As Meteor Blades explains, more than half of the Blue Dogs lost their seats or were not replaced (if they retired) last night. Meanwhile, only four Progressives lost their seats and one of them was replaced by a Democrat who will probably caucus with the Progressives. We picked up a seat in Hawai’i that will probably add to the Progressive Caucus. So, I think that we’ll probably see a loss of two seats in the Progressive Caucus after an absolute bloodletting for the Democratic Party as a whole.
Now, there are two ways of looking at this. One is that progressive policies are not viable in areas of the country that don’t have substantial racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. The other view is that the Blue Dogs failed to stand up for this Congress’s accomplishments and actually made matters worse by standing in the way of things like the public option which actually was the most popular element of the health care reforms.
I don’t actually think this is the most important debate for Democrats to have. When polls indicate that the people were simply misinformed about on all the major issues (were taxes raised or lowered, is the economy growing, are we gaining or losing jobs), it seems obvious that our first order of business is figuring out to communicate more effectively.
Regaining control of the House is going to require that we win back a lot of the seats previously controlled by the Blue Dogs. These are seats where we just saw unprecedented white flight from the Democratic Party. We have to figure out how to recruit candidates who can win those voters back, and we have to discover how to communicate in those districts so that people are better informed about the basic facts about what’s going on in this country.
Now, there isn’t some obvious message from last night that the answer is to be more progressive. Tom Perriello and Alan Grayson lost just like Bobby Bright and Walt Minnick lost. It didn’t matter whether the candidate was brazenly populist or unapologetically liberal, or whether they said they wouldn’t vote for Pelosi as Speaker. Nothing worked in these districts.
In my opinion, the racialized politics of the last two years worked against us. And these districts are not going to change all that much demographically over the next two years. So, we have a problem as far as taking back the House goes.
As for the president, he doesn’t have any choice but to move a bit to the center. It’s a simple matter of congressional arithmetic. What’s important is that he sets the right priorities and makes a stand on certain core principles. It was an easier shift for Bill Clinton to tack to the middle in 1995 because he was a centrist by instinct. Obama’s remaining agenda doesn’t line up nicely with what the Republicans want to do. But one thing Obama should emulate from Clinton’s experience is taking credit for whatever passes and denying credit to the Republicans.
I’m pretty sure a government shutdown crisis will unfold around the budget, just as it did in 1995. I think the crisis will unfold a little differently this time though because I don’t see how a budget will even get to the president’s desk. The Senate and House are not going to be able to agree on anything. So, basically, the Democrats in the Senate are going to have to sit down with the president and decide what their bottom line is, and they’ll have to make sure that that bottom line is very popular with the electorate. And we’ll fight our battle there.
Booman a couple questions I’d greatly appreciate your views on:
2. is the single greatest failing of Obama. His failure to reappoint people who believe employment > inflation to the Fed.
On Bloomberg radio it was said that it was about getting rid of incombents and that incombents are no longer safe seats.
There are Republican govenors whose states are in finacial trouble and the Republicans in the House can’t just blow them off.
I think that the Republican House has the Republican govenors, the Senate and Obama to deal with.
This recession is different in that all the mergers and aquisitons, trade agreements and outsourcing of jobs is making for a scary time.
Young voters didn’t vote. They have no idea that they will be affected by Republicans.
It may seem wondrous for the Republicans now, but 6 months in, let’s see what happens.
It can never be as bad as when Bush and the Republican Congress were in power.
Christie is my govenor. I gag at the thought of him.
As for the president, he doesn’t have any choice but to move a bit to the center.
You are just as bad as the jackasses on TV. WTF does this mean? What, exactly, is the center? Doesn’t the repeal of DADT have majority support in opinion polls? Yet, DADT isn’t going to be repealed, is it? So how is that the center, if repeal won’t happen?
seriously. i was waiting for that one.
the president’s already a centrist, booman’s essentially saying “move right”.
