I want to hear a “Mea Culpa” from the Dems regarding their mistake with the white working class in 2016. And even then…if they don’t act upon it strongly and quickly, I don’t want to hear any more centrist bullshit about how “The Party” is going to recover from the drubbing it suffered in 2016. Instead, all I am hearing from the Dems is the same-old same-old same-old same-old.
The same old leadership.
I mean…besides the Schumer/Pelosi/Clinton/Obama nexus (Headline from the PermaGov-speak HILL today: Don’t look now: Hillary’s back. Sigh…) and its Russian pipedream, the only interesting Dem action is from the other side of its crooked, DNC-enforced outer barriers. Bernie Sanders…still an independent at heart…warning the party that they had better wise up or lose all hope of regaining any power.
Bernie to Democrats: You’ll Never Win Without Independents
The same old DC partisanship game. A minority party trying to stick it to the majority party while the citizens of the U.S. continue to suffer.
Enough of Russia! There’s an Epidemic of Despair in the US
The same old candidates threatening to run the same old centrist game in 2020.
Report: Cuomo takes major step toward presidential bid
The same old PermaGov media…which only reaches the voting “non-deplorables” in this country, the same ones who voted for HRC…still trying to run exactly the same game that they ran and lost on Trump, like a beaten boxer throwing the same punch over and over and over again, praying for a miracle that never comes.
Yawn.
And the same old botspeak Booman Trib “contribitors,” continuing to cast their votes here using negative ratings and weak little trolling attempts as their beloved party rapidly sinks beneath the waves of the future.
Read on.
I had one of them…centrtistfielddj…recently ask me “Does a young boy write your stuff now?” I didn’t answer him there, but I will now.
No.
Does a near-retirement, white, mid-level bureaucrat write your stuff?
Lissen up, O privileged one.
A grown, working-class man…a working class artist, a union member for almost 50 years and a long-time participant in the mixed-race culture of American music…writes my stuff. And he’s here to tell you that if the Deplorabilist Party does not get up off of its over-privileged ass and go out among the people…all of the people, not just identity politics-selected groups…it is inevitably doomed to the extinction that many of us (myself included) hoped to see for the RatPublican Party not so long ago.
You done fucked up!!!
But what’s worse is this:
You’re not changing your game.
I dunno how many intelligent milennials (of all races, cultures and economic conditions) you meet in informal, open, friendly situations and discussions, but I am here to tell you that the ones with whom I work and the ones who are friends of my son…and that includes lots of people …are by and large absolutely through with politics in general, especially with the Demographic Party. Unless something entirely new comes along, they are not going to vote. Simple as that. Both parties are a total waste of time as far as they are concerned, a running joke at best.
As are you.
I’ll still be here, though.
Whatever “here” still remains…
Nice work, folks.
Thanks a million!!!
AG
P.S. And now more (Google) “news”:
That’s not “news!!!”
That’s how he got almost half of the electorate in the U.S….those who thought that voting for one of the two parties was worth the effort…to vote for him.
The other 40% or so of the available electorate? The ones who did not vote?
Go read the Bernie article above.
And then WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!
Please!!!
IMHO Andrew Cuomo doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the presidency. His father Mario would have a much better chance in 2020, except he’s deceased. Unlike the Dem elites, Mario Cuomo wouldn’t be afraid of using the “F” word, either. (see the 33 second mark in “Tale of Two Cities” keynote address in 1984).
Franklin Roosevelt is the F word?? Maybe I’ve forgotten or missed the trend of Dems failing to invoke him over the years.
Of all modern era Dem presidents, he would probably be the most frequently favorably cited. If anything, JFK is more under-invoked than he deserves.
In his book “Listen Liberal”, Thomas Frank makes a convincing argument that the Democratic party has abandoned its FDR roots. He provides evidence that the Democrats have changed from being the New Deal party to one that defends income inequality. I don’t recall any Dem elites mentioning FDR recently. Iirc President Obama referred to Ronald Reagan several times. When Obama was asked which presidents were similar to him, he said JFK and Reagan.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/16/obama-compares-himself-to_n_81835.html
Bernie Sanders didn’t shy away from FDR.
P.S. I was born an FDR Democrat (during Truman’s administration) and I have seen the changes myself in this party over the decades.
FDR had plenty of faults. Many of them were due to the American cultural circumstances which existed during his time, circumstances which he left unchallenged due to pragmatism and/or personal disinterest. His governing coalition in Congress also limited what he could accomplish in certain areas, and the Supreme Court limited him in still more areas. All the same, a President who, for one of many examples, ordered the arrest, internment and private property confiscation of all Japanese-Americans throughout World War II can hardly be called a moral paragon.
