I have to say that regardless of what happens, I’ll always be grateful to Barack Obama for attempting to get our elected officials to act like adults and take the people’s problems seriously. As he tries to iron out a decent set of health care reforms that will help millions of people, the right-wing is doing things like this. It’s ridiculous. It’s frustrating and aggravating. But it won’t ever change. Which, by the way, is why I’ve given up thinking about politics in terms of what government can accomplish and instead have come to the conclusion that the most important thing in politics is simply keeping the Republicans out of power. It isn’t an inspiring philosophy, but it isn’t based in cynicism either. I still believe in progressive governance, and I think most progressive ideas are good policy and good politics, so I don’t argue for trimming our sails. I worry that trimming our sails is exactly what puts the larger goal of keeping the Republicans out of power at risk.
But, ultimately, the Republicans are extremely dangerous and their ideas will hurt people both here at home and abroad. Look what they did to the fiscal health and international reputation of this country in eight short years! Dick Cheney is not uniquely insane and George W. Bush is not uniquely incompetent. They are probably slightly above average in their sanity and competence within their party.
I wonder when the Dems will wake up and realize that strong progressive policy is what led to strong Democratic rule for nearly 50 years. Even though Eisenhower was a Republican, in many ways, I consider him a progressive.
” Even though Eisenhower was a Republican, in many ways, I consider him a progressive.”
The GOP in it’s entirety was MUCH more progressive than it is now. This is a fascinating read, the GOP platform for 1956. Today’s GOP is unrecognizable from that of 1956.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25838
I think we tend to romanticize that. Joe McCarthy and his droogs ran rampant under Eisenhower, for example. We forget how horrific that era was. True there were some decent Reps then, but they were always a minority. The real difference is that the Reps back then had not yet fully understood how they could get the most ignorant and abused (white) Americans to sacrifice themselves for the comfort of the ruling class.
So you think it’s primarily a communications/media thing? The basis for the GOP hold on power, that is.
Hell yes!
I think it’s a strategic communications thing. Holding together that preposterous Frankenstein with the head of a social Darwinist and the body of the social Darwinist’s most abused (white)_victims. The one good thing about the teabaggers might be that they’ll make it a lot harder to keep the illusion going.
That’s pretty good but I still like when Gaffney claimed that the missile North Korea tested could have had an EMP warhead which could have knocked out power on the west coast. Obviously Obama is a pussy because he didn’t nuke Pyongyang. By the way Gaffney regularly appears on Hardball.
Sad but True.
Bravo!!! I could not agree more. Tweeted and shared on facebook.
So why couldn’t Barack Obama see this? And why is he STILL treating these irrational motherfuckers as rational lawmakers?
it drives me crazy, President Obama treats the American people like adults, too. And I think that might be his problem. He assumes that if he lays everything on the line, all the facts about rising premiums and how that puts an onerous burden on small businesses as well as millions of families, and how that affects the whole economy etc., that most people will understand the need for reform. He overestimates our collective intelligence.
And still conservatives talk about how Dems are “ramming it down our throats” – what is the fascination with this phrase? – even though, to progressives, his constant attempts at bipartisanship and consensus-seeking are maddening.
” how Dems are “ramming it down our throats” – ” in reference to that line of your comment, I think it’s almost sexual and it alludes to visions of perhaps oral rape and certainly one of dominence, which is the very point they like to get across. Backroom deals, perhaps a similar connotation.
I do think Reps. like to assign the most brutal tags to Dems period.
I also agree with you about Obama treating American people like adults, or even more educated adults, when in fact the lack of education is most evident.
It’s a curious drift from their usual stance as gun-totin’ rootin’ tootin’ real men, the aggressors to be feared. Usually they reserve the most brutish qualities for themselves and scorn victims and “weaklings”. Yet here they portray themselves as helpless prey getting things shoved down their throats by powerful forces beyond their control. I guess it’s just a window on how deep the psycho-sexual abberation runs in their mentality. Whole libraries could be written trying to understand how they contain it all.
That’s what I was getting at. 🙂
What’s the alternative? Better lying than the GOP? Louder appeals to the worst in people?
