remember defending your blackface post.  I thought it was a clever visual metaphor that perfectly illustrated the offensive nature of Lieberman’s pandering.  We all know now that not only is the definition of racism fluid but that it can also be used as a convenient cudgel to bludgeon your opponents into silence.

But wait!  There’s more.  Because Christy Hardin Smith, who I always liked, was practically joined at the hip with Jane back in 2006.  They tag teamed each other.  Christy was the legal, logical one while Jane lead from the gut.  What was Christy’s take on Joe’s Connecticut for Lieberman third party run for the Senate?

From Christy Hardin Smith in the post Lamont Wins:

Joe Lieberman is on C-Span right now thumbing his nose at the Democratic voters and the Democratic party, and announcing his run independent from the party. He’s saying he wants to “unite not divide.” This speech is right out of the Karl Rove playbook. Word on the street in Connecticut is that Lieberman will be running as an independent with Republican backing. Any doubts that his loyalty first and foremost is to Joe Lieberman, whatever it takes?

The question is: where will the DSCC and the party leadership be on this tomorrow? They had better be out in front and supporting the winner of the Democratic primary.

Jane called to say that Ned Lamont will be down to speak shortly. Here’s hoping that Democrats with some level of respect for their party, and with a healthy respect for the voters in the state of Connecticut, have a strong word with Joe Lieberman between now and tomorrow morning.

And here’s more from Christy from It’s a Win!:

Joe Lieberman lost the Democratic primary. And if he has so little respect for the voters in that primary that he will not abide by the results, then the party leadership must show him the door. To do otherwise would be to sanction cheating Democratic voters of their rightful say in the party process — and would render the party leadership moot.  That is true whether Ned Lamont won by one vote — or by several thousand.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, Christy.

This is almost exactly the problem we faced in the 2008 primary.  Let’s do the math.

Hillary Clinton went to the convention in Denver in 2008 with 1730 delegates.  Barack Obama went there with 1747 delegates.  He had a lead of 17 delegates.  That’s a difference of .97%.

Why did it look like Obama had such a commanding lead before he got to the convention?  It’s because of the way MI was apportioned.  Obama got 55 uncommitted delegates from MI and 4 of Hillary’s delegates.  But they and Florida’s delegates were at half strength.  So, Hillary’s numbers and critical mass always looked less than Obama’s.

But the party knew that it couldn’t go to the convention with Florida and Michigan’s voters at half strength.  That could have been an electoral disaster in November.  So, the Sunday before the convention began, they quietly restored the delegates of those two states to full strength.  Voila!  Hillary and Obama are almost equal in elected delegates.  But by then, the media narrative was set, which was all the DNC really cared about.  Even though Hillary technically won the primaries because Obama should never have gotten the uncommitted delegates from MI in the first place, she lost momentum.  The media put everyone else on mute.  The convention steam rolled right over the Clinton primary voters.

Know how I know?  Because I voted for her in NJ, a state she won by 10 points.  And here’s what happened at the roll call at minute mark 49:00:

Our former governor, who no one showed up to vote for last November, gave all 127 delegates to Barack Obama.  I don’t remember giving up my vote to Barack Obama.  The voters of NJ were not consulted. Hillary didn’t get a single delegate from New Jersey or New York or many other states that voted overwhelmingly for her.  Out of the 1730 delegates she went to the convention with, she got  341 votes at the roll call.

341 out of 1730 delegates.

As Christy said, failure to abide by the results of a primary ” would be to sanction cheating Democratic voters of their rightful say in the party process — and would render the party leadership moot.”

Obama didn’t win MI.  He wasn’t even on the ballot.  Why didn’t Jane tell Obama to stop playing games with the voters and abide by the results of the Michigan primary?

He lost Florida by 17 points.  Why didn’t Jane insist that Obama abide by the results of the Florida primary?

Even Jane knows that what happened at the RBC meeting was shady at best and outright vote theft at worst.  But Jane was OK with it when it happened to Hillary.  The old Jane would have been on fire about what happened to Hillary’s voters.  The 2008 Jane?  Not so much.  Because if Hillary’s voters had been treated fairly and with respect, there’s a good possibility that Obama might have lost.  OMG!  We couldn’t have that.

What did that “class of women” know about politics?  It was Jane’s responsibility to take the burden of self-determination from their slender shoulders and relieve their feeble brains from all of that stuff.

