Thinking about this piece by Armando, I was suddenly reminded of something. During the 1990’s, when the Republicans were attacking Bill Clinton for being a non-inhaling pot-smoker and a draft-dodger and a philanderer, a lot of analysts saw it as little more than a continuation of the cultural wars of the 1960’s, a self-obsessed battle among aging Baby Boomers. People my age, born at the very end of the 1960’s and beginning of the 1970’s who were beginning to vote for the first time, kept hoping that this stale debate would burn itself out. We didn’t want to fight about school prayer or Roe v. Wade or who fought in the war.
But things didn’t get better when Obama became president. Our generation is starting to dominate is some ways. You can see it in how attitudes have completely changed on gay marriage and marijuana use and interracial dating. You can see it in the demographic makeup of the Obama coalition. But the behavior of the Republicans has just continued to get worse.
This actually has come as a surprise to me, or at least a disappointment. Because I really do believe that Obama was always right that there is more stuff that unites Americans than divides us, and that the disagreements between the parties are exaggerations or caricatures of how most people think. There really is a giant middle in this country that is made up of different kinds of people, most indifferent, but some genuinely moderate, who have no more use for Bernie Sanders than they have for Rand Paul or Ted Cruz.
These aren’t the most informed people in the world, and they certainly aren’t sitting on a hidden mine of brilliant policy proposals. You can’t look to them for real wisdom. But you can win their allegiance, and that can bring you the power to win national elections and perhaps even to pass a bill or two once you get there.
I think what annoys a lot of progressives about any kind of post-partisan talk is not just that it fails to unreservedly take their side but that many of the people proposing post-partisanship seem to think that the correct decisions are right smack dab in the middle between what some mainstream Democrat like Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia thinks and whatever unhinged lunacy is being blasted across right-wing radio. I never thought that Obama thought like that. I thought Obama knew how to build a winning coalition and that he thought that a winning coalition would be able to do more to pressure the Republicans than actually turned out to be the case.
After all, a winning political coalition says something pretty definitive about the culture of the country. If a previously losing coalition becomes a winning one, that means the culture has changed and a new politics should be possible. But Obama seems not to have won with a previously losing coalition so much as he discovered a winning coalition that had never been tried before.
And then he had to try to get it to work in the midst of the biggest economic collapse since the 1930’s. I don’t think we can ever forget that things would have been different in unknowable ways if Obama had taken office in good times.
Still, as the country changes, the Republicans show very few signs of moving with it, and many signs that even conservatives who weren’t alive in the 1960’s will never get over that decade.
The political dynamic has changed. It’s not about finding a majority coalition of the voters. It’s about getting enough cash from corporate donors to saturate the airwaves and brain-washing a majority into voting for you.
Molly Ivins once asked her former NY Times colleague William Safire why the Republican Party hated Bill Clinton so much?
He told her that Bill Clinton reminded conservatives of the 60’s ….. which is why their opposition was so visceral.
Right. That was my point. That narrative did a lot of work during the 1990’s but maybe it was wrong. Unless Obama reminds them of the 1960’s, too, I think that was just an excuse. It’s not personal so much as tactical.
Unless Obama reminds them of the 1960’s, too, I think that was just an excuse.
Duh, of course he does!! Huey Newton. Stokely Carmichael. Malcolm X. You name it!
Amen.
I don’t think it is a mere coincidence that MLK Jr. was branded a “communist” in the 60s and Obama is branded a “socialist” now.
But civil rights for African Americans may be the biggest issue that had echoes in the 60s, during Clinton years and now.
Personally I think that many Repubs are pulling out the stops (in the rank and file also) to make sure the Obama legacy is tarnished. The last thing they can tolerate is a successful person of color for the leader of the free world. They can’t have him looking better than Dubya or Nixon.
And they will do their damnedest to make sure Americans forget that Obama was handed two wars, the worst financial crisis in 70 years and a horrific deficit. They HAVE to make him look incompetent so they sabotage his administration.
They have already lost. It’s spite and a gross overestimation of their own power that keep them going.
about Obama’s second inaugural speech was the extent that he sought to extend the 60’s Civil Rights Movement to Gay Rights – and by inference was embracing the 60’s in a more general way.
