With some obvious exceptions (Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle) the quality of the candidates didn’t seem to matter last night. We lost pretty much everywhere we could lose. This wasn’t about the candidates but the party labels. If you were a Democrat, you were in deep trouble. It didn’t matter a whole lot where you live, unless your district was ethnically diverse you were likely to lose. Powerful chairmen like John Spratt (Budget), Jim Oberstar (Transportation), and Ike Skelton (Armed Services) were bounced out of office. They weren’t beaten because they were too far to the left. They lost because white people have turned rather decisively against the Democratic Party. The exit polls showed that the Republican Party was actually slightly less popular with the electorate than the Democratic Party. But, what mattered was where the Democrats were popular. Chakah Fattah won in Philadelphia with 90% of the vote. Meanwhile, Democrats lost elections in all but one of the suburban Philly seats. Most of the Democrats who won reelection in California won with over 70% of the vote, but that didn’t help in a couple of districts with low levels of racial diversity.
This isn’t just a result of the economy. People still blame Bush for the economy. It isn’t really a reaction to this or that policy. The Republicans and their media friends have been relentlessly hammering on the president with messages that the president is not on white America’s side. That’s what the stealth birth certificate is about. That’s what the ‘he’s really a Muslim’ thing is about. It’s why they talk about the New Black Panthers and ACORN all the time. And this stuff doesn’t work very well with whites who live in racially and religiously diverse regions or areas of the country. It seems absurd to us, actually. But out in truckstops of Indiana, or the Wal-Mart parking lots of rural Kentucky, they’re convinced that the Democrats are just looking out for minorities.
The reason we did better in the Senate was because progressive votes counted. I don’t think we lost because of all the independent money, although that didn’t help and prevented us from being able to play any offense at all. I don’t think we lost because the Democrats didn’t do x, y, or z. The voters weren’t making a rational policy decision. This was tribal, and it was based on a very successful Republican messaging campaign that was largely subterranean and not even formally embraced or acknowledged.
I don’t think we should take too many lessons out of this election about policy or campaign finance. What we have to turn around is this perception that the Dems are not on white people’s side, because if that persists then we’re not going to able to win national elections and the House will stay in Republicans’ hands.
How do we do that? That’s the difficult part. I guess it starts with gaining a thorough understanding of how the Republicans were able to create that impression.
The system is rigged for Republicans, but there were a couple of things. The healthcare bill is viewed as a failure around the country. And Obama didn’t ask for enough of a stimulus with enough money in the right places.
With the deindustrialization of America it’s harder to pull the country out of depression, as will be evident over the next two years. In 2012 the question will be if America will want to actually work for change or look for someone to blame. Again.
this is where we are. The republicans are goign to fuck it all up, and then we’ll elect democrats, who will fuck it all up, and then we’ll elect republicans who will…
this will go on until serious people fix the problem, or the country will eventually break up. whichever happens first is anyone’s guess.
Well, no. Not really. This will go on until we hit a breaking point and then something will happen. Possibly a civil war, possibly the election of a fascist, possibly the election of another Lincoln/FDR type who can reign things in again for a while. Historically we’ve been lucky and when our country was at its two biggest crisis points we got Lincoln and FDR. Maybe we’ll get lucky again.
What I do know is that right now we’re not even all that close to the politically nuttiest our country has been, historically speaking. It would be tough to compare now to the run up to the Civil War for sheer nutbar idiocy, for example. Or to what FDR was dealing with during the Depression. We’re closer to the Gilded Age lunacy than anything else right now, but folks back then were on the whole even meaner and the media possibly even more manipulative.
People love to think that we’re in some kind of exceptional time, but we’re really not. America has almost always been like this, at least since the early 1800s after the first generation of revolutionaries left power in DC. We go through cycles of the nuts in this country having more and less power, and we’ve been going through the part of the cycle where the nuts have an inordinate amount of power for the last 30 years.