He can hardly move left. The challenge is just to keep the government unshuttered. It’s not that his rhetoric needs to move to the right, but obviously what is possible is very limited and will only happen with the consent of John Boehner. His agenda is effectively dead.
the shutdown during the clinton years did not work out so well for the Republicans. Let it happen.
those bitter old white people that voted for tea baggers and the GOP deserve to reap what they’ve sown.
and yes his agenda is dead, which is why i wanted him to go big from day one and govern like a one-termer.
Agreed on that one Booman. This is lazy CW- remind how passing a Romney/1990’s Heritage foundation/Bob Dle 1994 compromise health care bill was liberal? I think a better way to put it is thus:
From 2008-2010 we passed Obama’s agenda on the terms acceptable to conservative dems and a few conservatives republicans from New England.
From 2010-2012 Obama’s agenda is NOT going to get passed due to losing the house and a divided senate. So to the extent anything gets passed, it will likely be the GOP’s agenda, but on Obama’s terms. This is essentially what Clinton did post 94. Because we have the Senate still, we might be able to get some of our agenda passed, in exchange for passing some of their agenda, but nothing in the last few days leads me to believe that McConnell or Boehner are going to let anything pass other than THEIR agenda (so it would be up to Obama to water it down and negotiate slightly better terms, but its still THEIR agenda).
There are practical budgetary realities that the President can lead on, and has (debt commission). His agenda is to shrink government and to do it sensibly.. He is aligned with Repugs on the former, can get a lot done and rightful claim they are following his lead.
Afterward, I truly look forward to a few Repugs having a Reagan-like conversion, realizing that they must raise taxes to preserve their political power and to do right by America. ‘The pendulum swings’.
There is no way they can hold their unified front as they have while in opposition. They have to govern now, although some will be happy to just stop everything.
We will hear a lot from them about how powerless they are against the veto so no one can blame them for anything they end up doing, so we should be prepared to refute this and perhaps, for once, get ahead of things and frame the debate such that this is impossible. Oh, and don’t even try to do this by explaining senate rules like last time.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/11/03/exit_polls_unprecedented_white_flight_from_demo
crats__107824.html
That is one ugly statistic…
I think this was actually a bit of a realigning election and the new coalitions are as follows:
In broad strokes, the GOP is the party of the rich, corporations, conservatives, and independent-leaning whites who want to preserve the entitlement status quo for white america. I think with the recession and debt out of control, non-liberal whites want to make sure that as spending gets cut and government shrinks, they’re entitlements stay in tact. The GOP wants to restructure entitlements disproportionately on the backs of the young and the non-white.
The Dems are basically everyone else and its a very weak coalition that hasn’t really been made aware of what they are supposed to be fighting for. Obama wants to restructure entitlements/address our debt in a fair way, with shared sacrifices and in a way that still allows us to invest in our future. No one’s really too excited for this very reasonable approach so the grand bargain that will be struck will be much closer to the GOP position. The challenge for Obama is to keep his “everyone else” coalition together and while still a long shot that this even happens, keep Bloomberg (from the right) or Feingold or anyone else (from the left) getting in the race.
My only hope is that the next two years force the GOP to show their cards and explain that they really aren’t for “cutting the deficit” or “lowering taxes”: those points are just proxy issues that stand in for their support of corporations, the wealthy and now, thanks to the tea party, preserving white entitlements. If the GOP is forced to really show what they stand for, our coalition (particularly the young and minorities) will be fully engaged in 2012.
“everyone else” will be a vast majority soon, so long as we keep any such efforts to protect ‘white entitlements’ to a reasonable minimum over the next few election cycles.
President Obama can take credit til the sun goes down, but the press will spin it in the opposite direction. It falls to bloggers and, dunno who, video makers, to get the message out. Everybody and anybody.
I read Booman and Narconews before I look at anything CNN has to say, if I even get around to it.
The bought-up MSM press is useless and a problem.
