Sometimes you can win politically in the long-run by losing elections in the short-run. Right? Isn’t that the theory that Chris Bowers is operating under? Whatever your problems with Barack Obama, would you really prefer a president John Kerry (with adulterous vice-president John Edwards in tow)? And, without Bush’s disastrous second term, we wouldn’t have anywhere near these congressional majorities. If you can set aside the immeasurable damage that Bush created in the 2005-2009 time period, we clearly are better off that Bush defeated Kerry. What were we thinking when we campaigned against Bush/Cheney in 2004?
Of course, you can’t play at politics this way. You have to play to win. Losing elections is not a sane way to advance a political agenda, even if it might occasionally work out for the best. If the world could be spared a second Bush term, it was our responsibility to do everything in our power to see that that happened. Ask New Orleans. Ask the unemployed. Remember Samuel Alito and John Roberts.
As for the elections that we won in 2006 and 2008, we can only imagine how paralyzed Washington would be if Congress was still controlled by the Republican Party. Even a few less members of each house would render Obama’s presidency impotent. I understand the sentiment, but we really don’t have the luxury of holding out for a progressive Shangri-La.
P.S. It appears that Nate Silver agrees with me.
O/T, but the ladies are hitting it hard this morning in the Senate, working for better women’s health benefits in the Mikulski Amendment.
I’m not looking for the perfect democrat. Just someone who adheres just a bit to the democratic platform.
Is that too much to ask?
Otherwise they can run as indies. An give up all that cash from the DNC, DCCC etc. i don’t think rethugs lite should run as democrats.
Just sayin’.
I agree that you have to play to win – overall. But with the majority as large as it is, targeting a few of the worst Democrats in primaries makes sense. “Worst” could mean a could mean several things in this context – absolute, relative to the district, and grandstanding/concern trolling publicly against major Democratic initiatives.
But, really, the problem is in the Senate. I’d like to see more ideas about how to un-constipate that group.
But Chris seems to be rather explicitly rejecting the strategy of replacing shitty Democrats through the primary process in favor of a strategy of letting the Republicans beat them first.
For everyone? Or just chumps like Bright and Minnick?
For anyone who doesn’t vote with the progressives at least 50% of the time.
I disagree with him on that. Bowers is taking an axe to a situation that calls for a scalpel. If the base was enthused I would say: chop away. But its not, and losing control of one chamber or both would eliminate any chance of fixing the ever-growing list of things that are broken or deficient in this country for two to six years. I also think he doesn’t take into consideration how the supermajority standard in the Senate undercuts Pelosi’s ability to discipline back-benchers.
He points out that not many incumbents have been defeated in primaries, but AFAIK not many have been well-challenged. Progressives did make a major primary kill in 2006, but CT’s lack of a sore-loser law nullified it. Perhaps progressives will never be able to consistently mount primary challenges, but semi-purposely losing seats isn’t necessarily the next best option for electing more progressives.
Boo:
So do you agree with the post right under this one? What else do you explain for comments Summers is making? And why does Obama(and by extension Emanuel) seem like a scared cat(see all the deals they tried to cut with FIRE and Big Pharma .. re: health care). Are they really that worried about those groups dumping big money into the ’10 mid-terms? And if the economy was doing better(for Main St. .. not just Wall St.) and they had passed a good health care bill .. what would that money get big Pharma? Us losing Bobby Bright’s seat? Walt Minnick? Who cares about those two!! Look what Dubya got done and he never had as large majorities as we do in either the Senate or the House. I’ll say it again. I didn’t read either book all the way through, but the feeling I got reading the parts of Obama’s two books is that he has/had a deep seeded need to be liked by everyone. Meaning he tries to please everyone. The sooner he gets over that, the better.
It seems to me that there is an appropriate level of idealism on the left in this country that is not matched by an appropriate level of political sophistication. The most obvious example is with a realistic assessment of what it takes to pass a major overhaul of our health care/insurance system. If I hear one more progressive complain that Obama struck deals with hospitals, Big Pharma, and the insurance industry…
He did that and the bill still might not pass. The idea that he could have just giving better speeches and yelled into his telephone a bit and we’d have a significantly better bill is a complete myth. And what I am seeing is a lot of frustration that ought to be reserved for our media and our Congress getting laid at the president’s feet.
He hasn’t been perfect by any means, but you tell me how a more progressive stance would have brought more progressive outcomes.
His economic team needs to be fired, and they probably will be. They were useful for the immediate problem of staving off panic in the markets. Their usefulness now is in the rear view window.
I’ll ask you this question, since some of us want Obama to be more like the guy(except the Vietnam/Afghanistan part). LBJ was known to use whatever means was necessary to get what he wanted. He sweet talked when he had to. He wasn’t above using threats if necessary. Can Obama use threats? Will anyone take him seriously if he does? It’s why I laugh when all the Righties whine about Obama playing Chicago politics. It’s because Obama is afraid to play hardball against anyone but Progressives.