Bullshit.

Jane  has lost all credibility with us now.  Nothing she says or emails or pleads to us will make a damn bit of difference.  She was willing to overlook the smarmy, unethical, nasty, cheating tactics of her party and its Lightbringer who never protested once any of the disgusting things that party did on his behalf.   And for that reason, Jane will continue to fail at moving the Democratic party to recognize her or listen to her complaints or do anything she wants.  She gave it permission to ignore her and any voter who inconveniently gets in its way.

Jane is a world class hypocrite.

Of course, if she threw her blog to Obama just to keep the money pouring in, that would be worse.

The “screaming woman” who confronted Jane Hamsher on C-Span wasn’t actually screaming

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake

I admit I have been warming up to Jane Hamsher a bit in the past couple of weeks because of her strong fight against the abortion language in the health care bill. But apparently I got fooled again. We’ve all read and discussed Jane’s post, “Shaking Off the Hangover of the Primary Wars.” Riverdaughter did a spectacular verbal takedown of Jane’s rationalizing yesterday.

The post itself is troubling enough, but Jane’s comments about Hillary Clinton and her supporters in the thread clearly demonstrate that she (Jane) is not yet ready to take responsibility for actions she took or did not take during the divisive primary fights of 2008.

Many of us were able to see through Obama early in the primary process–after doing our own research on his character and his political experience (or lack thereof). But Jane claims that her site remained neutral throughout the primaries because there were no significant policy differences among the top three candidates, Obama, Clinton, and Edwards.

It’s true that FDL did not publicly endorse a candidate, but the posts and comment sections certainly favored Obama. It’s possible Jane couldn’t control the Axelrod astroturfers and just threw up her hands, as Digby did. But she allowed her comment sections to be infested with abusive language toward Clinton and anyone who defended her. And she banned commenters who complained about the bullying.

Jane writes:

Sophisticated campaigns marketed the candidates as personalities and people became attached to them and felt like they knew them. Everyone who opposed them was the “enemy,” rhetoric was amped up and overheated, identity politics were exploited by both sides as strategic campaign elements and suddenly the blogosphere was a giant pie fight.

We made the decision to stay true to our charter and didn’t take sides, pledging to support the candidate that emerged with the nomination. We believed that once the election was over and we could get back to discussing issues again and evaluating politicians on both sides of the aisle with the same yardstick, we’d be back in our element.

She assumes that everyone who followed the primary battles focused on candidates as personalities rather than looking closely at their characters, policy goals, and personal accomplishments. She could not be more wrong. Most of us didn’t support Hillary Clinton for her personality. I actually began the primaries as an “anyone but Hillary” voter. But her performances in the debates convinced me she was the best candidate. It wasn’t about her personality or about her husband, and it wasn’t about her gender–although I admit I would have liked to see a woman President in my lifetime. I supported Clinton because she showed herself to be smart, knowledgeable, and most of all issue-oriented.

Obama, on the other hand, was all about Obama. He never was specific about issues, he never demonstrated any commitment to Democratic ideology. He admired Ronald Reagan, for heaven’s sake! He cozied up to fundamentalist preachers their anti-abortion, homophobic followers. Most damning of all, it became obvious from his many comments about and to Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin that Obama was a misogynist through and through.

I knew Hillary was more conservative than I am, and I knew I probably wouldn’t be happy with her Iraq and Afghanistan policies. But I was even more concerned about domestic issues. All I wanted was a Democrat in the White House who would fight for universal health care and would protect what is left of our social safety net. Instead, thanks to people like Jane and Markos, we ended up with a Republican pretending to be a Democrat–who, if anything is as bad or worse than George W. Bush.

In the discussion thread attached to her post, linked above, Jane posted this comment:

“I had a woman call up and scream at me when I was on CSPAN the other day for all the horrible things Markos and I had done to Hillary Clinton during the primaries, telling me that I had destroyed the Democratic party.

“And I’m like, seriously? I know some people you should meet, you guys would have an interesting fight.”

Many thanks to Gweema for posting the link to Jane Hamsher’s appearance on C-Span’s Washington Journal on November 26, 2009. I watched the whole thing, and right now I’m practically shaking with anger (want to call me a “screamer,” Jane?).