Obama is doing a presser now. He hasn’t learned a thing. Talking about how he and Harry and Nancy and Boner are going to have to sit down and see how to move forward.
yeh. That’s worked so well for us.
Jesus.
What do you expect him to say to questions that the press is loading to create controversy?
They will have to sit down and see how to move forward. Otherwise nothing at all gets done. What they say when they do that is not something that you or I will know. And a politician’s public persona is not necessarily how he deals with other politicians in private when talking about the details of legislation.
Tim Walz in MN-1st kept his seat in a part of the state that voted heavily for the Republican Gov candidate. He’s seen as a Blue Dog by some (don’t know if he caucuses with them or not, but he is a “balanced budget” kind of guy), but he talks a very populist line on a number of issues. Was a Master Sgt. in the Marines and a HS football coach. Kind of like Ed Schultz, but a congressman.
This thing remains primarily a communication issue, but there are deeper currents. The WH lost control of Congress and the messaging around their issues very early on. They came across as weak sisters even when they won. And when they did win there was no victory, just an accomplishment. I think that last is key. As the famous line from “Patton” goes, the American people like a winner. The Obama administration never came across as winners, period.
The other thing is the economy. It can’t be said enough that outside of the cities the economy is in its worst shape since the Great Depression. And the bottom line is that nothing the Obama economic team did was even remotely aimed at ameliorating that fact.
I’m so disgusted that I don’t know where to begin. Grijalva survived, barely, but it was a massacre in AZ on the state level.
Russell Pearce was just elected State Senate President by the AZGOP in the first round of secret ballots. He was the architect of SB1070.
Ugh. I just want to hide from the news for a week.
It is not a communications problem that can be solved by continuing to depend on the corporate media to deliver straight information. You can see that in the questions that the President is getting in his press conference.
The media is trying to stampede him to the right.
It is a communication problem that can be dealt with by what policy and what priorities are brought to the Congress, particularly the House to work on.
And thinking about this in ideological terms about whether he is moving to the center or the right or the left is going to trap progressives into ineffective advocacy and action.
What is lacking is not forcefulness but an effective strategy to break through the lies. And the GOP has whipped up so much enmity against the President as person that for him to be more forceful would do more than endanger his Presidency. That’s a reality that he has be measuring carefully for two years.
Which means that that strategy has to use the entire Republican Wurlitzer operation’s mass and momentum to throw that operation off-balance. And that is a difficult problem not easily dealt with by the simple solutions that progressive blogger advocate. And it is something that we must figure out how to deal with because it reduces the effectiveness of the progressive network. Without disabling the Wurlitzer, the truth will not come through, either through the media or through personal networks. Right-wing messaging is privileged and progressive messaging is stigmatized viscerally by a majority of the population.
In short terms, the Republicans put politics over policy, hurt the American people, and were rewarded for it. And frightened Democrats sandbagged even the President’s compromised agenda. Now the Republicans have to come up with budget and appropriations policy. And now we must become more politically sophisticated in our strategy. What is said will not necessarily point directly to our policy objectives. So don’t freak out about what is being said. Politics moves with indirection, flanking, entrapment, and not just a frontal effort.
It’s still a 74% white country so unless all the minority voters vote, you are going to need them. But how can you run candidates who appeal them without also stomping on the minorities or the principles of the left?
Didn’t the Dems do this in 2008?
If the difference between then & now is fear — which is basically an altered state, a form of temporary madness — are you asking about how best to appeal to the temporarily insane?
But it’s never going to go away. Businesses can spend as much as they like and what Dem anywhere and I mean online or elected, knows how to craft a market message that defines Democrats in their own terms, and grabs the attention of people? Republicans do this all the time and we never have.
I’m going to give a marxist-sounding answer, even though I’m not one. I think we need to stop worrying about “minorities” so much and start focusing on class interests: namely, the interests of the middle class, black, brown, white or purple, which, if things keep going the way their going, will eventually be a minority, but is hardly a minority right now. If the middle class goes, we’re a banana republic.