On economics Obama isn’t very liberal – and even if he could do something about our issues his agenda is too limited (though better by miles than the GOP). But outside of economics he is more a child of the 60’s than people think.
Nobody who has said that he admires Reagan is a child of the sixties. Get real.
Obama himself has written:
That’s what you’re doing.
what Obama said about Reagan completely out of context.
Here’s some context for you:
Matt Stoller: Obama’s Admiration of Ronald Reagan
So Obama has explicitly condemned the sixties, and yet you think he is “a child of the sixties”. This is going beyond projection. It is desperate denial.
where are you from, Alexander?
I’m from the northeast (Long Island and New England). Why do you ask?
I seem to remember you telling me otherwise.
Regardless, you don’t seem to have any kind of personal reference to really relate to the president.
Did you have a hippy mother who had a brief interracial relationship in college with your father when that was a taboo in 49 states?
Did you go to schools like Occidental, Columbia, Harvard, or (like Michele) Princeton?
Did you live in NYC during the 1980’s or Chicago in the 1990’s?
Do you know what it’s like to live on the Upper West Side or in Cambridge or in Hyde Park? Do you know how those areas reacted to the 1960’s? To Reagan?
Do you know that most of Obama’s best friends in New York were Pakistani kids whose parents formed the upper crust of Pakistani society?
Or that his best friends in Hawaii were a multiracial group of athlete/stoners?
Let me tell you something.
I share a lot of that culture with Obama, and I don’t think you share much at all. And your attempts at remote psychology strike me as totally off-base.
You neither understand the deep progressive assumptions of the president, nor do you understand he deep discomfort with the culture he grew up within. The resentment toward his overly idealistic and absent and less than responsible mother. The sting of slights felt at the hands of the nation’s elite at our most elite and intellectual institutions and communities. The rebukes from “authentic” black Americans whose ancestors felt the sting of slavery and who had none of the advantages of Obama’s white family. The sense of fitting in nowhere. The allure of victimization. The guilt of privilege. The sense of abandonment from his father.
You reduce that all to a political comment to and editorial board in a campaign season while seeking an endorsement.
That’s pathetic.
Getting a little personal, aren’t we? And yes, I went to two Ivy League schools, one for college and one for grad school, although I don’t see what that has to do with anything. And I did spend a lot of time in New York city in the early 1980s. What is your argument, exactly? Because you assume I didn’t live in Cambridge (I lived there for more than a decade), I don’t share any “culture with Obama”? Someone who has not lived in Princeton or Cambridge, or gone to an Ivy League school, has no right to criticize Obama, or “the president” as you call him? That seems to be what you’re saying.
As far as I understand the rest of your comment, you are saying that Obama was a victim, the implication being that we should feel sorry for him and therefore accept his not being significantly different on anything from George Bush, except for gay rights.
Did you read your comment before you posted it? What is an impartial observer to make of your phrase “the deep progressive assumptions of the president”??? Sounds like adulation to me.
You know, I’ve never found that appealing to “an impartial observer” under the assumption that it would support your argument to be terribly convincing. It feels too much like an appeal to authority without laying any groundwork.
You seem to have lived everywhere it is convenient for you to have lived depending on the argument.
And then he had to try to get it to work in the midst of the biggest economic collapse since the 1930’s. I don’t think we can ever forget that things would have been different in unknowable ways if Obama had taken office in good times.
And much of the change that Dems failed to bring round with our big majorities during Obama’s first term may again be available after 2014, or 2016, depending on how well we do. In fact, if Hilary wins with big majorities in 2016 I predict a second explosion of progressive legislation, similar to that of the 111th Congress, if only due to the fact that a lot of urgently needed legislation has been temporarily blocked by the Republicans in Congress. But that policy block can’t hold forever – like a dam, it will eventually explode.
ObamaCare isn’t progressive legislation. Leaving the insurance industry in charge of health care isn’t very progressive.
I guess for some people it’s the 1960s. For others, it’s always 2009.
I see you can’t tell the difference between progressive legislation and legislation which is better than the status quo at the time.