The women caller on C-Span did no screaming. She did not even raise her voice. Instead, she listed her credentials to confront Jane Hamsher and then did so very articulately. Jane responded with condescending lies and half-truths. I decided to transcribe that portion of the interview so we can dissect it here. The relevant section begins at about 25:50.

Elizabeth from Tennessee, calling on the Democratic line, wishes Jane and the interviewer a happy Thanksgiving and says she appreciates their working on the holiday weekend. Here is Elizabeth’s question:

To Jane Hamsher, I have been a lifelong Democrat, I was very involved in the health care battles of the 90’s. I was involved in actual implementing of town hall meetings back then in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois; so I don’t take a back seat to you.

But in the area of February of 2008, I discontinued reading your blog and also the dailykos blog altogether because of your extreme hatred and villification of another Democratic candidate, and that was Senator Hillary Clinton. [Jane Hamsher rolls her eyes at this point]

I don’t know how much you are aware [of]…how much damage you did and how much damage Markos did–

Hamsher interrupts the caller: “Are you sure you’re talking about our blog? We had Hillary Clinton on [patronizing laughter] …

Elizabeth says: I’m talking about your blog, ma’m, and you should know it. If anyone wants to know they should go read…from that time. [interviewer breaks in and asks when this was, but Elizabeth goes on with her points.]

“You mentioned today that Obama was an anti-war candidate. He was no such thing. In fact, throughout the campaign, he continued to say that Afghanistan was a good war…. ”

[Jane Hamsher breaks in to agree with Elizabeth on this point.]

Elizabeth says: “You really caused a lot of people to leave the Democratic party during the 2008 campaign. And I’m telling you now, I’m sorry that you’re sick, I’m sorry that you’ve had three bouts with the cancer, but I’m gonna say this. You are going to be shown exactly what damage you caused our party last primary season, and I will never forgive you for that.”

Elizabeth was a bit harsh at times, but she maintained a level tone of voice and did. not. scream. In fact I’d have to say that Jane’s characterization of Elizabeth’s presentation as “screaming” verges on sexism. Perhaps Jane has some unconscious issues in that department.

Here is Jane’s response [highlighting is mine]:

I know that there was a certain class of women who decided that they would start supporting John McCain over what they thought was bad treatment of Hillary Clinton. In fact…I took a video at the Rules Committee meeting, a woman, Harriet Christian who said that…she was not going to support a party who would have an inept black man as a candidate, and that became a…rallying point for some people.

We didn’t take a position…in the primaries. We said that we would support whoever was the winner and in fact had Senator Clinton as a guest on the blog, so I think we represented all viewpoints. I think there were people their who were Hillary Clinton partisans; I think that there were people there who were Barack Obama partisans, and I think that each side…collectively saw the other side as the issue. But I don’t think we were unfair to Senator Clinton, and I don’t believe that the people who left the party to vote for John McCain, who was very much an anti-choice candidate, a pro-war candidate, reflect the same values that I have anyway, or reflect the values of Senator Clinton.

There is so much wrong with Jane’s response that I don’t know where to begin. You do need to watch the video–her facial expressions while listening to the caller and responding to her are unbelievably patronizing and condescending. It is evident from her use of the words “class of women” that Hamsher sees herself as superior to these working class (?), pathetic women (though we’re not all women by any means) who mistakenly think that Hillary Clinton was treated unfairly. In addition she twists Harriet Christian’s words in order to imply that Harriet is a racist.

And what the f&ck is it these people don’t understand about protest votes anyway?

I honestly think that Jane’s rationalizing is an unconscious defense mechanism. Now that she has seen what Obama really is–a DINO, a conservative hack, maybe just barely qualifying as a Rockefeller-style Republican–she has to go back and try to cover up her own behavior during the primaries. But Jane has a very very long way to go before she understands the damage that she and the other A-list bloggers caused. I sincerely doubt that she will ever take responsibility for her actions–or lack of actions. For one thing, Jane was at the Rules Committee meeting and apparently she had absolutely no problem with Obama being given delegates belonging to to Clinton or with Obama getting delegates from a state he didn’t compete in!