As far as the broader domestic policies of FDR and the Democrats who dominated Congress throughout his Presidency, well, What Scott Said:
“It’s a nice-sounding story to claim that the Democrats stayed in power during the New Deal because they had clearer slogans or because the programs were simpler. But in fact they stayed in power in large measure because they didn’t threaten white supremacy. The Great Society coalition has always been a much dicier proposition, and anyone who suggests easy answers is fooling themselves and/or you.”
Mino just about pins it.
And you.
AG
I had the good fortune of spending half a day at the FDR presidentiall library/museum last August. The complexities of the New Deal, including the role of southern white Democrats, is presented there in fairly unvarnished fashion. Hanging on to a fantasy version of FDR’s great accomplishments instead of a clear-eyed assessment is silly.
DNC Dems are invested in trashing FDR Dems to blur their incredible effectiveness in creating a more egalitarian economic system that produced stability and overall prosperity for 50 yrs. Until the first oil embargo.
Particularly, since DNC Dems design the exact opposite for us.
By insisting that racism infested FDR’s administration, they hope the casual reader does not delve deeper into how AAs of that time felt about FDR’s policies towards themselves. From near 100% Republican registration prior to the Depression, by Truman’s era, 50% were Dem. And FDR himself received 70+% of their vote.
Bernie’s FDR-style rhetoric didn’t gain the increased support from African-Americans you claim for FDR. I wonder why.
In thinking thru how FDR might have increased African-American support for his Democratic Party, need I remind you that national unemployment was at 25% in both 1932 and 1933. The modern national economy was never in worse shape than at the moment Roosevelt and Democrats took power. Under those circumstances, the lives of African-Americans could be improved even while Jim Crow laws remained secure in the middle of policy revolutions all around them.
There is no refutation of the landed point that the New Deal allowed white supremacy to continue. Roosevelt is one of our very greatest Presidents; that is not changed by this and other facts. Nevertheless, we can and should look at the record of FDR and his Congresses in whole, particularly if we employ a hot desire to look at the record of President Obama and his only majority Congress in whole.
Perhaps a little timeline of history is in order?…http://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-and-education-magazines/black-americans-1929-1941
The attack on the New Deal shows how lost you really are.
Pathetic.
To defend Clinton we must attack FDR.
You sir, are no Democrat.
How is this an attack on FDR? I wrote that he was one of our greatest Presidents. I also wrote he and his Congresses were far from perfect. That seems uncontroversial to me.
Nobody in this thread has refuted a single historical fact I have shared here. Instead I’m receiving a bunch of personal attacks. That gets us nowhere.
Forget about it bruh, it’s ad-hominem town. That’s all they got.
Mean Annual Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers
Male
Black White Ratio
1939 $537.45 $1234.41 .44
1949 1761.06 2984.96 .59
1959 2848.67 5157.65 .55
1969 5341.64 8442.37 .63
He doesn’t respond to reason.
The good news is he represents a very small percentage of Democrats who hate Bernie and are indeed now outside the mainstream of the Party.
The troll ratings will continue.
But attacking FDR is such a clueless manner is more than revealing.
FDR was America’s greatest President. LBJ regarded himself as working to continue the work FDR began. To try and separate the two is nonsense. To deny the New Deal’s effectiveness as a program that won African American support is ludicrous.
I don’t hate Bernie. I voted for Bernie in the primary. I simply opposed the divisive, factually flawed rhetoric which was maintained after the Democratic Party Convention. It ended up biting our movement in the ass, hard. We’ve been over this before.
I’d put FDR easily in the top 3. Lincoln, JFK , FDR — so close, like those 100m Olympic races where the winner wins by a narrow .1 sec and the next two are virtually tied.
JFK, FDR, Lincoln — sometimes the order depends on how I feel about the wisdom of prosecuting a major war to keep the country intact, especially given in hindsight how the South has turned out (except in college major sports); or how much weight to give to the tragic and unnecessarily harsh internment of the J-As as well as the failure to save more Euro Jews when it could have been done. I fear that Franklin ultimately didn’t care much about the Jews.
The peculiar 1937 economic proposals, which led to the Roosevelt Recession — someone can perhaps explain to me why he suddenly seemed, after a massive landslide re-election, to want to govern like a Republican.
Bad habits are hard to break?
Deficit hawkery and austerity are STILL the nostrums being fed the public by national govts here and in the EU as immiseration proceeds…
Roosevelt was a lot quicker on the uptake, though. He believed his eyes when he saw the outcome. And reversed course.
The poverty rate of black Americans 1959 to 2012. Still dropping…
https:/qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-8f9e2be3886b25753a952888df3b8145
Caution, calculation methods may be mixed as benefits were/were not included as income.
This article explains…https:http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/07/11/poverty-in-the-50-years-since-the-
other-america-in-five-charts
Oh, and this is a howler:
“DNC Dems are invested in trashing FDR Dems to blur their incredible effectiveness in creating a more egalitarian economic system that produced stability and overall prosperity for 50 yrs.”