Did you just refute your own point?
Nope. my bad. I don’t like ObamaCare as the solution to our health care mess but its better than the status quo and single payer doesn’t seem all that likely.
I’m kinda excited for the Vermont single payer experiment. Could be similar to how it all started in Canada.
JFK was able to get the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty passed despite initial overwhelming opposition to any arms control treaty with the Russians. In the same way, Obama could have created a single payer system if he had put his mind to it when he had a Democratic Congress. He’s been opposed to single payer from the start, because it cuts out his constituency, corporations.
he could have done that how????
By making use of the overwhelming good will he had when he came in as president? By addressing the American people directly, as Kennedy did with the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and explaining to them why single-payer is the only approach to paying for health care that makes economic sense? By making universal health care, a right that people in all other industrialized countries have, the top priority of his presidency?
The reason that Obama didn’t work for single payer is because he is not a progressive but a neoliberal, believing that the purpose of the 99% is to be economically exploited by corporations and the top 1%. It is not because he could not have succeeded at enacting it if he actually held progressive ideas.
The facts are on the side of single-payer. But Obama, like Bush, studiously avoids using facts to the advantage of the public good.
it didn’t matter what he said to ppl, he didn’t have the votes in the Senate
show us on the doll, where obama touched you
Here’s something that “progressives” appear unable to understand: Single payer had no chance, zero, to pass because the majority of DEMOCRATS in the Senate do not want it.
And the Public Option could not pass because too many Democrats opposed it (Nelson, Lincoln, Landrieu, and ersatz “Democrat” Lieberman). All 60 votes were needed, and were not there. Shoot, Lieberman even opposed his own proposal that Medicare eligibility be reduced to age 55.
The only chance for single payer is for the states to do it, as Vermont has and as California still might.
That chance exists because it was in Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Yeah, he hates single payer so much he put it in his law.
He didn’t put single-payer into law. All the law said was states could do their own thing as long as it met minimum requirements. Also, it’s obvious, you have little idea how power works. If he mentioned that he was for single-payer at every opportunity and but they it likely won’t pass because of the Senate, it puts the Senate in a little bind, doesn’t it? Also, people really didn’t understand how Rahmbo worked. He took the path of least resistance, which of course helped Rahmbo’s corporatist buddies.
Yes.
Look, if you think Obama is a progressive I have a simple two-word rebuttal: Rahm Emmanuel.
Everything that happened during Obama’s first term was perfectly in line with the policies that Rahm, a center-right Democrat if ever there was one, has advocated during his term. Go ahead, blame Joe Lieberdem or Ben Nelson if you like. The evidence suggests that Obama got what he wanted. Well, except for the electoral slaughter of 2010 … but I doubt very much that Obama, as super-smart as he is, understands the link between the policies he pursued with Rahmbo and the results his party got in 2010.
You seem to misunderstand. I agree with you!!
I understood – that’s why I started with “Yes”. Just was expanding on your comment.
“If he mentioned that he was for single-payer at every opportunity and but they it likely won’t pass because of the Senate, it puts the Senate in a little bind, doesn’t it?”
that worked so well with background checks.
There are how many Democratic Senators now? Compared to how many then?
And we saw that democrats (Begich) and republicans (Ayotte) who voted against Background checks take a hit in their numbers. EVEN IN ARIZONA. Would that have happened without Obama pounding away it before the vote? Before raising the consciousness of it. Now gun-control people can point to hard evidence that their position is not 100% fucked in public opinion. It may not be enough to oust someone but it can be part of future campaigns (as Bloomberg’s pac has shown).
Was the outcome legislation?
No.
Was the outcome better than if he had said nothing? Does it make future legislation even slightly more possible?
Absolutely.
It was never an argument that magical ponies would pass everything, it was an argument that the Progressive strategy was better and what do you know? It was.
In 2009, with the majorities he had in the House and Senate, it wasn’t time to score some political points against the Republicans.
It was time to cash in those skee-ball tickets, and buy the biggest prize he could afford.