Obviously Riverdaughter demolished Jane’s rationalizing yesterday afternoon, so I don’t have to do it. I’ll just post these three paragraphs from RD’s righteous rant here:

People like me are pretty steamed at you and your buddies. You took away our choice. We didn’t get a fair primary season. We didn’t even get a floor fight. There was no unity, Jane. It was all an illusion. Your guy was forced on many, many Democratic voters because YOU decided that Obama was best for us. And many people swallowed that because they were convinced that Republicans were worse. So they voted for a Democrat and they got a Republican anyway.

Jane, how many times do we have to tell you that it wasn’t about Hillary after May 31, 2008? It was about choice. Remember Choice, Jane? The right to self-determination? The ability to choose your own destiny? If someone else took that choice away from you, you’d be on their doorstep with a bullhorn and wouldn’t let up. But because it was YOUR guy who won, it was OK? What about the choice of the rest of us, Jane? What about CA, NJ, NY, MA, OH, PA, TX, IN, NH, WV, TN, FL, MI and so on and so on? Those big, Democratic states did not vote for Barack Obama in the primaries, Jane. They deserved to cast their votes for the candidate they *did* vote for. I was one of those voters, Jane and I am not letting the Democratic party off the hook for its outrageous behavior towards me and the others. With a primary this close and disputed, the nullification of my vote was unforgivable.

That is why the primary of 2008 isn’t going to go away and why you are going to continue to get angry callers who blame you and your friends for the state of the country under Obama. You took our choice away. Your incredibly high handed and self righteous decision to support Obama and shut down the rest of the party for the supposed good of that party has lead us to this point.

Don’t come crying to me with any more of your action e-mails, petitions, and fund-raising drives, Jane. I figured it out. You think I’m in “a certain class of women” who are beneath your contempt. You won’t get another chance from me, Jane. You’re just not seeing reality clearly yet, and I’m not sure you ever will.

Jane’s amazing powers of prophecy

I was directed to Jane Hamsher’s comment thread by Wonk the Vote who spotted this clairvoyant Monday morning quarterbacking from Jane Hamsher:

In response to okanogen @ 107

The idea that Hillary would’ve done anything different about health care or anything else is pretty phantasmagorical I believe, but since we don’t know for sure people are free to make their own assumptions.

It was assumed that Rahm would be key in the administration regardless of who won, and the “strike a deal with PhRMA” logic was generated by veterans of the Clinton White House in response to their 1994 health care experience. It’s at the heart of Bill Clinton’s “let’s find a few things we can agree on and pass that, and not worry about this divisive stuff” exhortations in the past few months.

“Shanking off the hangover of the primary” cuts both ways, and I don’t think one side is going to find that any easier than the other.

Ok, let me see if I can pick out the flaw in this comment for Jane.  We will never know for sure what Hillary would or wouldn’t have done because she was never given the chance to demonstrate this to us.  However, using the evidence we had on hand at the time, *Obama’s* behavior was entirely predictable.  In fact, we predicted it.  Over and over again before the election.  Yesterday, Stateofdisbelief suggested that we collect our predictions for an Epiphany Day post, so look for it on or around January 6 where we will present the collected predictions from the 2008 primary and immediate aftermath of the election where we laid it all out about just what kind of president Obama was going to be.

But Jane’s problem goes deeper than just a lack of prophetic power.  She really doesn’t get why people are still mad about the primaries.  Take this comment, for example:

In response to Phoenix Woman @ 5

I had a woman call up and scream at me when I was on CSPAN the other day for all the horrible things Markos and I had done to Hillary Clinton during the primaries, telling me that I had destroyed the Democratic party.

And I’m like, seriously? I know some people you should meet, you guys would have an interesting fight.

Jane, I will tell you why this woman and some of the rest of us are so angry.  It’s because YOU and Markos and Booman and your naive friends who thought you knew what would happen if Hillary was elected decided not to protest all of the slimy machinations of the DNC during primary season.  You heard Donna Brazile divide us into the New Coalition and the Old Coalition and didn’t call her on it.  You listened to the misogyny but didn’t do enough to stop it.  You accepted the results of some pretty rigged committee hearings and some of you cheered for the winning side.  You watched as delegates from Clinton states were forced to vote for a candidate they didn’t represent and you looked the other way.

That last thing just floors me about you, Jane. You went along with the idea that a woman who was a mere 17 delegates behind her opponent, and 17 seriously questionable delegates at that, wasn’t entitled to a genuine roll call and floor vote at the convention. The old Jane Hamsher would have never tolerated such a violation of fair reflection. But the new Obama supporting Jane Hamsher was perfectly OK with it.

