Al Giordano makes an amusing analogy comparing Democrats to the Simpsons and Republicans to the Flanders. Whose party do you want to attend? I agree with Al for the most part, but I just don’t think we can lay the blame for the fiasco in Washington on the doormat of the Angry Left. While there is no doubt that a goodly percentage of progressive opinion leaders have spent the last year sabotaging the president, they didn’t cause this problem. In retrospect, the Obama administration made some bad investments and some tactical errors, but they aren’t really to blame either. The blame lies with the Democratic Caucus of the United States Senate, and with the Republicans who showed remarkable unity of purpose in using every tool at their disposal to delay and oppose a deal or vote on health care reform.
The Senate health care bill should have been ready for a vote by September. We didn’t have sixty votes in the Senate at any point last year until Paul Kirk took office on September 24th. That was the point when the Senate should have passed their bill. It’s also the Senate’s fault that the public doesn’t like the bill they eventually produced. I think both Atrios and I have been saying for a year that the public will hate being told they have to buy insurance from private insurers. A mandate without a public option was never going to be popular, and only corporate influence can explain why the Democrats in the Senate would attempt to pretend otherwise.
The public also cannot comprehend why 59 votes are not enough to get legislation passed. The Senate has let everyone down, including the president. It might make me feel better to blame some progressives that I think have been particularly unhelpful, but honesty compels me to cut them slack. They were just as deluded about the possibility of convincing Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln to support a public option as Obama was about convincing any Republicans to help him pass health care reform. But they didn’t delay the bill, they didn’t obstruct the bill, and they didn’t water the bill down to the point that it was toxic.
The real blame for this falls on asshole senators from the Democratic caucus (and, of course, the Republicans). And the solution is the same as it ever was. Use reconciliation.
Later, if let’s be honest, there IS a later, is there any prospect of a sitting president campaigning against senators of his own party (or rather for primary challengers) to replace them with better members?
Until some of the Senate Democrats actually start losing seats for folding on their party, I don’t think they are ever going to change. It’s not simply a matter of Harry Reid saying “do thus and so, lose chair!” you need Democrats willing to enforce the discipline.
I think it would have been better to do that to Lieberman but Obama prevented that. But regardless it’s a small thing in retrospect-though of course Joe Lieberman personally speaking seems more like a boil on the ass of humanity every day–but is it possible going forward?
“… any prospect of a sitting president campaigning against senators of his own party (or rather for primary challengers) to replace them with better members?”
I don’t think that’s the way it’s done, but the president is, after all, the leader of the party, and he can (behind the scenes of course) encourage the primarying of that candidate and not bother to campaign for him, or at least bot go beyond pro forma.
Would it have made sense to publicly challenge Lieberman when nobody knew how persuadable he might be? It’s hard to predict what a weasel will do. Now we know. The problem is, the Senate didn’t call a vote until they thought they knew they’d win it. When the bill was weak enough, Lieberman voted for cloture, so there’s no clear charge that can be made against him — that he negotiated for what he wanted?
The other problem is that nobody knows what the Senate leaders can or can’t do. Nobody. This insane rule of 40 has to end. Winning cloture votes is no longer a credible strategy. Boo says you can’t change the rules. I don’t believe it. I think a majority of 20 can do anything it damn pleases if it cares enough to try it and take the flak. The voters would cheer. The media asses would moan. The Reps would scream treason. It really comes down to whose side they are on. Which doesn’t look so good for our side.
Firedoglake and Daily Kos are full of diaries about some legislative 11-dimensional chess game that will end the filibuster and get health care passed. But nobody is listening to them anymore.
Here’s the plan that I think is now taking shape with the congressional democrats:
Who knows, maybe it will work.
Blaming Republicans would always have worked, especially if they threatened a filibuster. Why didn’t the Dems call their bluff?
By my count, we never had the magical “60 votes.” Including Lieberman in the caucus is a lame joke.
I think the saddest thing in this entire affair is that most of the grief from the conservatives could have been avoided by one simple deal: vote for cloture on a public option-included bill, then vote against it for the final vote.