You talk as if there’s no downside to throwing the Hail Mary instead of completing the pass over the middle, but you’re ignoring a very real threat: over-reaching could result in no bill getting passed. It could compel the hardest three or four Senators to commit to a no vote early.
And we’ll never know what the biggest prize was because Obama never allowed a serious attempt to get a bigger one than what we got.
But as it happens, I’m saying the progressive proscription worked here. Will it always work? No strategy always works and we can differ on when to employ it.
My point is that just as Booman is sick of fighting the culture wars, I’m sick of refighting the Affordable Care Act. We get it. You don’t think it’s progressive. You don’t think it went far enough. How about having a useful conversation now?
Fine. Answer me this question. Who’ll be the likeliest to enact single-payer? Hillary Clinton? Brian Schweitzer, Elizabeth Warren or Andrew Cuomo?
Easy. The most likely to enact single payer is the President who has such great coattails that he or she is accompanied by a wave of liberal senators and representatives who come into office determined to enact single payer no matter what any lobbyist has to say about it.
Now as soon as you can tell me which candidate that is, I’ll get started working for him or her.
Given that Brian Schweitzer didn’t enact single-payer at the state level in a small homogenous state, i’d say he’s a no.
Warren? HA! You Lizbots are hilarious. She supported TARP! Yes, dear, dear Liz supported trillions of dollar bailouts of the uber rich.
For goodness sakes, she just voted for the rich-man’s fix to the FAA sequester. Populism – not! If that doesn’t tell you she’s easily influenced by her rich bundlers, then you’re an idiot.
She even supported extending the Bush tax cuts in 2010. Populism – not!
During last year’s campaign, when asked if she supported single payer, Warren repeatedly ducked the question. Refused to answer. She cut and ran every time it came up. Really, if you are too chick-shit to support single-payer in a deep blue state for Ted Kennedy’s seat in a state that already has Romney-care, then you don’t have the profile in courage to enact it in a far less liberal electorate like the us senate.
Moreover, she isn’t a progressive or liberal. She vehemently opposes decriminalizing something as harmless and helpful as marijuana. She supports Dronzes, the rotten war in Afghanistan, bombing Iran, and genuflects to the AIPAC-Likud line.
Hillary Clinton, because she could win.
A useful conversation would be how to make Obamacare into stealth Single-Payer.
Well actually the MOST useful conversation would be about green house gasses but we’re fucked there too.
The American public was much more focused on the broken healthcare system than it was on global warming. And health care had a very simple and obvious solution: Medicare for all. No comparable obvious fix for global warming.
And that’s why discussing climate change is a more useful conversation. As you said, the solution to the healthcare issue is relatively simple: medicare for all.
The solution to climate change merits a lot more discussion since the obvious fixes are opposed by anyone with any power.
You gotta walk before you can run.
I see you can’t tell the difference between progressive legislation and legislation which is better than the status quo at the time.
So “progressive” doesn’t include the concept of “progress.”
Fascinating. Perhaps they should call it “Everything in one big bite or I’m taking my ball and going home” ism.
I am not sure there is as much of a difference as you think there is.
But it forces them into competition with each other. Yes, that is a very progressive step.
Economic competition has nothing to do with progressive politics, in cases where economies of scale lead to the conclusion that there should be no competition at all, since the most efficient solution is to only have one organization (the state) providing a given service.
And you are completely side-stepping the issue that any policy that does not provide universal health care, something that people in every other Western country take for granted, is reactionary, not progressive.
Wow. Where is this Platform of Progressive Politics? I must have missed the convention. Teddy Roosevelt is rolling in his grave over the fact that they call themselves progressives and don’t care about economic competition.
Alexander speaks only for himself.
any policy that does not provide universal health care, something that people in every other Western country take for granted, is reactionary, not progressive
Congratulations: you just defined Medicare and Medicaid as reactionary programs progressives should have opposed.
Now leaving people without health insurance at all – that’s real progressivism.
Just as long as those people aren’t named Calvin Jones.
Heighten the contradictions, but on someone else’s back.
Obama would not have been elected to office in good times. He was elected because things were so bad. He will be the only lasting positive effect of George Bush.
I think the Republicans would rather be stuck in the 1860s.