Some fights you fight because think you can win.
Some fights you fight although you know you can’t win.
“the most important thing in politics is simply keeping the Republicans out of power. It isn’t an inspiring philosophy, but it isn’t based in cynicism either. I still believe in progressive governance, and I think most progressive ideas are good policy and good politics, so I don’t argue for trimming our sails. I worry that trimming our sails is exactly what puts the larger goal of keeping the Republicans out of power at risk.”
Replace Republicans with Democrats and Progressive with Conservative and this is how Repubs think. This is how they justify their obstructionism.
yeah, I am aware that arguing that progressive ideas are better ideas and that they sell better than centrist compromise is the mirror image of what conservative Republicans say.
However, there is a lot of polling data that shows that progressive ideas are quite popular. For example, the health care bills produced by Congress are unpopular but the individual pieces appear to not go far enough. People like the bill once you add a public option. They support stripping the anti-trust exemption.
People also support abortion rights, they want tougher regulation of Wall Street, they want the repeal of DODT, they want to tax the rich to pay for things, and so on.
So, I think I’m justified in saying that the Democrats’ popularity is suffering more from a lack of progressive commitment than it is from being too far to the left. And I know that centrism is demoralizing to the base. So, I think my view is justified. We’d save more seats by being more aggressive because our ideas our good and they tend to be popular if they are defended adequately.
I don’t see how anyone can argue against that. The real question is, why don’t they do it? Surely they can see the truth in this — if they do nothing else, they follow polls. So what’s the problem? Outright corruption? Fear of winning? Or simply some kind of socio-genetic incompetence at communicating? I hope we get an answer to that some day.
Corruption/corporatism. A lot of progressive ideas challenge the status quo, and put barriers between rich people and their ability to make themselves even richer. That fact alone, to me, is the key explanation for the majority of bad behavior on both sides.
I remember years ago, wondering why my managers always wanted time estimates. Any sane software professional will tell you that a time estimate is one step removed from voodoo, and it’s actual predictive value is nil.
The week I was put in charge of my first team, I got them together so we could hammer out – you guessed it – time estimates. I still knew they were bullshit, but now I realized their accuracy wasn’t the point. People need numbers to make decisions, even if they are bad numbers that produce bad decisions. My perspective had changed.
I strongly suspect that many of us here, if elected Senator, would end up acting very much like our current crop of Senators. Maybe the compromises necessary for office taint you, maybe you get wrapped up in the bubble, maybe you have BETTER insight than we discussion it from the sidelines. Who knows. But there is a reason they behave that way, even if we don’t know what it is.
That’s… probably true. But if you believe Lawrence Lessig, it’s because Congressfolk are so desperate for cash to fund their campaigns that it has infected the entire system, and forces them to primarily pursue the legislative goals of moneyed interests. I.e. the Big Guy, in one form or another.
That’s a very plausible reason. You take a truly good Progressive, and tell him he’s 50,000 short of being able to win a race…oh, and BoA is offering to donate 50k. Does he just give up the race, or take the money and rationalize it as means to a good end?
It may not be that Congressman are born crooks, we may just have a system that “criminalizes” them.
The only way to keep Republicans — or at least the nutters they’ve come to represent — out of power is for the Dems to define America as a just and humane nation. They do that by creating policies that make those qualities the default assumption instead of survival of the “fittest”.
For most of a lifetime the rightwing has been better at selling basic principles (“free market”, “individual responsibility”, “meritocracy”) while their opponents flail with little temporary fixes. Traditional Dem values will win out in the long run if people basically like America. Republican values will win if they want it to fail as a society that exists for the common good. For the past half century we’ve had little to be proud of. That’s what Dems need to change, and change definitively, if they are to win the long game.
Hear hear.
“The only way to keep Republicans — or at least the nutters they’ve come to represent — out of power is for the Dems to define America as a just and humane nation”
And that I think is the best explanation for the President’s maddening insistence on treating the Republicans as if they were rational, and the American public as if they were intelligent. And there is the power of example and there is a natural tendency toward imitation. (Which is why the media and the GOP spinmeisters are constantly trying to coopt it.)