Any time I worry about how the country might be sliding downhill, I go back and read my Twain to remind myself that there’s no such thing as a Golden Age. Most of his writings are as relevant to US politics today as they were when he wrote them. And people then were no less stupid/mean/greedy/awful than they are today.
if you say so, nonynony.
i think that if Texas, NC, or kentucky decided to secede, no one would be signing up to keep them in the union.
both parties are so thoroughly in the thrall of corporate money, they can’t do anything without the say-so of the corporation. and you can see this reflected in the secret deal on the public option, and the reluctance to attach strings to the bailouts (as necessary as they may have been).
Thanks, pal. Is California ready to receive political refugees from those states.
no idea, but i suspect i’m right. Nothing against you or other tarheel democrats, but if the south was to secede today, who would fight to keep it? Same with texas, or pretty much any other state. that’s not a slap at the south: that’s a statement on what perilous ground we’re on right now.
for that matter, i can see almost all of the new england states leaving together. OTOH, PA would probably split in half.
Booman says, The voters weren’t making a rational policy decision.” Brendan says, “this will go on until serious people fix the problem.”
I think voters were thinking in 2006 and 2008 when they gave Democrats consecutive huge victories that this gave serious people enough power to fix the problem. But the ‘serious people’ didn’t fix the problem, and didn’t seem to recognize its seriousness. Sure, they puttered around the edges, but the truly systemic problems were not addressed much less fixed.
It became clear to even casual observers that the people destroying the nation’s broad-based prosperity not only weren’t being prevented from doing so again, they had become more deeply entrenched despite all of the ‘change.’ But no one offered any coherent explanation of or justification for why this should be so, the Republicans because their outrage at the bankers was all fake and rhetorically vague, the Democrats because … well… they believe in Chicago School capitalism too, just not as much, or quite as hard.
So, being stuck in a two party system with one degree of freedom, voters chose to give power to the other extreme; maybe serious people over there would recognize the seriousness of the problem and fix it. What were their choices? The voters are going to force politicians to recognize the seriousness of the problems and fix them at that depth or they are going to keep careening back and forth until someone fixes the problems or ends democracy.
My evidence for this hypothesis? The fact that citizens kept saying that, ‘we trust Democrats to handle almost every policy issue better than Republicans,” and “we know that Bush caused this economic disaster,” and still voted massively for Republicans. Yes, I recognize that there was a regional effect here, just as the South mitigated the scale of the 2006 and 2008 elections.
Rational policy decision? No. Rational decision-making in forcing someone – anyone – to use their power to address our deep problems and try to do something serious to fix them? Yes. The voters are forcing a crisis, and will keep forcing crises until someone in power doesn’t just feel their pain, but actually does something about it.
But how could such an agenda win? The Republicans aren’t going to do anything that fixes the problem. In fact, they can be relied upon to make things worse, and then try to blame us for what they have caused. And those mean Republicans and those big bad corporations won’t let us do anything that really works. Waaah!
Citizens play a lot of roles in society, but there is only one role in society that counts politically, and that is as voter every two years or so. That is the coercive force in democracy. Politicians confuse a few greedy corporate daddies who don’t care about the country with all wealthy people, just as they confound respondents to a poll today with eventual voters.
The election isn’t being held today, and policies don’t need to be found to appeal to the majority in a poll today. Policies need to be found to appeal to a majority at the polls at the next election. This gives you two years, minus the amount of time it takes to pass policy in the form of legislation to make it appear to address and fix the problem. It doesn’t have to be a big seller today. It just has to be sold before the next election.
The recognition of this difference is what would constitute leadership in any political party, and is the exact opposite of how Democrats have approached policy implementation. Either they do not recognize this, or they have so little confidence in their ability to sell good policy in two years that they don’t even try to cut through the 24 hour media chaff and constant Republican barking. Democrats need an alliance with the voters, not this or that collection of interest groups to stand in for the voters in the meanwhile.