I think you need to explicitly point out that you’re not trying for equivalency here. It is objective fact that a Congress full of Bernie Sanders clones would make a better life for people than a House of Ron Paul and Senate of Ted Cruz.
ED: Rand Paul.
Not to mention that it’s a false choice. I bet “Moderates” are a lot closer in their position to Sanders then they are to Cruz and the son of Crazy Uncle Liberty, Sen. Aqua Buddha.
Well, if it makes any difference, if I were a senator, I’d probably sound like Obama and vote for the most part like Sanders. But if I was president, I would not try to get the country to vote for a Sanders agenda. It’s not possible.
How, exactly, is Bernie Sanders out of step with the majority of this country? Is he in favor of nationalizing ExxonMobil? Stop being a squish!
Yes, democratic socialists favor public ownership of resources.
This could be the dumbest question I have ever been asked, but in the context in which it is offered, I was making a distinction between my personal politics and what I believe I could reasonably accomplish as president. And if you are asking me if Sanders is out of the mainstream in Congress, the answer is yes.
Mainstream Congress? That den of corruption? Haha! I mean the mainstream of America!! Regardless of the fact that he calls himself a Democratic-Socialist, how is Bernie Sanders farther out of step than Ted Cruz? He isn’t.
Excuse me but your generation grew up in a world where interracial marriage, desegregated schools, integrated public facilities and workplaces existed and social pot smoking and gay people weren’t hidden from most people. Thus, you didn’t have to change. Same sex marriage is of relatively recent origin but those that changed to embrace equal protection under the law in the sixties, needed no convincing that it was just. (Only a decade ago there were strident voices at dKos arguing that Howard Dean was unacceptable because he signed VT’s civil unions law. Those are the people that slow down and impede progress.)
Like the “good times” of the 1990s? Well we know what a Democrat did then: NAFTA, GATT, DADT, DOMA, energy dereg, telecom dereg, bank dereg, commodity dereg, welfare “reform,” capital gains tax reduction, “reinventing government,” … All dreadful. All invented by the right; just like the ACA.
Armando and Wilentz have it about right — like this from Wilentz:
And what good ideas have Republicans had in the past hundred years?
Like the “good times” of the 1990s? Well we know what a Democrat did then: NAFTA, GATT, DADT, DOMA, energy dereg, telecom dereg, bank dereg, commodity dereg, welfare “reform,” capital gains tax reduction, “reinventing government,” … All dreadful. All invented by the right; just like the ACA.
Sad but true. The conservative movement, starting with Reagan’s election in 1980, wasn’t especially efficient or organized, but they had as their main advantage that there was literally no organization committed to defending the gains of the New Deal and Great Society. Those organizations that did exist – from unions to environmental groups – were too disorganized to coordinate their response at any level.
The result was that the leading Democrats of the 1990s were all basically moderate Republicans. Sigh. We haven’t seen progressive leadership, except in a few state governments, for several decades. We’re reduced to cheering Obama for signing the Lily Ledbetter Act and the Heritage Foundation version of Health Care Reform.
And what good ideas have Republicans had in the past hundred years?
So it’s probably worthwhile understanding that the Republicans of 1980 did have a few legitimate gripes. This should be expected after the Democrats had owned Congress for all but 2 House years of the previous 48. One had to do with inefficiency of government. Basically in 1980 it was virtually impossible to fire a government worker under any conditions. The second had to do with self-perpetuating bureaucracies. When Kennedy got into power he had a number of great ideas for improving government that basically fell flat on their face. The “best and the brightest” (that is, hiring people from top universities almost exclusively for the top positions, with little thought to relevant experience) and what amounted to a “throw money at the problem” mentality — they explicitly understood that a lot of the stuff they were doing would fail because they were doing so much so fast, but thought it was still okay as the net would be an improvement. Alas, they created a lot of bad bureaucracy that simply never was going to be fixed.
In one of the MANY ironies of Reagan-in-reality versus Reagan-the-Saint is that in 1981 he brought in a lot of efficiency experts who really did improve basic functions at many government agencies. You cannot imagine that happening with any leader in today’s GOP, who works to make government ineffective under all conditions.