There’s an old saying in public relations:
“If you don’t tell your own story, somebody else is going to tell it for you.”
Obama and the Democrats have been terrible at communicating the news of their own accomplishments. Perhaps they expected that the corporate media would give them a fair shake and report all the good stuff that Obama has done– good luck with that.
The President needs to get out in front of the TV cameras at least once a week and trumpet his achievements, and hammer the Republicans. We didn’t lose the political contest– we’ve lost the messaging contest.
IMO, to effectively combat the Wurlitzer personally, he’d have to meet every minute of corporatist, right-wing propaganda with a minute of its opposite, all by himself. My understanding is that he does have other obligations — unlike Bush, whose media time was his main job.
Corporate media will never be a fair vehicle for positions that may run counter to the bottom line. Unfortunately, there’s got to be another way.
“…it seems obvious that our first order of business is figuring out how to communicate more effectively.”
Communication is what matters because it’s the root cause of the vast majority of problems Democrats have had. It’s time to face the fact that we have been out-messaged at least since the Al Gore campaign, to a shameful degree. I’ve never understood why Democrats accepted formulations like Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice, how Death Tax was allowed to enter the lexicon, or why we allowed obscene wealth transfers to the rich to be lumped together with Tax Cuts for working families.
The clock starts now–it can’t be a last minute campaign to ALTER a narrative, it has to be embedded in the heart of an ongoing narrative. Now that they have a foil in House Republicans and a greater number of lunatic Senators, Obama and his team have the capacity to start winning at the messaging game if they commit fully.
I disagree with progressives who think Obama has to burn hot and loud. Ed Schultz is devoting his entire show today to an extended series of rants about Obama’s press conference that he feels lacked testicular fortitude. I disagree completely that that’s the thing to do, which doesn’t mean Obama doesn’t need to make immediate changes (which I think he will and should do, pronto.) He needs to begin the 2012 campaign now and work overtime to create a new narrative. There’s plenty to work with, such as Tax cuts for the rich UP TO $250 and not a penny more. Trying to disprove lies, such as the disinformation about health care, is not the way to go. Setting the record straight on that can hinge solely on condensed facts about coverage for pre-existing conditions, lifetime caps, etc.—the things Republicans don’t dare say they’re against.
Blowing hot air is not how Obama is going to frustrate Boehner and his posse. He needs to build relentlessly towards emasculating them, and get them to squabble among themselves. He needs to get THEM frustrated and enraged and bring out their inner Paladino. But they can’t be allowed to be against abstractions, like” Washington”. They must be made to lash out against things most people are FOR.
One mistake we make is to think that what is needed is a loud firebrand to move the huge number of votes in the middle. That’s not what Obama can or will do, and it’s not what’s needed to get this job done. Having so many Blue Dogs out of the way will help, as will the disappearance of the absurd illusion that the ragtag majority coalitions we had after 2008 constituted anything resembling control of three branches of Government. That was total BS, never actually true in any meaningful way, and the fact that so many progressives perpetuated the myth, doing the Republican’s work for them, was disgraceful. Let’s not make it any harder than it already is.
Yes you are right. And i believe Obama is capable of it. We catch glimmers. We saw a little of it — too little — around the health care. Remember when he invited the opposition for a friendly debate and wiped the floor with them? He’s probably just been to preoccupied to do it very much.
Most Democratic communication strategists still don’t seem to understand that you reach the public with images, not “explanations,” There is nothing to be ashamed of in that, because any rationale or explanation can be formulated in imagery, and surely there are thousands of professionals today — employed and unemployed – in the communications field who know how to do this. I simply don’t understand why the Democrats do not make more intensive use of this huge creative resource.
But there is a more serious problem, and that is access to media. Too much access for the republicans, to a MSM that is rapidly losing all genuine professional journalistic standards, and not enough for the Dems, who sre present at best as tokens and can only “pay to play” with advertising, which becomes a money contest and which is just not effective enough anyway, as we see from last night’s results.