Precisely.
A pox on both parties.
AG
“tribal” is a good word for a lot of what happened last night, especially in Kentucky. fucking cavemen.
No one could have predicted that being against desegregated lunch counters wouldn’t hurt Rand Paul in Kentucky.
Isn’t the way to show “white people” that the democrats are on their side not to elect a black man as President? Surely that’s obvious. It’s now fashionable again in America to be an unreconstructed racist. How fucking depressing.
what surprise me was that the head-stomping incident had no impact. That says a LOT about what kind of people live in Kentucky. At least the republicans.
tellin ya, another 5-15 years, we’ll be split up like the USSR. a lot of us simply can’t live with each other, and don’t want to.
Interesting analysis, Boo, as always. I suspect that you are right (although it would be nice to see some data, maybe from polling, to back you up). In any case, your account makes sense of some things about republican rhetoric that otherwise don’t make sense. For example, all this talk about “taking our country back” – from who? And the white-hot anger about the health care bill, which did not add to the deficit, but did give healthcare to minorities.
I, once again, think that the critical fact great increase in inequality, meaning that most people in this country have not seen their income go up in 30 or 40 years. Of course people are angry, so the question is where the anger should be directed. Democrats have failed to direct that anger upward, towards the billionaires and corporations that have gamed the system, in part because the exigencies of the campaign-finance system means that Democrats are in league with those billionaires and corporations at least 50% of the time. Republicans have filled the rhetorical gap by directing people’s anger downwards, towards minorities and immigrants. I was surprised, recently, when I talked to a high school friend from Missouri, who is not particularly right-wing, how agitated he was about illegal immigration – an issue that I have no strong feelings about at all.
What concerns me about this election is that I fear that as the pie continues to shrink (for most people) folks will turn genuinely conservative. In the sense that they will give up on collective action, and just vote for whoever promises to preserve their little slice of the pie. I think we are already seeing this, and it will get worse.
What concerns me even more is that I’m starting to read a little bit about climate change, and it seems possible that we are already in We Are All Gonna Die territory. It’s really really scary, and I think it may actually be too late to do much about it.
I don’t that there is any racial data in the exit polls. But I am basing my assessment on a variety of observations.
I’d like to look over some data before I come to firmer conclusions, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that we lost because the health care bill wasn’t stronger. I don’t think our base was depressed, either.
What appears to have happened is that white independents, both suburban and rural, voted very strongly against the Democrats. And the Republican base was very fired up. In combination, the only safe seats were ones that had a large mix of races.
I think you’re on the right track when you talk about our failure to direct anger upward and the campaign-finance necessities that preclude us from doing that. I think there’s an indirect effect of the Citizen’s United ruling. The advertising is part of the problem, but the larger problem is the necessity to raise even more money than before, and that makes Dems even less inclined to beat up on the rich.
Boo:
Have you looked at the results for PA-06 yet? Did about 10,000 people out themselves as racist here? Because Gerlach made his best showing, ever, and we lost 10,000 or so votes from 2006(meaning Trivedi got 10,000 less votes than Murphy in 2006).
Nigger, nigger, nigger …
This was how the southern elite dominated politics in that part of the country from the 1880s to the 1960s and beyond. That cancer has infected almost the entire country. It took a generation to accomplish, but it is here and now. Welcome to the United States as a truly low-wage southern economy. Great, I suppose, if you like grits and country music, and living in card board boxes on a dirt road. Step ‘n fetch it.
I have personally lived on a dirt road in a tent.
Having no other option isn’t nice.
This sums it up for me too. I think this is the narrative the Dems have to seize.
Robert Reich has a good read on this with his new book Aftershock.
There is some interesting perspective on the roots of how we transferred manufacturing to other countries at the Nation. It’s buried in the book review section and I can’t currently find it online.
