I have something to say about this spew from David Sirota:
[Al] Giordano, in particular, self-importantly lectures us about his “decades of studious participation in authentic social movements” and about his allegedly awe-inspiring experience in politics. But I just have to say: If you put pen to paper (or, as it were, keyboard to Internet) arguing with a straight-face that it’s realistic to believe that coddling Republicans now will mitigate their “This Will Be Armageddon” opposition to bills like the Employee Free Choice Act, then you shouldn’t be bragging about your political experience or acumen because you are making very clear that you spend your life frolicking with ponies in a psychedelic fantasyland that most mere mortals never even dreamed existed.
Yes, yes, Republicans will be cajoled with candy and niceties into supporting bills to help make union organizing easier, just like I will teach myself the Force so that I can levitate and read people’s minds and see the future and defeat Darth Vader and the Emperor in an intergalactic space battle aboard a steel-constructed planet called the Death Star. I mean, really. When you even suggest such an absurd line of reasoning, you make abundantly clear that you are so far gone, you have been so utterly lobotomized over the last 20 years, you have been so completely oblivious to the very basics of politics for a generation, that it’s hard to even know how to communicate with you, other than to wish you well in your unfathomably ignorant bliss.
At a recent appearance at the National Press Club, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made clear that he will do everything in his power to prevent passage of the Employee Free Choice Act:
“I came here to speak about bi-partisanship, but this is an issue on which there will be no bi-partisanship. … This is an outrageous proposal. It will fundamentally harm America and Europeanize America and we will have a big political fight over this.”
So, let us stipulate that David Sirota is correct to note that the Republicans will not be “cajoled with candy and niceties into supporting bills to help make union organizing easier.” However, we should be careful to consider other facts that are in the record. On June 26, 2007, the Senate voted 51-48 in favor of the Employee Free Choice Act (but they needed 60 votes to invoke cloture). Every Democrat voted for it. Every Republican except Arlen Specter voted against it. Assuming that Specter votes for it again when it comes up in this Congress, and assuming that all the Democrats that voted for it in 2007 vote for it again, and assuming that all the newly elected/appointed Democrats vote for it, the Employee Free Choice Act will have the support of exactly the sixty votes required to pass.
So, when Mitch McConnell says that he is going to fight like hell to prevent passage of the union-friendly bill, what he really means is that he is going to do everything he can to pressure Arlen Specter to flip his vote, to prevent any other Republicans from wavering, and to apply some pressure on veteran Democrats to change their mind and freshmen Democrats to take his side.
We are not talking about convincing the Republicans, in the aggregate, to support the bill. We are not talking about picking off two, or three, or ten Republicans. We’re talking about holding our caucus together and convincing Specter to hold firm. Or, we might convince someone like George Voinovich or Olympia Snowe to flip. Efforts by Obama to maintain a positive working relationship with various Republican lawmakers are aimed at future battles like this. That was the point Al Giordano was trying to make and Sirota’s rebuttal is not on-point. Of course, Al’s response might have been a little intemperate.
Update III: Poor David Sirota. He became laughingstock over at Daily Kos back in November and now fills the Matt Stoller memorial dunce stool over at Open Left. His peewings were apparently hurt by my observation, above, of the embarrassment he’s caused himself in his schoolyard attempt to mix it up this week with the maestro Nate Silver.
Now he’s dedicated an entire blog post to upturning his oatmeal at the children’s table in a tantrum over me (and also in response to our thoughtful colleague Elliot over at Election Inspection).
My favorite line from the Netroots’ resident fussbudget’s diatribe is when Sirota calls me out saying:
“you are making very clear that you spend your life frolicking with ponies in a psychedelic fantasyland that most mere mortals never even dreamed existed.”
(Translation: the guy from Narco News must be on drugs. Oh well, it’s not the first time that a few words from me have stung enough to turn a mediocre faux-progressive into a frothing chemical McCarthyist. Good thing I find it entertaining.)
Now, what do Sirota’s three boogeymen du jour – Elliot, Nate, and I – have in common that could be guiding these recent outbursts? Oh, right. We were three of the bloggers (along with the chess master Psifighter37) who throughout 2008, in primary after primary, January, February, March, April, May and June, and up to the general election in November, were predicting the results accurately while Sirota and some others screamed “Obama must do it my way or the sky is going to fall.”
My one little mention of him today (“Nate Silver 1, David Sirota 0”) apparently upset the guy so much that he couldn’t even read between his tears my explanation above about the Machiavellian nature of Obama’s moves on Capitol Hill with Congressional Republicans: that Obama is, one, weakening the Republicans in the eyes of their constituents in order to, two, hasten the day when they feel vulnerable before their state and district electorates, and will then have to play ball on future legislative priorities. He translated that to claim that I had argued that Republicans should be “cajoled with candy and niceties.” Ha ha. (Since you’re reading this here, you already know who, in this conversation, is humping the fantasy pony, or being humped by it.)
But I do thank him for spelling my name right more times than he misspelled it. And I appreciate being called out by such a consistently beautiful loser as Sirota, who has, according to his own Wikipedia promotions, lost far more battles than he’s ever won in politics, has never organized or led a successful movement, has no grassroots base behind him, and whose predictions reliably have failed at each step along the way. The guy is a near-perfect barometer, an inverted compass: when Sirota says “heads,” you can make a lot of money betting on “tails.” I know I do.
These arguments don’t need to be so personal. We can follow Obama’s advice to disagree without being disagreeable.