Unfortunately, Reagan’s efficiencies did not extend to the Pentagon, where they basically repeated the Kennedy strategy of throwing money at a problem – hence the $600 toilet seats (the money was already allocated, they just had the problem of finding items to attach it to). If you read the then-famous 1981 Atlantic Monthly interview with David Stockman you’ll see how Reagan’s boys were very keen to “improve efficiency” with social services but didn’t let budget director Stockman cut any of the services that sent money to Reagan’s rich supporters.
And of course there was the problem that many of the cuts were not about efficiency but instead about re-asserting the right of rich privilege. It’s hard to remember now but up through 1980 most colleges had “aid-blind” admissions – that is, the admissions departments did not consider payment when choosing who to admit. By 1984 I think only 2 were left with that policy. This was due to massive cuts to the grant and loan programs for non-rich college students.
That was like robbing the petty cash drawer and ignoring the open safe after the armored car delivery.
“Efficiency experts” were the rage during the 1980s. Consultants such as McKinsey and Co made good money off those initiatives in the private sector. My front row seat at one of those initiatives is that it was at best a waste of money and at worst made company operations less innovative and creative by making employees feel less valued.
Everybody has gripes and some of those gripes, even by Republicans, signal a problem that can be fixed. However, while gripes often include an idea, those are rarely good ideas, and not giving team Reagan any points for bringing in “efficiency experts” when all they did was buy what consultants were selling.
Well, it was so bad in the federal government that even a McKinsey-type expert could make improvements. I knew a lot of people working in various positions back they and they all noted improvements in 81-82.
But in general I totally agree. The kind of efficiencies that most consultants identify are due to their lack of understanding of the biz, not due to anything that’s actually inefficient.
History doesn’t repeat but sometimes it rhymes. I don’t think Repub resistance to Obama was a continuation of the 60s culture wars so much as simply a coalition of bigots and corporate interests.
Obama actually preempted some of the conservative side of 60s culture wars by doing things like supporting veteran services and celebrating the service of vets – no matter that they ended up serving in a dirty war like Iraq. The left’s view of military service was completely different in the 60s and this was a big deal.
Also a lot of the 60s culture war went away with the Berlin Wall.
Obama also introduced some new language to the public dialog that helped some of the old cultural boundaries fade away. “Empathy deficit”, “my brother’s keeper”…
In place of that we now have something far worse. We have a conspiracy theory fed right that is also inflamed by racist and sexist language. The corporate media are grossly irresponsible so the right’s political leaders are given cover.
And Republicans are driving government and the country into the ground because they know they have no future and no chance unless they can create just enough chaos that helps them hold on a bit longer.
There are independents in the US that remain so largely because they can no longer stand to listen to the crap that is spewed out during campaign seasons – yes even from both sides sometimes. They have low tolerance for the anxiety that gives them. Most of them don’t know a Sanders from a Cruz. They got hooked on Obama’s vision of one United States of America because they think differences could be overcome by reasonable people. They think that ultimately Obama’s vision is correct. (How to act politically on that vision is another matter and IMHO Armando gets vision and action hopelessly confused.)
I don’t think of the 60s when I look at the current times. I think of the 1850’s. Read Mann and Ornstein and McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.
It’s interesting how a lot of this thread has turned into who’s a better liberal/progressive than who.
It’s exactly what’s the problem, no understanding of power and how to use it. Until that problem is solved we’ll never get the results we want to see.
It’s exactly what’s the problem, no understanding of power and how to use it. Until that problem is solved we’ll never get the results we want to see.
And who do you think doesn’t understand that, exactly? I have an idea how to do that, which would use both sticks and carrots. I gave an example above but that would require turning the screws on Blue Dogs and other fake Democrats. It seems they need to learn a lesson from Jesse Unruh/Sam Rayburn.
“And who do you think doesn’t understand that, exactly?”
No need to name names and get into finger pointing. I think it’s good enough to simply say that if you think Obama could have gotten single payer but you can’t name the 60 senators who would have voted in favor, then you don’t understand how to use power.