Even as late as the Lieberman fiasco, if Rahm had simply secured Holy Joe’s cloture vote, it would have been fine. But instead, all the conservative idiots thought their cloture vote and final vote were the same. They aren’t and never will be, regardless of what the GOP does or says.
Separately, I find it cruelly amusing that the group that Rahm has disparaged his entire career, the progressives, are now the only ones that can save the entire thing from failure. If Obama does anything else, firing Rahm for this situation should be the first thing.
This analogy might make sense if I knew who the Flanders were. Or is he talking about the Belgians, who seem to be in worse shape than the Democrats right now, politically at least.
Now you’re advocating that the Democrats
which is what has been advocated all along by the President’s hated foes, The Angry Left.
I think you need to choose a side here.
One side left the building, Ed. The 60 vote route is no longer with us. Remember?
If you go back and look at my record, I told people initially that the effort to do this with 60 would be a painful Kabuki Dance, that would end in failure, and that we just needed to ride it out. But then we actually seated Franken, flipped Specter, and seated Kirk, and we actually had 60 votes. At that point, I flipped too, because the preferable choice was to do it under regular order, and it looked like it could be accomplished.
Coakley ruined that chance.
Not that anyone asked, but if I were VP of Common Sense for the Democratic Party, I’d advise the following:
It makes sense to me, but then again, I’m not the VP for Common Sense.
Now, the big question is:
Why don’t Democrats do the obvious?
Oh, that’s right. Bart Stupak wants to shut down all abortions.
It comes with age. Al is right this time. I work at home with MSNBC on all day. They tend to have liberals who are angry w/Obama and a Republican. Do you know what this sounds like?? Two Republicans bashing the president along with the host of course. It has been absolutely ridiculous to watch. Now when they go to those segments, I mute. I can’t take it anymore so I know why Independents left. However, I didn’t. I just left their blogs, esp. HuffPost. Shrill liberals or “Progressives” need to stop. I don’t consider you shrill, Booman.
I guess the way I look at it is that the Senate got transfixed by having 60 votes, at least on paper. In reality, we never had the votes in the Senate for anything this ambitious.
The fact that we needed each and every vote in the Senate meant that the bill was guaranteed to be watered down. If the threshold that we needed was only 55, then we would have gotten a decent bill out of the Senate. But you will never get a good bill when you need each and every vote.
I don’t know where they go from here. They may try to salvage something by taking important pieces and doing reconciliation. Or maybe there are pieces that are uncontroversial enough that we could get some Republican votes. It remains to be seen..
It annoys me that they spent this much time on a stillborn bill. All that time in the Finance committee was wasted, and we could have told them that right from the start.
Sorry the hot potato landed in the House’s lap, but they’re just as much to blame. It’s not any wing of the party: White House, House, Senate, blue dogs, progs, labor, all contributed their own special piece to the humiliating removal from power come November.
The public doesn’t give a shit about 59, 60 votes, blah, blah, blah. They just see Obama, Reid, Pelosi and the rest of the clown car posse repeatedly hitting themselves with a hammer.
Use reconciliation.
What are you smoking? It’s D E A D.
Pelosi’s getting her bills passed. She passed healthcare and she passed climate change legislation as well as a scaled-down stimulus bill.
And she’s doing it while being handed shitty negotiating positions by the White House & Senate.
If they can turn this around, get a jobs bill passed, and real investment dollars flowing into robust physical infrastructure and clean energy she may well be the most powerful speaker since Rayburn.
She’s at least as good as Tip O’Neill.
And to equate them is pure asshattery.
I completely agree with this. The Left didn’t “sabotage” “the president”; he sabotaged himself with his arrogant, uber-naive call to “bipartisanship consensus.” With that clarion call, this weakest president EVER gave spinach to a moribund Popeye called the GOP while giving Kryptonite to the people who elected him. That’s the very definition of betrayal. Sabotage?! Just a few weeks ago, you were talking about how this WH was forcing us to “eat shit,” now you claim that we sabotage him. The vacillation hither and yon continues unabated. Please pick a side and stay on it!