And you did this because Obama was your guy.  You wanted him.  And because you wanted him so badly without really listening closely at what he was dogwhistling to the other side, you substituted YOUR judgement for OURS. You supported Obama because you felt you knew what was best for the rest of us.  We waited eight long years to get rid of George Bush and desperately wanted someone we felt was competent to run the country and you and your friends joined in the effort to nullify our votes.  Now, as a result of the decision that you made for the rest of us, we are stuck with Obama.  We got bankers holding on to our money, a health care reform bill that locks us into the insurance industry’s monopoly power, endless war, skyrocketing unemployment and people losing their houses with minimal government interference.  Instead of Clinton III, we got Bush III.  Tell me, Jane, which one would have been worse?

People like me are pretty steamed at you and your buddies.  You took away our choice.  We didn’t get a fair primary season.  We didn’t even get a floor fight.  There was no unity, Jane.  It was all an illusion.  Your guy was forced on many, many Democratic voters because YOU decided that Obama was best for us.  And many people swallowed that because they were convinced that Republicans were worse.  So they voted for a Democrat and they got a Republican anyway.

Jane, how many times do we have to tell you that it wasn’t about Hillary after May 31, 2008?  It was about choice.  Remember Choice, Jane?  The right to self-determination?  The ability to choose your own destiny?  If someone else took that choice away from you, you’d be on their doorstep with a bullhorn and wouldn’t let up.  But because it was YOUR guy who won, it was OK?  What about the choice of the rest of us, Jane? What about CA, NJ, NY, MA, OH, PA, TX, IN, NH, WV, TN, FL, MI and so on and so on? Those big, Democratic states did not vote for Barack Obama in the primaries, Jane. They deserved to cast their votes for the candidate they *did* vote for. I was one of those voters, Jane and I am not letting the Democratic party off the hook for its outrageous behavior towards me and the others. With a primary this close and disputed, the nullification of my vote was unforgivable.

That is why the primary of 2008 isn’t going to go away and why you are going to continue to get angry callers who blame you and your friends for the state of the country under Obama.  You took our choice away.  Your incredibly high handed and self-righteous decision to support Obama and shut down the rest of the party for the supposed good of that party has lead us to this point.

Your predictions about Hillary are irrelevant.

Addendum: This is how a true blue Democrat handles the issue of Choice, Jane.

It’s worth watching the whole thing because Chris Smith really lays out the anti-reproductive services/anti-abortion argument in all its glory and she still makes mincemeat of him without even raising her voice.

Where was Barack Obama when Bart Stupak proposed his amendment? Why wasn’t he all up in Ben Nelson’s face fighting for those young Obot women who voted for him out of fear that Sarah Palin was going to take away their right to abortion? Barack Obama is no Hillary Clinton who can stare down the most obnoxious Congressional anti-abortion foes around. He doesn’t hold a candle to her and her convictions.

Don’t you feel stupid now, Jane? So much for Jane Hamsher, Issues Maven.

In defense of Jane Hamsher, Democratic party loyalist

Who could have predicted?

Jane Hamsher has taken a lot of heat lately from the likes of Booman, whoever the hell he is (we never read him).  Apparently, he wrote a post directed at the disillusioned party faithful who are now disappointed in President Barack Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress.  We know he must be talking about Jane and other bloggers like BTD because he sure as heck isn’t talking about us.  We were hep to that step and we didn’t dig it a long, long time ago.  We’ve been calling ourselves Democrats in Exile since about May 31, 2008.  Do we regret the fact that we no longer have a party to call home?  Heck no.  We know all about free milk and a cow.

But this is a painful lesson for people like Jane Hamsher, who has now been told by Booman that if she doesn’t stop voicing her discontent at the bill of goods that Obama failed to deliver, she isn’t a real Democrat.  I beg to differ.  Jane has indeed defended her party credentials quite admirably in a post today.  I advise everyone to go and read it in its entirety as well as the comments.  It seems some of the commenters are still confused about who supported Hillary, PUMA, both, either and why.  I’ll try to clarify that at the end.