You used to be able to make that — the gap between the rich and the rest of us — go away, by contrasting that with the much larger gap between anybody white and everybody black.
Not any more.
No time for sulking, I agree with Armando:
We need to start fielding candidates now.
And challengers for Republican house seats. Primarying an incumbent can allow for a Republican pickup. To offset that, we need to pick up Republican seats.
To do both, we need to move the political culture because elected Democrats can’t be trusted to make that case.
I agree racism has been a huge factor in this election. But just to add to the analysis, here are two observations, one global and one local.
Global: based purely on economy we would have expected the Republicans to pick up 45 or so House seats. They got at least 20 more. If you are looking at this statistically, comparing historical results, you ask yourself “what was different about this election?” to explain the significant difference. Booman, you already mentioned racism — but racism has been a factor in previous elections and not yielded this kind of difference.
I think the key difference globally may be the outcome of Citizens United, as we feared. House and local races are particularly vulnerable to this kind of influence because the candidates are rarely well known to the voters. And no matter how many times we chant Tip O’Neill’s mantra about politics being local, the fact is that quote was made at a time when Democrats were enjoying a multi-decade long permanent House majority, so of course House voters focused on local issues. Now that the House regularly switches parties, people are voting based on national issues.
And if Citizens United does have the ability to distort the House by 20 votes — and remember this is just the first trial run of the new campaign contribution model — then this country may be permanently screwed.
There is another reason to believe CU caused a 20 seat distortion: the Republicans now have at least a dozen more seats than they had at any time between 1995-2007. In fact, if they exceed 246 seats they will break the one-term high water mark they had in 1955-1957 (which was a momentary blip in an otherwise long stream of huge Democratic majorities) and have the largest majority since before the crash of 1929. They appear to have broken a modern barrier … this would be like a modern Democratic candidate for President winning 60% of the popular vote — a major electoral shift would be needed for this to happen.
Now, on the local level, it does appear that Senate races get a lot more attention and therefore the quality of the candidates really does matter. We all know that O’Donnell’s primary victory cost the GOP a Senate pickup in DE, and Angle probably did the same in NV. Well, that’s probably also going to be true in CO. Looking at the local exit polls here GOPer Buck did just as well among men as you would have expected given the wave election, but the gender gap was a canyon. Dem Bennett ran a TON of ads in the last weeks of the campaign citing Buck’s extreme stands on everything. Almost none of the ads worked — I mean, Buck’s biggest supporters were people on social security, and he’s in favor of killing it off. However, the one issue that connected were comments Buck made about a rape victim on secret tape when he explained why he was not going to prosecute the rapist.
Only that last point overrode the wave. That, plus the Tea Party self-destruction in the Governor race, are the only reason the Dems won those two state-wide seats this time around.
So, Tea Party extremist will turn voters off when a light is shown on it for all to see. The challenge is finding a way to do that against the tidal wave of Citizens United.
Both farmers and labor (not the unions, but the rank and file and non-union labor) deserted the party that stood with farmers and labor during the 1930s.
And suburbs, the great creation of postwar government policy, although hammered, deserted that which could preserve the middle class. And the investment companies’ message that Social Security will go away will become a self-fulfilling prophecy after billions of dollare spent on campaigns over three decades. But older folks assume that Social Security is still the third rail of politics.
How whites got the message that Democrats only looked out for minorities is very simple. Their expectations were that Barack Obama would act like Republican presidents of the last thirty years have–look after their own race and constituents and ignore the rest. And that belief was played to in Republican messaging and hammered home by true believing ditto-heads with their friends and family. The media blitz went rationally ignored but emotionally it was effective in that it kept folks angry, if only for the very amount of ads that were running.
Now Democrats are going to take several wrong messages. That they should move to the center, as if that weren’t where they were. That they should raise more money from large donors by selling out to the corporate state. That they should spend that money massively on advertising in media that finances Republicans. That the ground game doesn’t matter and the youth vote doesn’t exist. That they should distance themselves from the “professional left”, whoever that is. That the DLC should be revived. That Heath Shuler should be made majority leader.