We DFHs tried to tell you intellectual elite types that the people do not care about that “Republicans are worse” meme that tends to creep up every time Obama increases his odiousness and promotes his profound lack of any discernible principle or value. Coakley lost while she favored the Public Option that was already dead because this “glorious” man (who will be retired to the highly-paid lecture circuit in 2013, btw) just wanted to “get something done–anything.” This is what happens when one sells himself and his constituents out.
I’m coming, Tom!
Don’t discount the power of opinion leaders to shape opinions.
The thing is: Obama has proven that he isn’t a leader. He’s an feel-good, appeasing ameliorator (if there is such a word).
I don’t discount that power at all. It’s ironic that I always thought that you were the one who didn’t believe in that. After a decade of Republican misrule, the people, especially the people who elected him, didn’t want to hear vast platitudes and lectures about how some Republicans have good ideas that should be listened to at the table. Obama is still stuck in 2004, when he gave that rousing speech at the Dem Nat Convention where he went on and on about there not being a blue America, red America…blah, blah, blah. He was and is deluded, and he believed that he could fraudulently spin his delusion into straw of gold for anyone but himself. All that rhetoric is good for high-falutin’ campaign ads and on the stump but it’s not good governing policy when “change” was promised with a “new way forward.”
I think you need to relax a bit.
The reason a president needs to be careful about demonizing the opponent party is that he will need some of their votes. The pat response to this is that the Republicans never had any intention of giving him their votes, etc., but that’s only true on health care and a few other items. And, in any case, he can’t pass jackshit with less than 60 votes unless they change the friggin’ Senate rules, which can’t be done until the first day of the next Congress. So, he doesn’t have a lot of choice but to keep the door open to Senate moderates like Lugar (Dawn Johnsen), Graham (climate change), Snowe (stimulus), Collins, Voinovich, and anyone else who might provide a vital vote.
People have been advising the president to tell Snowe to go eff herself since August. It’s a good thing he didn’t do that, because now she replaces Joe Lieberman as the Queen of Washington DC.
And I think you all have been too relaxed and complacent and fell into the trap of believing that no sane person would vote for a Republican for the foreseeable future. He didn’t have to “demonize” them. That, sir, is a straw man. But he didn’t need to console them tea and sympathy, either. When Obama fails repeatedly, why does this “poor Obama” meme keep rearing it’s ugly head. “Poor Obama doesn’t have the power to do this or that because he is only the president.” That’s the epitome of weakness. I’m sorry that I can’t be as charitable as you.
Criticism is not months of calling the administration, corrupt, cowardly, bad intentioned, inept, stupid, weak minded, naive, and criminal. That’s not “criticism” it is framing, right out of the Luntz/Rove playbook, using the phrases and themes developed by Republican operatives and naively, criminally, believing that this display of manipulated distempter was a noble cause.
Well, it sure turns out that this administration has fulfilled each of those liberal stereotypes (and–wait!–there’s more!). You know that old cliche about the broken clock, don’t you?
Even if you were correct, the tactic of reinforcing the propaganda of the far right is so stupid that it defies explanation except on psychological grounds.
I had thought the propaganda of the far right was that he was illegitimate (in all sorts of ways), a socialist, a communist, Hitler, a Nazi, the Joker from Batman, a witch doctor, a guy with an innate hate of white people….it goes on and on and on.
There’s no way any of the Democratic or progressive criticism has reinforced that.
No. In the raw, the criticism is that “that nigger is not ready for prime-time, he’s an empty suit manipulated by kikes”. That’s why it’s so great to have “progressives” tell us that Obama is over-his-head, inept, naive, stupid, ignorant of the obvious, etc. etc. and that the power behind the throne is Rahm. It’s enormously different.
And, of course, it is impossible for “progressives” to make arguments like “Banks should be broken up and strongly regulated” instead of “Timmey sucks bankster cock” or “Health insurance companies have the Senate in teir pocket” instead of “Rahm tells Obama to bend over for Aetna” because discouraging the latter would be a terrible imposition on their freedom of expression.