It’s not my intention to dump on Jane Hamsher.  She really does mean well.  I will always admire her for what she did in CT for Ned Lamont.  It must feel like a real sucker punch to be sold out by her own party on the issue of reproductive rights too.  I remember that Jane feels very strongly about that issue.  FDL was also doggedly persistent on Plamegate and I sat riveted to my monitor throughout the duration of Scooter Libby’s trial.  Jane was barely out of major surgery when that happened.  But it was the quality of the journalism, not just Jane’s incredible resilience, that merited an award for FDL.

But something went terribly wrong in 2008.  Jane, the party loyalist, took the path most traveled and lost her way.  She documents some of the atrocities in her post today.  Most of it consists of pitiful excuses for why Jane stayed neutral during the worst of the primary abuses.  I’m sure she would like for the primary of 2008 to die an ignominious but quiet death somewhere so we can all let bygones be bygones and get on with it.  It’s not going away, Jane.

Some of Jane’s commenters and perhaps Jane herself think the problem with us “bitter” holdouts is the fact that Hillary lost.  When they notice us, if they notice us at all, they think it is all about Hillary.  But a couple of days before Hillary dropped out, I had a conversation with Peter Daou on the phone.  I was enraged by what the DNC had done and not just because of Hillary.  Of course I was angry with how they had betrayed her but I was more angry at how they had betrayed US, the voters.  I told him that it wasn’t about Hillary anymore.  It was about the Democratic party primary voters.

Let me address some of Jane’s excuses for doing nothing during the primary war of 2008.  Jane says that during primaries, it’s all about personalities.  Maybe.  But I have certainly never seen anything quite like the massacre I witnessed on DailyKos or the emnity between the campaigns that was generated by Obama’s people.  It was like the primary was taken over by the smartest guys in the room from Enron.  That was my first clue that something wasn’t cool about Obama.  His followers seemed too “ends justified the means”.  The campaign was very weak about reining them in, which eventually lead to the “Sarah Palin is a cunt” T-shirts. But the aggression didn’t stay on the blogs.  Nope.  It made its way to TV and print.  It was evident at every televised debate.  It got ugly when the accusations of racism were thrown at the Clintons.  I thought it couldn’t get lower than that.  That’s when Obama lost me for good, Jane.

But your site stayed neutral.

Then there is the issue of their voting records.  Yes, they were very similar.  So, I can’t understand why Hillary got branded as a “corporatist” and Obama didn’t.  On what basis was that label applied, Jane?  But it was even more illogical than that.  If there voting records were virtually identical, why in God’s name would you choose to go with a guy who had virtually no face time in the Senate and ZERO experience in the Executive branch? Then there was the whole Lieberman Resolution on Iran which Hillary was forced to vote for, because no one with an ounce of common sense would vote against what amounted to an opinion poll on whether Iran should be punished if they used terrorism.  But Obama was conveeeeniently absent that day.  Huh.   But wait, there’s more.  Remember the MoveOn Petraeus Ad motion that Obama voted present on?  How about all of the Illinois Senate votes on reproductive rights and abortion that Obama voted present on?  Or how about the fact that he rode to the WH on a speech he gave on the Iraq War Resolution but never had to vote on?  It was a missing data point.

But Jane’s site stayed neutral.

Then there were the caucuses that were overrun by bussed in Obama people and the caucuses in Texas where the fraud was documented and reported on at length by the likes of Pacific John, who witnessed it.  There was the RBC hearing of August 2007 where Florida and Michigan were punished.  Two whole states’ voters disenfranchised for no fault of their own simply because the politicians involved had a dispute over timing.

But Jane’s site stayed neutral.

Then there was the RBC hearing of May 31, 2008.  We keep coming back to this but Jane doesn’t get it yet.  The issue was not simply Florida and Michigan, Jane.  The issue was CA, NJ, NY, OH, PA, MA and all of the other big and little primary states where voters did not vote for Barack Obama, sometimes by more than 10 points.  We covered that hearing, Jane.  We had boots on the ground too.  We saw Amy Siskind giving an impassioned speech about what it meant to her to be disenfranchised simply because she voted for Hillary Clinton and didn’t like being called a sweetie.  And then we watched when Donna Brazile had the nerve to call Hillary Clinton a cheater simply because she wanted to keep four of her delegates and leave the rest of the uncommitted delegates at that status.  Clinton’s position, as communicated by her representatives, was extraordinarily fair.  Instead, that same committee gave Michigan’s votes to a man who wasn’t even on the ballot and by doing so, wiped out every other Clinton voter in every other state.  They knew this is what they were doing.  They threw the game to Obama, in front of all of us.