You know LBJ operated what passed for the DSCC as a slush fund, right? LBJ held the purse strings. FDR once tried to support primary challengers to his own party in Congress and they all lost and Roosevelt was weakened and embarrassed. LBJ learned some lessons from that and was able to bully people more directly. But those days are gone. We have clearly defined groups: DNC, DSCC, DCCC that are not doling out money based on Obama’s latest temper tantrum. For the most part, that’s a good thing.
We have clearly defined groups: DNC, DSCC, DCCC that are not doling out money based on Obama’s latest temper tantrum.
Maybe not Obama’s but probably Rahm’s.
He did that and the bill still might not pass.
Anyone could have told you that it was a bad idea for him to jump in bed with Big Pharma and FIRE. Did you really think Congress was gonna go along with it? Lets face it, we’d be a lot better off if Kennedy was still alive. We’re screwed now that he’s gone.
Yes. Clinton’s adultery never bothered me. This is Illinois. We are used to politicians being swine. What counts is what they do for you. Obama is a nice guy, but that doesn’t count either.
What counts is his war, economic, and health care policies being straight out of McCain’s playbook. He is my family’s enemy, no matter how nice he is personally.
would you really prefer a president John Kerry (with adulterous vice-president John Edwards in tow)?
Does Edwards’ adultery really matter? There are no saints in politics. Hell, according Catholic teaching, Kerry is an adulterer too(Since he’s on his 2nd marriage). I suppose you forgot what Edwards said during the campaign that everyone ought to remember. And which Obama isn’t doing right now.
I’m increasingly skeptical that elections can change anything fundamental. Or perhaps, the more powerful the elected position, the less likely that any fundamental change will flow from it. Our financial system is broken, but a reform approach that recognizes that fact and seeks to fundamentally alter the current dispensation is verboten by Obama’s team. Same with health care, and same with our foreign policy “security state”. In each area Obama seeks to honor existing power structures while promising changes that recognize the objective fact of these systems failure/corruption. But you can’t do both.
People look at FDR as the model of an elected official bringing about progressive change, but that’s probably simplistic. I wonder if whatever change he brought about was only made possible by the spectacular and undeniable failure of the system he was changing. Anyway, I think people looking for societal change might do better to focus their energy on non-electoral movements, as with the civil-rights and environmental movements. Politicians are always corruptible.
“I’m increasingly skeptical that elections can change anything fundamental.”
An easy conclusion to come to when an election is little more than a contest of who can make the most people believe the biggest lies.
Besides the obvious political reasons why institutions resist change, I think the whole electoral process winds up being a big sideshow that has little to do with articulating our real problems and conducting an honest debate about solutions (to put it very mildly).
I don’t see the point of talking about Obama/Kerry when Chris was talking about Congress. I doubt that he’d say what you “quote”. The presidency is one person. A shift in Congress is a few percentage points. Big difference.
The assumption of critiques like Bowers’s is that Obama’s presidency and the Congressional majority IS impotent. I don’t agree, but the frustration is understandable. Bowers is not urging any particular action that I can see, just expressing his ambivalence about how bad the polling news would be for progressives in the long run. I don’t see how it can be argued that no one should be disappointed by what the “veto-proof” Congress has accomplished so far, or by its lack of imagination and inability to sell core Dem principles.
Where I get off the train is Bowers’s assumption that the polls at this point mean something. It seems like a waste of time drawing conclusions about something this fluid. Surely it’s obvious to him that if the current administration/Congress accomplish good things (and I think even the compromised HCR will be the start of an excellent thing) next year those numbers will become entirely irrelevant.
The real underlying issue is that what passes for the Left in this country has still not found a way to influence any party as effectively as the extreme Right does with the GOP. Nor to get the kind of media attention/deference that even the most idiotic/dishonest Republican does. Until we’re ready and able to win deep electoral reform — at a minimum — the frustration Chris expresses will continue no matter how many Dems get elected.
I’m skeptical of Bowers’ strategy because it trades certain partisan losses now for speculative progressive gains in the future. We shouldn’t overestimate our ability to foresee consequences. At the very least, a strategy like this needs to be much more targeted than “let the GOP take out mostly Blue Dogs”. Targeting the DCCC for recruiting Blue Dogs would probably be a better route, but I see every sign Obama supports that (it is largely Rahm’s doing after all), so it would be difficult.
But, though I preferred Dean, I would take Kerry over Obama. Obama started as a community organizer, but Kerry started by founding Vietnam Veterans against the War. His overall record was much more progressive than Obama’s; in fact, Obama’s was so brief, it was hard to say how progressive he was, and he seems to be less so than many thought. With Kerry, we had a better idea what we were getting. And I don’t care that Edwards, like Clinton, FDR, JFK, and MLK, couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. Veeps are expendable if it comes to it.
Besides valorizing the second Bush term for giving us Obama is saying Obama is worth the Katrina dead, the later American and Iraqi dead, the vital time and momentum lost in fighting global warming, and the financial crisis. I wouldn’t want to make that case.