It’s the economy. 45-60 y.o. white males who have worked at the same place for 20 years are losing their jobs. They are not retrainable and there are no service jobs that pay >40% of what they were making. These men feel emasculated and their families and friends hate what has done this to them. Add in the constant stream of hatred spewing from FOX news (which they now have nothing better to do than watch), and the answer seems simple. The Dems need to put these people back to work, and do it fast.
The biggest criticism of the Obama administration that matters is that their economic programs have been aimed at stabilization, not recovery. They have succeeded, of course, but that is no comfort to these people. We need 4.5% annualized growth at a minimum to win back people’s confidence. We have really one year, and crappy fundamentals going in.
Go.
The next kick in the head will be when Boehner’s tribe figures out how to rush right ahead with their version of business as usual (with a little frosting from Bachmann) and spin it on Fox so that their Teabaggers think they are getting their agenda. Since none of the Tbaggers read it shouldn’t be all that hard.
Great analysis, Booman.
The way Repubs were able to create that false impression is quite obvious. A handful of mega-rich people basically control the national discourse, and have for decades (they’ve even taken over the AP now, which is the most powerful messaging system). Their predecessors talked about it openly in interviews after the 1950s and 60s social upheavals, and how they can stop that from happening by buying up and controlling the message machines. Joseph Goebbels would be impressed by what they’ve been able to do these last few decades.
If there was an actual Fourth Estate, most of the public would know that, since Obama has been President, the national deficit has gone down, a lot, and that more private sector jobs have been created this year alone than in the entire 8 years of Shrub and Repub rule, by far! We’d be very happy today if people simply knew that. Instead, over 50% of the American electorate questions whether Obama was born in America. This is by design.
Liberal anger should be focused on the real problem – the MegaMedia and its owners. Al Giordano had a great take on this yesterday, if ya haven’t seen it yet:
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/4174/after-deluge-media
After some time to process, I’m feeling pretty good today in that things aren’t nearly as bleak as they were after the 2004 elections, and we’ve weathered the storm okay. We can build on this, and it’s quite nice to see some of the DLC/Blew Dogz gone. The trick will now be getting people to realize who the real enemy is, and stay focused on them instead of shooting wildly from the hip at every manufactured outrage du jour. Full steam ahead!
(shrug) As long as white folks say everything BUT them is the problem, the problem will continue.
Of course, that’s how we rig the game. We deny the very existence of the problem, just so that we can merrily continue BEING the problem.
lols.
There is so much projection going on in American politics that it is no wonder it looks like a funhouse of mirrors.
But the fundamental contradictions in America’s founding remain the problem: white European pursuit of empire and exploitation of slave labor based on a binary test of skin color. And both of those continue to undermine freedom and justice.
And to that we have added over racist Andrew Jackson’s objection the creation of legal “persons” with limited liability and then wonder why they are running roughshod over ordinary people with their private, restrictive, corporate governments. Every CEO a President. Every board of directors a Congress. And no courts.
But exclusion of real power so that only white people exercise it makes it fundamentally a white issue and requires a solution by white people. Progressive Southerners know this; it was the message of the civil rights movement. Without whites in power standing aside from crushing the movement and even legislating at the national level laws that nominally provided inclusion, it wouldn’t have happened no matter how many African-Americans marched, sat in, or rioted. Indeed under FDR it did not happen. There was sufficient prosperity and the luxury of conscience that let whites relax their privileges in the 1960s. Magnifying economic inequality creates the iron shackles to hold racial inequality in being. Because n hard times white privilege becomes more important for arbitrarily reducing the number of competitors.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/11/03/exit_polls_unprecedented_white_flight_from_demo
crats__107824.html
It is tribal, but the bad economy amplifies it. “I lost my money security, I want it back.” The tribal thing to do is take from another group to the benefit of your own.
