God help me, I was watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann tonight (hosted by Lawrence O’Donnell), and Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) was a guest. O’Donnell told her that the Republicans are threatening to bash Democratic House members in the upcoming elections if they vote for the Senate bill which includes the vastly unpopular ‘Louisiana Purchase’ and ‘Cornhusker Compromise.’ Woolsey’s response was that the American people are smart. According to her, they are smart enough to notice when a politician votes for something in one bill and then turns around and votes to eliminate it in the next. This was a reference to the much anticipated sidecar budget reconciliation bill that will somehow accompany the Senate bill through the House. It is in the sidecar that unpopular measures like the ‘Louisiana Purchase’ and ‘Cornhusker Compromise’ will be stripped out.
Somehow this exchange between O’Donnell and Woolsey crystalized something I’ve been trying to communicate to Democrats for years. That is, you cannot avoid Republican attacks by ducking tough votes because they will accuse of being a wacko socialist no matter what you do. Barack Obama has cut taxes on 95% of all Americans, and he hasn’t yet raised taxes on the other five percent. The top 5% will only see their taxes raised in 2011 when the Bush tax cuts for top earners are allowed to sunset. Yet, the Republicans are going around the country saying that Obama has raised taxes and will continue to do so. He might as well have raised taxes on the highest earners since most people think he already has.
The health care situation is an interesting case. It would be an inverse of John Kerry’s 2003 war-funding vote: Democrats will vote against it after they vote for it. First they will vote for the Senate bill that includes the ‘Louisiana Purchase’ and ‘Cornhusker Compromise’ and then they will strip those provisions out in the sidecar budget reconciliation bill. The Republicans will then accuse Democrats of having voted for the unpopular measures. The Democrats who fear this, fear it because it will be technically true. They think they’d avoid being accused of being a corrupt socialist if they just anticipated the attack line and avoided taking the first vote. They know the American people are collectively stupid enough that they can be tarred as a flip-flopper and a supporter of sordid backroom deals.
But, the problem is deeper than how a strategic vote can be distorted. The chances are that candidates for office will be accused of voting for backroom deals even if they don’t vote for the Senate bill. The error is in thinking that the Republicans stick to making distorted attacks that have at least a grain of truth them. But, they don’t, as the attacks on Obama’s tax-raising should make clear.
The Republicans are bullies. If you punch them in the nose, they will back down. Otherwise, there are no rules they respect, in debate, campaigns, or on the law books.
I guess this is why so many of us are still wondering why you’re not a fan of Grayson’s antics…
I like some of what Grayson does. I like it when he aggressively calls bullshit. But he does it in a way that is ultimately unconvincing to the people he is trying to convince. It’s more a style issue with Grayson.
Didn’t he just win a Republican poll in his district? He’s not going to convince Republican congresspeople, I agree. But if he’s shouting to be heard by people who have given up on politics, I think the jury’s out on how he’s doing until his race this year is further along.
And I say that as someone who was initially very turned off by his tactics.
I think you’re mistaken about who he’s trying to convince. The majority, or near-majority, that has given up on caring about what the government does is his target audience. He’s trying to cut through the easy cynicism, not convert the teabagger idiots.
i was JUST going to say that Seabe.
The one guy that really taks it to the GOP, publicly, relentlessly, and unabashedly, and he gets tarred as a wacko here.
Did I say he was a wacko? Maybe I did, but I don’t think so.
I have to say, though, in all honesty, that I’ve met Grayson and had a ten minute conversation with him. I didn’t think he was crazy at all. I just thought he was a little off. I’ve written about that conversation before. I kept asking him about his district and he kept telling what war criminals the Bushies were. I asked him what committees he wanted to serve on and he told me about some magazine article that was about to be published detailing his opponent’s historic corruption. He wasn’t responsive to me as a person. He didn’t seem to care about what I wanted to know or care that I wasn’t getting satisfied in our exchange. So, no, I don’t think he’s crazy, but he’s got one of those strange personalities that makes you sort of wonder what’s going on.