The content doesn’t matter that much. We should know that by now. The attacks from the right and and “left” agreed that he’s a sellout, a liar, a loser. That’s all it takes to spread a meme, especially when it’s one that justifies the American lust for self pity.
Do you propose that we just whistle past the burning WH? We shouldn’t say anything, regardless however true, because it would only serve to reinforce conservative tropes? We should just “clap louder.” That sounds even more stupid.
What really reinforces conservative mantra is this Obama’s ineptitude and unrelenting bowing and scraping to appease these conservatives and “moderates.”
No what reinforces the right wing mantra is the unbearable ignorance and childishness of so-called progressives who probably don’t even know what agency Hilda Solis runs or give a damn that the DOJ is enforcing civil rights laws but feel that Chuck Todd level synopsis of the administration are good enough.
Hilda Solis? Your changing the subject–hilariously, I might add. And let’s not get ahead of ourselves on Obama and civil rights. As we speak, he is validating and embracing the worst of Bush’s extremism in the most craven way imaginable.
That’s a beautiful illustration of exactly what I mean. A powerful, active, and aggressive labor department is not compatible with the “bowing and scrapping” demeaning language you choose to use to reinforce Republican stereotypes, so you claim it is changing the subject. Ah, the Maureen Dowdization of the American “left” is very comprehensive.
I want to apologize for being a layperson. I don’t have MSNBC or CNN on my teevee running 24/7 telling me all the great things that Hilda Solis is doing for the people. I’m one of the people who aren’t interested in wonking my way through this crap. Yes, I admit that I don’t know who Hilda Solis is. If you ask that silly question on the street, I bet you that even the politically active won’t have any idea. And WGAF!
Also, what good is a Liberal Labor Secretary when there is has been no real labor in this country since Reagan? She’s there for one reason and one reason only: CYA.
Nobody said that except you. There’s a clear difference between attacking and criticizing. If that’s too subtle for you maybe you could just STFU because you have nothing of interest to impart.
Depends on the criticism. Rational criticism is always to the good, no matter how much it stings. Calling Obama a traitor, a sellout, an insuranceco tool, a Rahmbot, blablabla, IOW parroting the teabagger playbook, is not. It is sabotage, unless you’re getting all nostalgic for Bush like they seem to be in MA.
Of course, Obama is to blame in that he has not governed in a way that reflected the realities of the current U.S. political scene: the corruption of many of the Democrats in the Senate, the ill-will of the Republicans, the hunger of the base for real change…
Of course, the Republicans are to blame. Their behavior is evil.
Of course, the “centrist” Dems in the Senate are to blame. Without them, we’d be backslapping and popping champagne corks.
Of course, the “angry left” is to blame, at least those on the left who applied pressure in counterproductive ways.
…and so forth.
I enjoy Al, and you, but I’m sorta tired of blaming ‘ the left’. Tell me, throughout this entire process, who has been eating SHIT SANDWICHES other than ‘ the left’?
Please explain to me what SHIT SANDWICH any of those mofo Blue Dog Dems have eaten?
NONE from where I sit.
the thing that kills…that TRULY KILLS…
is IF the ‘the left’ had ‘ obstructed’, they would have at least be doing it based on a set of laid out clear PRINCIPLES..
I’ve said it before, and will say it again..
these sellout mofos….
their ‘ objections’ were never based in anything other than who they were bought and paid for.
nada.
once the FRAUD of their bullshit mantra of ‘ FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY’ was thrown out the window, with them REJECTING everything that was MOST fiscally responsible – Single Payer, Public Option, Medicare Buy-In…they just couldn’t hide that their ‘ principle’, was nothing but bullshyt from DAY ONE.
To me, this very common argument is based on a breathtakingly peculiar idea that things should be fair. The blue dogs represent RICH POWERFUL WELL ORGANIZED ELITES so their life in government is well greased and does not require the kinds of bitter compromise of principle that people who want to represent truth, good, and justice have to endure.