But Jane’s site stayed neutral.

Then we went PUMA, which simply meant that we were going to withhold our votes from the Democratic party because we could not reward this outrageous, undemocratic and fraudulent behavior.  Since the convention hadn’t taken place and Hillary hadn’t officially withdrawn her name from the race, we felt there was time for the party and the party faithful to come to its senses.  We hoped that the party loyalists would put principles before party.  We thought they would be alarmed by the amount of money pouring into Obama’s campaign.  Where was it all coming from?  What did the money people see in a less than one term senator who had almost no legislative experience?  Then there was the FISA vote.  We were glad to see Jane as a signatory on a sternly worded letter in The Nation.  But when we got to Denver to protest the shameful way the party was treating Hillary Clinton and her voters, where was Jane?  I swear, Jane, if you had woken up and smelled the coffee and joined us, I would have followed you to the ends of the earth.  What did a full time working person with a new blog and a ferocious out-of-the-blue insurgency know about organizing and making a scene?  I could have used a Jane Hamsher.  If Jane Hamsher had stood up and demanded a real roll call vote for Hillary Clinton, if Jane Hamsher and her followers had insisted upon fairness and against delegate intimidation, Jane would have little to complain about today.  Jane could have said, “Well, at least I tried.  At least I did *something* to keep the party together.  At least I stood up for principle instead of letting a tidal wave of accusations and incrimination destroy the good intentions of the people who voted for Clinton.  At least I could say I stood up for the working class instead of the bonus class who controls us now.”

But Jane can’t say any of those things because Jane’s site flipped from neutral to pro-Obama as soon as the Convention was over.

This in spite of FISA and primary voting improprieties and Obama meeting with evangelicals and promising them God knows what.  In spite of the overt misogynism of the media that Obama never decried or the fact that the candidate barely called himself a Democrat or that he lobbied for the first TARP bailout bill- before the election- Jane was happy to climb aboard the Obama bandwagon and buy into the scare tactics on abortion to whip the rest of us into line.  We were all supposed to come together in unity and support Jane’s Democratic presidential candidate.

And now Jane doesn’t like her guy or the Congress he rode in to town with. Who could have predicted that he’d turn out to be a corporate loving, weak president with an equally craven Congress behind him?   The nation was in such dire straits last year that only a skilled and experienced politician with a quiver full of well developed policies ready for action could have *maybe* put the country and its financial sector straight.  We got Obama and his billion dollar campaign backers instead.  And BTD is still citing the DLC as the reason why he couldn’t get behind Clinton.  Oh, please.  When Bill Clinton was president, the center was where the left is now.  To centrists back then, the Left was a bunch of tree hugging, Birkenstock wearing, Alfie Kohn loving, Noam Chomsky pacifying vegans.  We’re not the new Centrists, the Lieberman types.  We former Clintonistas, Democrats in Exile, last year’s PUMAs are FDR style liberals.  You would think that Jane and us would have a lot in common.  But Jane has some weird mental image in her mind about who we are and who we support.  We are not Palin people.  We’re not birthers.  We’re not tea partiers.  And we sure as hell aren’t racists.

We are Democrats who were set free from the party or set ourselves free to go our own separate ways.  We put principle before party.  That’s all.  We saw what the Obama campaign and the DNC was willing to do in order to get him elected and suspected that big, corporate money had a lot to do with it.  It was the neo-feudalists flexxing their muscle and we wanted no part of it.  So, yeah, we are not Democrats anymore.  For us, the primaries told us everything we needed to know about Obama.

But one thing you can’t say about Jane is that she is not a Democrat or loyal to the party.  She is the most loyal of them all and she is facing an uphill struggle.

My condolences, Jane.

Who is this Drew Weston guy?