Look at Table 2:
Poverty Rate of Black Americans:
1959- 55.1%
1966- 41.8%
1974- 30.3%
The rate rose very slightly thru the Carter/Reagan/Daddy Bush Presidencies. Then:
1993- 33.1%
2001- 22.7%
Then the rate rose again very slightly until the last years of the Obama Administration.
The Great Society programs, along with the CRA/VRA, were responsible for creating the more egalitarian economic system we now enjoy. The Great Society policies tore the Democratic Party in two.
“The Great Society programs, along with the CRA/VRA, were responsible for creating the more egalitarian economic system we now enjoy.”
Whoa. You really are clueless.
The Great Society’s economic facet you’re referring was about the safety net, for the most part. Indeed, it did reduce dire poverty until Clinton monkeywrenched it. But it was hardly egalitarian.
Social Security and Medicare are egalitarian.
Unions, anti-trust, Glass-Steagall, usury laws, and a number of other industry regulations–those created a more fair, stable economy.
Social Security was originally denied to workers in professions most commonly held by African-Americans. That’s why the Dixiecrats voted to establish the program.
Medicare, on the other hand, began as a much more egalitarian program, as did Medicaid. That’s because these were Great Society programs. FDR and his Congress did not pass such a program in the New Deal. I wonder why.
Despite the success of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Unions were most frequently denied African-Americans as well, with the UAW eventually growing to be another notable exception in the private sector. Public sector workers didn’t gain the broad right to unionize until 1962. That’s when black Americans began to gain much greater access to collective bargaining. Some of the most important actions of the civil rights movement of the ’60’s were in support of striking public sector workers whose first negotiations were met with violent pushback.
I don’t like the welfare reform which was passed in the late ’90’s. However, your analysis fails to deal with the fact that the poverty rate for African-Americans was cut by nearly a third during the Clinton Administration, and it has never come close to returning to the rates which existed in 1993. Even during the worst of the financial crisis, the poverty rate for African-Americans never returned to the ’93 rate.
“Social Security was originally denied to workers in professions most commonly held by African-Americans. That’s why the Dixiecrats voted to establish the program.”
The lie that will not die. Sigh. I have refuted this slur aimed at FDR’s administration at least four times. Only once has a poster actually bothered to follow my links, read them, and be corrected. Enjoy your New Deal Dem bashing, because I will not bother trying to educate you. Besides, you post like you know what is in the mind of everyone anyway.
Medicaid was never egalitarian. It is a poverty program with rules for qualifying. Perhaps if I use the term “universal” my meaning will be clearer?
FDR Dems legislated and protected a public commons that checked how far the market could commodify resources.
I’ll concede that the motivations behind why Congress more severely restricted the classifications of workers who qualified for Social Security in the original 1935 Law are openly debated. For example, this official analysis from the Social Security Administration is premised to forward your claim.
But even this analysis which attempts to support your argument concedes that “…Although 65 percent of the African American workforce was excluded by this provision, it was also the case that 27 percent of the white workforce was likewise excluded from coverage. Moreover, African Americans were not the most heavily impacted group: 66 percent of “other” races were excluded as well.” So: 2/3rds of non-white American workers were denied SS benefits in the original law, while over 2/3rds of white American workers enjoyed SS benefits. That’s a substantial difference.
What is not open for debate is that a greater percentage of non-white Americans have gained access to Social Security benefits since FDR signed the original Bill into law. FDR did not insist on bringing more non-white Americans into the original program. You may accept this pragmatism from him; I do as well. But we shouldn’t pretend that this flaw in the original law didn’t exist.
Medicaid is another program which has been made more broadly available to Americans over the years, most dramatically thru the ACA. If Chief Justice Roberts had not made his legally peculiar claim that the original ACA was unconstitutionally coercive in its Medicaid eligibility expansion regulations, millions more would be insured today as the original law intended.
Yes, and when AAs started voting Democrat because of FDR/Truman’s policies, Southern white Democrats bolted from their party and joined the Republican party. The Dixiecrat party was just a placeholder. LBJ’s Civil Rights Legislation was the last straw, although it took a while for the complete makeover. I can remember watching Democratic U.S. Senator Richard Shelby morph into a Republican the day after the election of the Republican Revolution in Nov. 1994.
Well, Obama on Reagan and JFK — a little more comparison to RR than Kennedy, and my sense is Obama in 08 was omitting FDR and citing Ronnie (a bit too favorably for my tastes) to avoid the Big Spending Big Gubmint Liberal tag. He seemed to run away from the L word, in other words. Something great leaders like JFK and Mario Cuomo (a near-great) refused to do.