Things SHOULD be fair.
They aren’t but they SHOULD be.
Nothing peculiar about that.
But the point is the left has shown time and again it is realistic enough to compromise to keep the thing going. They should get some credit for that, that’s not fair, it’s political reality so they don’t abandon your phone banks and donation coffers.
Some of the national outlook spilled out onto the Massachusetts public, trickling as Al explains in the comments to that article from the angry left to the national columnists to cable tv, but apparently a lot of the problem was local.
Someone else in Al’s comments makes the point that states with a party as entrenched and powerful as the Mass. Dem. party must have been, tend to lose touch with their voters and engage in infighting. And they tend to just nominate whoever it is who’s turn it is, regardless of anything else. I imagine the internal politics got pretty stinky over time there, just guessing.
…The other commenter on Al’s article was CarolDuhart.
Here’s a quote:
Can’t disagree there. Have we ever had a prosecutor who turned into a decent politician? I does seem like the opposite of the mentality we should want in a legislator.
I have no idea what the recent corporate money=free speech decision will mean, but I guess I wonder if it will make that much difference. Corporations already control the media! They already own a majority of the senators. That’s why it seems the senate is unable to pass reform legislation: dozens of democratic senators have to extract his or her pound of flesh for their corporate overlords. This suggests how unchained corporate money will be used in coming elections: support a critical mass of both R’s and D’s to ensure that A)The illusion of ideological difference with respect to major issues is maintained, B)a majority or immovable minority of R’s and D’s is always in place to stop reform before it’s even voted on. So, more of the same. Thus we won’t see massive corporate funded campaigns for the republicans, because that would be to obvious, and why give them all the pricing power when there are dems to be bought for much less?
I think the president should propose legislation that would require all corporate advertising to be identified by brand name both before and after every commercial. None of this “Citizens United for Economic Beneficence” nonsense. Force them to put a big Exxon-Mobile sign in front of every ad.
That’s basically what Change Congress is pushing. It strikes me as an absolutely essential win if we are to have any hope of even holding back some of the military/corporate neo-fascist tidal wave.
While I agree with most of your post, I’d be harder on the President and the administration than you. All these months I’ve felt uneasy with Obama’s style of staying above the fray, being the adult, not getting his hands dirty while the congress thrashes things out. I’ve felt he should be giving much more direction to the process, spend political capital, put senators who want to be obstructive in the uncomfortable position of opposing the President and the leader of their party, and putting himself at risk at the same time of course. But he knows a lot more about politics and legislation than me, so I’ve been saying to myself, well, he must know what he’s doing; I’ll reserve judgment until I see the results. Well, here are the results.
And a bit more blame for the DNC specifically for being caught flat footed regarding Massachusetts. Sure, Coakley was bad candidate, but it’s still their job to anticipate trouble and work to win elections. Suddenly out of the blue there’s complete panic, and a last ditch effort sending the President out to campaign. Something went badly wrong, and I wonder if it would have happened were Deans still the DNC chair.
“”The president believes it’s the right thing to do to let the dust settle and give those on Capitol Hill some time to search for the best path forward,” Gibbs said.”
This does not give me much hope.
I’m sorry to say that this is Obama’s style of leadership.
I wonder how this county would be right now if MLK said, “let’s wait until the dust settles.” ROFLMAO!
Obamaism: Instead of “let us pray,” we get “let us wait.”
There’s a fair chance he would have said something just like that had he been president.
There is not. And that, sir, neutralizes any thought that I might have had that you had any sort of insight and weren’t just another Obama Apologist.
The Democrats are the Simpsons? The Simpsons I know would make a wannabe beauty queen bimbo and her knocked up drug-addled family their standard bearer, and then move on to a Cosmo centerfold bimbo pushing his American Idol wannabe kid to peddle her bumps and grinds at his acceptance speech. I don’t know any Dems that need to be diapered before they can cum, either.
I always did thing Giordano had the tinniest of tin ears. Now I know why.