You write:
I never thought that I would live to see the day that you campaigned for Hillary! (Not entirely snark.)
You also write:
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The Dems need to hot up!!!
Supporting empty suits like Pelosi and Reid while dissing imaginative pols like Alan Grayson will get the Democratic Party nowhere. Fast. Further nowhere than they got last night. The remoteness of the President’s approach, the perceived distance of people like Reid and Pelosi from the daily life of Americans, the elitist sniping of the MSNBC/Comedy Channel/HBO (Maher) triumvirate? These are the real reasons that the Dems could not compete in the message game, even though most of their message made a great deal more sense than did that of the Republicans.
Further lyrics from Trummy Young’s great ’30s song w/the Jimmy Lunceford band, ‘Tain’t Whatcha Do, Hit’s The Way ‘Atcha Do It:
‘Tain’t whatcha say, hit’s the way ‘atcha say it, too.
Professor Obama up there on the bully platform? Had he pulled a Jerry Brown and refused to live in the boss’s mansion…even symbolically, because it’s obvious that he would have to live there because that’s where the all the buttons are…had he and his family refused to live the symbolic,presidential high life, had he gone to his community organizing roots and spoken street to the American people the results last night would have been entirely different. Had he from his very first speech publicly branded the self-evidently real vast right wing conspiracy as the reason that the US has gone so far off the rails, had he kicked ass and taken names in full view of the American public from the moment that his election was certain, last night simply would not have happened.
Ain’t about “racism”…that’s just a convenient place from which to hang he right wing message. It’s about a good target.
A cool target.
Can he hot up now?
We shall see.
I doubt it. It’s just not in him. He’s so busy proving old-line racist white America wrong about alla them crude black people that he politely let it lynch him.
And us along with him.
So it goes.
Next?
AG
yup.
This is correct, but it’s also like saying “if up were up, it would not be down.” Because if Obama were perceived as even remotely capable of such targeted truth-telling, he would never have been allowed anywhere near the White House. (Ask Jesse or even Al about that one. For all their flaws, it was above all else their propensity for naming names that got them frozen out of Democratic Party leadership roles even at the height of their public popularity.)
The question at this point is whether Obama and Reid will go all left/populist, or move further to the right. Those are the only real options. And I know where I’d put my money. I hope I’m wrong, because it’s no longer 1992, and DLCism is a recipe for both political and policy disaster.
The one sliver of hope on that score is the defense Obama supporters gave in 2008 when detractors pointed to his relative lack of experience: he’s smart enough that there’s much more of a chance than with other recent presidents that he’ll grow on the job. Obama is still our best asset in place. Game on.
I agree. He must act now as a double agent. It’s a personal risk…it is quite possibly his own mortal ass is ultimately at stake. They do kill people, y’know. But he volunteered for the job, and he made promises in order to get elected. I think that he is more than smart enough to have been quite cognizant of the compromises that he made to get where he is now. The question is, does he have the personal wherewithal to go against everything that he built in terms of his own personality during his climb up from the near-bottom of the pile? Yeah, I know. He wasn’t poor. But dark skin in the ’60s and ’70s…his truly formative years…was societally near-bottom all by itself. A dark-skinned multi-millionaire during those times could get his ass thoroughly kicked in any segregated neighborhood in America just by walking down the street at the wrong time of day or night. I witnessed this myself even in supposed “liberal” cities like Boston and New York.
So…does he risk all in an attempt to achieve real greatness?
I dunno.
I don’t think he knows yet, either.
We shall see soon enough.
My bet?
He does not. And I cannot criticize him for that. He has children and a wife. Heroism is for the lonely. But…if he does, and if he succeeds…he will be remembered for centuries.
We shall soon see.