It’s because he’s after a national agenda. And I do have a little bit of a problem with that, but right now the fight for your district is so much at the national level that I can’t think of it as terribly important at this present time. He might not be serving his district to his full capacity, but I believe he’s serving his country enough to where it’s a full-out balance. Minus his no-nothingness regarding the Fed and financial policy, that is.
You’ve come off as distinctly dismissive. One senses a cognitive dissonance between that and your laments about the craven creeping Dems. You seem to long for an LBJ with the refined sensibilities of Jane Austen.
the Dems in the House and Senate need to man the fuck up. period. Grayson might be strident, but he’ll be going down fighting, not running away and hiding.
No, they won’t. They will keep coming with their BS, over and over again, so you have to be willing to stand and fight – keep punching them (and kicking them and biting them and…and…and…) until you stand victorious.
Then get ready to do it again.
And again.
And again.
I’m not sure Oscar. I think we are seeing, of late, that when actually punched they whine (see: Roberts, SCOTUS). They may come back and lie again, but then they need to get punched again. I think people find the whining very unseemly, as long as Dems are out there to put it in context.
They WILL back down. They tried to censure Grayson, and he didn’t back down. What did they do? They backed the fuck off. Any other Democrat would have accepted their demands and apologized, and then the Republicans would have gotten the groveling they wanted.
He apologized, and it wasn’t the apology they were looking for. However, they still backed down because they knew they were lying.
Yes. I’m grateful to him, if for nothing else, for his refusal to bow down and apologize every time some asshole accuses him of something. Sometimes there’s nothing better than a breath of fresh air even if it doesn’t smell quite the way you’d prefer.
I’m sure you all know that Woolsey is a target of the Firebaggers because she will vote for the Senate bill despite the fact it doesn’t have a public option, and she pledged that she would not vote for a bill without the public option.
The big punch at the bully is this: It is not conservative politicians who have failed; it is the conservative philosophy of government and economics from top to bottom that has failed.
All this party of “No” stuff is just rope-a-dope to keep you from throwing that big punch.
And not Democrat has stepped up to the plate and called them out on this — not one.
A progressives say it privately, but not publicly and loudly and frequently.
The project of William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Newt Gingrich, William Kristol, and friends has failed and failed miserably, as miserably as the failure of Soviet Communism.
Agree, although for many tiptoeing Tiny Tims in the Dem Pty, calling the Repubs the Party of No amounts to some harsh and uncomfortably impolite criticism of the sort they are not accustomed to uttering in politically mixed company.
So, I’d say the Party of No line constitutes progress for my party. It certainly beats various expressions of “disappointment” in so and so in the other party or threats to send a strongly worded letter of disapproval (aka the Daschle treatment).
In the meantime, while I agree that the conservative movement itself needs to be called out for its corporatist and antidemocratic qualities, perhaps we could also encourage some on our side to stop reflexively praising conservatives like St Ronnie of Raygun every time they get on teevee.
It isn’t the corporatist and anti-democratic qualities that they need to be called out on.
It is that on almost every issue those policies failed to do what they promised they would do, and worse sent the economy into a tailspin, locked us into two wars, and left us the largest runup in debt in history. And all of this was through the assiduous application, with no permitted deviation, of conservative ideas.
The ideas failed; to the dustbin of history is where conservative political philosophy needs to go. It does not work; the world cannot be reshaped to its beautiful Platonic outline.
This is probably my greatest long-standing frustration with the Dems. They’re afraid to take on Reaganism and conservative ideas directly and instead just lay back and hope the Reps give them an opening by screwing up the details. It ain’t just the pols, though: look at how much space the leftysphere spends on sex scandals and such and how little discussion there is about basic principles.
I have to disgree that no Dem ever does this, though. Obama has made some pretty out-there criticisms of rightwing ideas in some of his speeches — the problem is that they somehow stand alone and are not connected with specific policy arguments. Maybe once there are actual achievements to trumpet that will begin to change. One can only hope — some more.