There has not been enough awareness about why GOP ads features Obama and Pelosi linked as “not our values”.
The Obama reference is obvious; it is a dogwhistle about race. The Pelosi reference is often misunderstood as being about a strong woman; it is not often remarked that it is in fact a dogwhistle for “gay” just because she comes from San Francisco. And that explains the visceral hatred a lot of conservatives had for Pelosi. Almost as strong as the visceral hatred they had for Obama.
“it seems obvious that our first order of business is figuring out to communicate more effectively.”
Yes, that was the first thought in my mind when I saw the results last night. No — actually the first though in my mind was, “How did the media in this country get so totally fucked up? Tell me, is there one other country in the world with a so-called free press that is such a pathetic piece of crap as ours does? What with Faux News, hate radio, the Karl Rove machine, Morton Blackwell’s cadres of pseudo-journalist disinformation specialists, virtually no liberal MSM except for tokens on a few major papers, centralization of ownership, etc., etc. — it’s frankly an amazing achievement that the Dems control even the presidency and the senate at this point. Why doesn’t this country have ONE major goddamned newspaper or broadcaster that can be trusted for reliable, relatively spin-free news and analysis? It is just pathetic if you think about it.
And instead of blaming the American people, I take my hat off to what I still recognize as the majority in this country who to a greater or lesser or extent are able to see through this thick veil of hokum. Frankly, for the amount of money the GOP put into this thing, you’d think they’d have done a lot better. Plenty of Democrats won, and plenty of Republicans lost last night. Just not enough.
“One is that progressive policies are not viable in areas of the country that don’t have substantial racial, ethnic, and religious diversity”
hahahaaahah!
Shorter: The overall electoral problem is with white folks.
I realize we can’t stand saying that, though.
lols
And the big problem with white folks and politics is that they outnumber everyone else–at least for now.
I would argue that the real problem is that the Blue Dogs and other “centrist” groups, who President unfortunately listened or at least acceded to at key times, prevented the Democrats from being able to adequately address the one problem that truly matters to many voters – the economy. As a result, we did not get a big enough increase in employment, jumpstart economic growth, or save people impacted by the mortgage crisis. And, to make matters worse, we appeared to be in bed with the banksters by appointing Summers and Geinthner.
Take away those economic problems, and the tea party/Fox News crap would have largely fell on deaf ears (or at least only on the 20% who are the far right wing nutjobs) and President Obama’s other accomplishments would have looked quite impressive.
The silver lining is that with many of the Blue Dogs gone and the centrists plainly to blame for this loss, perhaps we will be able to put together a bold plan for moving forward that will inspire voters as the Republicans obstruct, investigate, and shut down the government.
In what world are the centrists “pretty clearly to blame for the loss”?
I mean, that’s not on my teevee.
Of course it is not on your teevee, because no matter what happens, the media pretends that the center is where Democrats need to be.
In reality, it was centrists who are to blame because they blocked real action on the economy, just as in previous years they convinced a number of Democrats who should have known better to vote for the Iraq war and to follow the deregulatory mindset that led to the Bush Recession to begin with. In each case, the progressive position was right not only on the merits, but also would have enabled Democrats to win on the politics. Instead, the Democrats look like they won’t stand up for their convictions and that they lack the bold policy ideas needed to address the economic and financial problems facing the American middle class.
Right, but someone has to believe that for it to have any utility.
Well, you and I believe it, so that’s a start 🙂
More seriously, it is up to us progressives to get that message out. You have a blog. I have a blog. Many other progressive folks have blogs with readership much larger than mine. We all are able to call or meet with our Congresspeople, write letters to our local newspapers, talk to our family, friends, and neighbors, get involved with our local Democratic Party, etc.
No, we don’t have entire media networks dedicated to the progressive message. But we do have ourselves and our ability to organize and spread the message. Let’s use the tools we have to fight for a progressive party and future.