AG
Here in NY-22 — very white, working class, traditionally deeply red, underemployed, economically depressed for generations & technologically backward — our progressive Dem representative, Maurice Hinchey, has survived GOP challenges, extensive gerrymandering & in yesterday’s race, $600,000 worth of American Crossroads’ crap, as well as the thousands donated to his GOP challenger by Chesapeake Energy, a major player in the current gas drilling debate.
For the uninformed: south-central New York State sits on one of the largest natural gas plays in the world. Its exploitation (currently under moratorium) will fundamentally change both the economic & environmental landscape.
The hype is that this particular industry will revitalize local economies, help remove our murderous dependence on foreign energy sources & bring desperately needed revenue to the state. Energy suppliers & affiliated industries have had blue balls for this gas play for years. Our departing Democratic governor has decimated the state DEC in order to grease the way, while refusing to hear our communities’ concerns.
This isn’t only a local issue, but a matter of preserving some of the cleanest drinking water in the world for the metropolitan New York area, as well as metro areas in New Jersey & Pennsylvania.
Maurice Hinchey has been in the forefront of stalling exploitation of the gas play — because the process that makes it possible to extract gas from the play is not safe for water supplies (let alone air or land use).
It was removed from the Clean Water Act at the behest of Dick Cheney, whose old employer, Halliburton, developed said process.
I call it ‘bringing the war back home’.
Hinchey has worked to bring the process back under Federal regulation via ‘The Frack Act’. He’s actively joined with citizen’s groups in demanding that state regulatory structures overseeing this potential exploitation be strengthened. Moreover, he’s made it no secret that he’s doing so. He has remained an active & visible part of our community for his entire tenure; he remains accessible & responsive to his constituency. He makes it clear that his concerns are with our community; also, rather than simply acting as a one-member ‘party of no’ to regional energy generation & economic development, he’s spearheaded efforts to bring the development of green industry to our region.
Lo & behold, he’s defeated the GOP tide once again, in this, a very desperate year for a desperate community. How do you figure?
(Aside: as of an hour ago, the AP still hadn’t called the race & it’s receiving minimal media attention, even in the New York markets, although this was actually one of the hottest Congressional races going. Again, how do you figure?)
From Wikipedia (in this case, reliable info):
Please, Dems, let’s get a clue.
”I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not ever approve of distribution of wealth, and I am not a socialist, this country is not socialist, we are founded on Judeo-Christian principles. I will riot in the street if I have to. I have never been so ashamed of the way Obama has diminished the Presidency. He calls certain people enemies. He doesn’t dress properly. He talks about certain networks. He is just what he is — a Chicago agitator.”
~Woman from Virginia in Tom Perriello’s district
‘He doesn’t dress properly’?
What, he should wear a flight suit?
Oy vey.
It’s not the suit. For some reason, he just keeps wearing the wrong-colored skin.
It’s the not wearing a tie, a politician’s move to identify with working people, just like rolling up their sleeves or draping a jacket over their shoulder campaigning.
But that complaint is just a cover for the real objection — a black man got elected President.
AG thinks its all about image. He should get a country gig in Danville, VA or Anderson, SC and see what progressives here see. It’s not about hot or cool. Maybe in the big cities with upper class whites, but not here.
Of course it’s about a black President. It’s really a mind-blower — especially for a flag-waving patriot. She couldn’t be more transparent if she complained that he doesn’t eat properly either (no watermelon).
I do not think that it is all about “image”, Tarheel. I have Maine family and acquaintances that are no less racist than the most obsessed southern white country folk. Jews, Blacks, Italians, Hispanics…they hate ’em all.
But I do thnk that the part of the electorate that remains in play when all is said and done…the roughly 40% that is neither committed Dem nor committed Ratpub, the 40% that decides who wins and loses here on a national level…could be reached more effectively by real heat and a more populist approach from the Dems. (Call it image if you must, but it’s more than that.)
30% Republican, 30% Democrat…the lowest that national approval ratings go here for either side.