Are you suggesting that Obama wanted single payer, and would have gone for it if he could have gotten 60 votes in the Senate? If so, where is your evidence? If you can’t demonstrate that Obama wanted single payer, then your point about there not being 60 votes is irrelevant.
It is always the same with the Obama dead-enders. Obama wants to shut down Guantanamo, but Congress won’t let him. Never mind that he has the authority to release the people in Guantanamo who have been cleared of any wrong-doing. Obama is appealing making Plan B available to all women because he wants to lose the appeal. Obama is a progressive Democrat, but he cut the centerpiece of progressive and immensely popular Democratic policy, Social Security, in his budget with chained CPI, because the Republicans forced him to do it, even though the draft of a budget is not a part of any negotiating process, and Social Security has nothing to do with the budget deficit.
By the same token, apparently as long as Obama himself didn’t want single payer that badly, apparently the Senate is completely off the hook. Co-equal branch of government be damned.
The first thing anybody should understand about american government is that there are separate yet equal branches. They all share responsibility, blame, and credit in equal turn. Fixating on any one of them to the exclusion of others is missing the point.
But don’t let me stop you from calling people Obama dead-enders. That’s sure to convince lots of people to see it your way.
I’m not saying the Senate is off the hook. The point was more could be done to pressure the Senators. But that’s not going to happen when you’re tight with clowns like Jim Messina. He might be good at campaigns, but he doesn’t belong in actual governance.
In 2009 we had 60 Senators for I think at most a 3-4 month stretch, I’ve never seen a whip count on Single Payer but from what I know of the Senators that were there I think we would have been 6-7 short of 60 if not more. Sure you might be able to pressure 1 or 2 Senators to change votes when the votes are close but 6 or 7 is a lot.
I don’t know if there would be enough leverage to make that big of a change and not getting any of the reforms we got wouldn’t be a good result either. Expending all that political capital to get nothing as a result would have left the President very politically weak and likely much more vulnerable to Republicans in 2012 than he was.
it doesn’t matter who the Democrats nominate, the wingers and their propaganda assets will always find a way to demonize him/her.
Jimmy Carter was a moderate-conservative from the deep south, as well as a sunday school teacher, family man, farmer, patriot, noted veteran and they demonized him.
See too, Max Cleland. An Army captain who lost three limbs was demonized as soft on security by a chicken hawk.
You’re so right about the economy throwing the Republicans a lifeline.
If they has lost three consecutive elections, that might have been enough of a wake-up call, but they interpreted the 2010 results not as a “throw the bums out” election in the depths of the deepest recession in decades, but as an ideological vote of confidence.
Good point on two counts :
It also doesn’t help that the myths start these days before the ink is dry. History is re-written even as we consider a given topic current events. We get miniseries to tell us what we saw unfold last week. Take the “ni” out of “miniseries” and you got “miseries”.
and one I have given a fair amount of thought to recently.
One of the things that realy interests me is the trends amoung the younger generation. They are:
Why is this important?
Because these facts stand as proof the right has been completely wrong about the 60’s.
Remember, the right claims that the country started to go to hell in the 60’s. God was driven out of the classroom, society was integrated, the great society enabled bad social behavior etc…
Now read the facts above again.
What precisely is left of the rw narriative? This is why I keep insisting on discussing the crime rate when people argue for gun control. I am for gun control – but the larger issue is lost. The ultimate answer to the argument that anti-poverty programs are hurtful is the facts above.
I find it amazing no one makes much of these facts – perhaps the old can never give credit to the young, and never admit that crime isn’t half of what it used to be. But there is a powerful political story to be told.
And a hopeful one.
that if you trace the links, you find that much of the increase in crime in the 60’s is tracebale to the increases of lead in our environment.
Remember those dirty hippy’s who argued that the way we treat the earth will wind up being reflected in how we treat each other. Even I laughed.
But the evidence is overwhelming that the crime epidmic was a man made illness based on our introduction of a toxic substance into our environment. It made us more violent (and crazy – there is a link between lead and skizophrenia).
That is another story about the 60’s waiting to be told. After all, if they were right about lead, what else are they right about?