And has he been reading all of our stuff in the past year? In his post, Leadership Obama Style, he writes some pretty familiar themes:

What’s costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

…

Like most Americans I talk to, when I see the president on television, I now change the channel the same way I did with Bush. With Bush, I couldn’t stand his speeches because I knew he meant what he said. I knew he was going to follow through with one ignorant, dangerous, or misguided policy after another. With Obama, I can’t stand them because I realize he doesn’t mean what he says — or if he does, he just doesn’t have the fire in his belly to follow through. He can’t seem to muster the passion to fight for any of what he believes in, whatever that is. He’d make a great queen — his ceremonial addresses are magnificent — but he prefers to fly Air Force One at 60,000 feet and “stay above the fray.”

…

The problem with the president’s strategic team is that they don’t understand the difference between compromising on policy and compromising on core values. When it comes to policies, listen all you want to the Stones: “You can’t always get what you want” (although it would be nice if the administration tried sometime). But on issues of principle — like allowing regressive abortion amendments to be tacked onto a health care reform bill — get some stones. Make your case to the American people, make it evocatively, and draw the line in the sand. That’s how you earn people’s respect. That’s the only thing that will bring Independents back.

And that’s where the problem of message comes in. This White House has no coherent message on anything.

…

And capping off all of these aspects of the president’s leadership style is his preference for the lowest common denominator. That means you don’t really have to fight, you don’t have to take anybody on, you don’t take any risks. You just find what the public is so upset about that even the Republicans would stipulate to it if forced to (e.g., that excluding people from health care because they have “pre-existing conditions” is something we can’t continue to tolerate) and build it into whatever plan the special interests can hammer out around it.

Unfortunately, what Democrats just can’t seem to understand is that the politics of the lowest common denominator is always a losing politics. It sends a meta-message that you’re weak — nothing more, nothing less — and that’s the cross the Democrats have had to bear since they “lost China” 60 years ago. And in fact, it is weak.

and then there’s this:

I don’t honestly know what this president believes. But I believe if he doesn’t figure it out soon, start enunciating it, and start fighting for it, he’s not only going to give American families hungry for security a series of half-loaves where they could have had full ones, but he’s going to set back the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by decades, because the average American is coming to believe that what they’re seeing right now is “liberalism,” and they don’t like what they see. I don’t, either.

What’s they’re seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass.

This is all stuff we’ve been saying since January 2008.  Obama is a weak president who is crippled by his inexperience, no earned political coalitions and a political philosophy lacking in core Democratic principles.  It was all right there for everyone to see.  Everyone, that is, who wasn’t blinded by his branding team.

I’ve never heard of Drew Weston before but he’s special enough to get a post on HuffPo.  He’s just two years too late.

PS. I find it interesting that Jane Hamsher is ready to entertain the idea of partnering with the Tea Partiers.  Jane seems to have skipped over the people who could help her most (that would be us), and went straight to the right side of the political divide.  Very odd that she would choose to ignore the people who agree with her on almost every issue but were ostracized by the netroots last year because we rooted for the girl during the last election cycle.  Maybe the taint of the false accusations of racism still hang around us like a nasty fart.   You’d think she’d be able to see through that by now.  We’re off limits but somehow the Tea Partiers smell like a breath of fresh air?

Jane needs to step back and think about that before she tries to entice the Glenn Beck fans.  There are a lot of us and we’re much easier to reason with.

Tea Party Thoughts

I didn’t pay much attention to the buildup to the “Tea Parties” that were held on April 15, and I didn’t follow any of the coverage of these events after they happened. I had gotten the impression that the “tea parties were a right wing phenomenon focused on high taxes. Since I actually would like to see higher taxes for the super-rich and corporations, I didn’t think I would fit in. It turns out the “Tea Parties” were also about other issues, like protesting the bank bailouts that most Americans, including myself, didn’t want. Apparently, the “tea parties” were heavily promoted by Fox News Channel as well as former U.S. Representatives Newt Gingrich and Dick Army.

I also thought it was interesting that so-called “progressive” bloggers like Jane Hamsher and Mike Lux along with professional organizers Joe Trippi and Zephr Teachout organized a protest on April 11 called “A New Way Forward.” Please note that the rallies were heavily promoted by William Greider and The Nation magazine. Greider even appeared on The Bill Moyers show to promote the “movement.” Here is a report on the Washington DC “a new way forward” demonstration, attended by Jane Hamsher. The video has a Republican bias, so tune that out if it bothers you.

Our own Riverdaughter attended the “new way forward” rally in New York City, and reported that it was a little small and disappointing, although she did meet two very nice young people there named Zach and Alana.