And a 40% swing vote.
Reach 51% of that swing vote population and it’s a win. Reach 49% and it’s a loss. Do you not think that this 1% of the total electorate that really dictates who wins or loses on a national level could be better reached by some heat? By some populist expressions of solidarity with their needs?
I do, and it’s not because I do not enter the white rural and working class areas of this society on a fairly regular basis. I go there often. I am not some cloistered NYC Sex And The City-type asshole, brother. I can disappear into any small town in America and I do so regularly when I travel. My old baseball hat, well used jeans and work shirt are my passports. That and my talent for dialects. I know these people. At the bar and in the diner at the very least. And at home in Maine as well, Fox News droning away in the background..
John le Carré and Elmore Leonard had nothing on me.
Bet on it.
AG
Yeah I’m 29 and I’ve gotten that from a lot of my friends. They are very apathetic about voting because they think it doesn’t matter anymore. Also a lot of my friends are just plain sick of bad campaign rhetoric and the candidates being just plain mean to each other. This is one reason why Obama won with the younger people, because he didn’t do a lot of that, and I kind of find it hilarious that mostly baby boomer liberals are telling him to be angry when a lot of people my age don’t want him to be nasty. He’s smarter then they are… I know that’s cliche but in a lot of cases it happens to be true.
Booman,
I like your analysis, but I’d add one more dimension…
As a society, we seem to have lost the ability to process factual information and arrive at a rational conclusion. I don’t know the cause, perhaps it’s six decades of bad TV and inadequate nutrition, or something along those lines. But it’s worth noting that we live in an information-rich country, yet are terribly misinformed. Voters routinely cast a ballot against their own interests, because as you suggest, it’s a tribal thing now. We don’t take politics seriously, we just engage in culture wars via the voting booth. Hardly anyone takes a sober look at the issues and the candidates and makes an intelligent choice. Instead, we have been duped by code words and subliminal messages crafted by manipulators and operatives like Karl Rove and Frank Luntz. It’s a pathetic state of affairs.
Unless there is an undeniable image, and often even then, facts don’t exist in political discourse. The right wing led the way but the corporate/national media happily went along for the ride (see the new york times and “enhanced interrogation”). This is the real problem with our media, not the blowhardism that Jon Stewart can be broderific about.
Voters cast votes against their own interest because they perceive that both sides will sell them out. Because that is what has happened repeatedly at the state and local level, and also at the national level. So the rational response that gets trotted out is to reduce the size of government, reduce taxes, and get the government (which takes from us and gives to the wealthy) out of our lives.
The tribal layer has an overlay of flagwaving racism, which is exploited to keep government from actually being reduced. And to keep tax breaks for the rich and corporations and a heavier tax load on everyone else.
Reduce the size of government but increase military spending and spending for law enforcement but outsource it to private enterprise. There’s the contradiction in the conservative agenda.
e the size of government but increase military spending [..]
Yep, that’s the one that makes my bullshit meter ring red. They’re railing against wasteful spending but the military budget should bloat?
Please. It’s a joke.
Yeah this is kind of what has been bugging me eagle eye. All most of the media wants to do is piss people off. So they will simplify a message in order to piss people off cause that’s how they get ratings. It’s true with MSNBC’s coverage too it’s just that it’s anger from the left. I just can’t deal with any of the anger or the oversimplification so I can’t watch any of it anymore. I already have enough anxiety and stress issues. I don’t need more. lol
We never had 60 because we have 2 independents, and we have a lot of democrats that are more like republicans, including Specter, who just became a democrat recently. When we have a big tent party like that it is going to be impossible to ram anything through and some compromises to the right are going to have to be made to get the more centrist democrats if nothing else. I am really pissed at the democratic pundits and bloggers, etc that kept reinforcing the narrative that we had this huge majority when we didn’t have much of a majority at all… Especially since the republicans kept filibustering everything…