Ultimately O ended up a lot less like both, as he was neither a transformational president (in either a positive or [Reagan] negative direction) nor one who undertook bold new progressive/positive directions (JFK). He was an incrementalist, unable or unwilling to change or call for a change to the heart of the status quo, and unlike Kennedy, whose popularity remained high throughout his presidency (despite undertaking a tough, controversial CR bill), Obama’s initial high hopes and energy were dissipated with his unduly modest policy proposals.
Yet he could probably have won a third term, as he noted.
Perhaps more of an Eisenhower Democrat? Good enough overall, no major scandals, largely a continuation of the status quo domestically and in FP, but someone who should have done much more.
The Affordable Care Act, a significant transfer of money from the rich to the poor, was a bold new program which makes Obama a transformational President even if it had been the only thing accomplished during his Presidency, which is far from the case.
A sign of how transformational the ACA has been: the most consciousless, spiteful, policy-illiterate Executive and Legislative branches of our lifetimes cannot figure out how to repeal and replace it. They barely got through three weeks into the effort before they abandoned their attempt, scorched by the political heat.
Obama should have used the significant political momentum he enjoyed coming off his decisive election victory to push hard, bully pulpit-pounding, to rid the system of the useless middleman greedy insurance cos and enlist people behind a Medicare For All bill. Instead, he negotiated weakly, starting from the get-go to please the corp Dems (Baucus, Nelson, Lieberman et al), Republicans and their insurance co benefactors.
I would have preferred he at least have tried to make such an effort even if it all ended up roughly like ACA. He would have earned points from me and others for showing bold, tough leadership. Americans appreciate a leader who makes the effort even if it’s ultimately unsuccessful.
But we learned that going bold for truly strong progressive change wasn’t a priority for O. He preferred to want to make friends with his political enemies, the nice conciliator guy from his earlier years who believed he had a gift from God* to bring seemingly irreconcilable forces together.
In the end, ACA was a moderate improvement over the previous system, but not quite in the SS/Medicare bold transformational sense.
(* I use this word only to help drive home the point; it does not signal a belief in such from me, but does fit the Obama belief system. I look forward to the day when we have eliminated all the God talk and praying in our public political rhetoric. But that probably won’t be until another lifetime or two …)
I disagree.
The Affordable Care Act is massively progressive. It’s the single largest expansion of the safety net since 1966. It was a significant improvement over the previous system. I’d like to hear you tell Americans coming to congressional Town Halls, desperately telling their Congressmembers that if the ACA is repealed they will die, and the many Americans they represented in doing so, that it wasn’t a significant improvement.
The crux of your criticism is here:
“I would have preferred he at least have tried to make such an effort even if it all ended up roughly like ACA. He would have earned points from me and others for showing bold, tough leadership.”
Style is not more important than substance. I disagree.
Also, given the extreme closeness of the whole legislative effort, it is entirely possible that had President Obama demanded more from Congress it may well have resulted in nothing getting passed. In fact, we just saw an outcome like this with the current Congress’ feckless and failed pursuit of the ACHA passage.
And, given the transfer of wealth and the saving of lives and financial futures which the ACA has provided, I couldn’t disagree more with your conclusion:
“Americans appreciate a leader who makes the effort even if it’s ultimately unsuccessful.”
No. No. No, they don’t. And, most importantly, an unsuccessful legislative effort doesn’t improve policy, and fails to help people.
Finally, you and I and Senator Sanders agree that a Medicare for All policy would be better than the status quo. However, over and over and over again, Americans have proven by their direct votes on single payer referendums in the various States that they are not comfortable with a full transfer of health care to the public sector. We can be made unhappy by this, but it is damaging to our movement to refuse to accept this fact, because it leads to people in our movement repeating the absurd charge that the only thing preventing Medicare For All from becoming the law of the land is poor ideology and corruption. That’s not the full truth, it excludes the most important truth, and it unnecessarily demoralizes our movement.
If the majority or supermajority of voters had a real appetite for it, Medicare For All and other public sector single payer schemes could overcome ideological and corruptive barriers. But American voters do not support single payer at the moment. The unhappy fact is that we have not won the public argument yet.
True, but I wasn’t arguing for empty insincere style over substance. I was suggesting it’s better to make the utmost effort to squeeze as much out of the political system as possible on a top priority item when a president is at the height of his power, as O was starting out.
Also signals a president is taking the matter seriously enough to risk a fair amount of political capital to get it done. Instead, O signaled he was risking only a moderate amount for a moderate bill. And unwisely started out asking only for half a loaf, and ended up with even a bit less. Not my idea of a smart negotiating stance nor bold leadership.
Which is why the need for better public education on the issue, something Obama was positioned to do, with his great communications skills and political mo in 2009.
Back in 63, when Kennedy faced a strong majority of Congress and the public voicing opposition to his Test Ban Treaty with the Russkies, he went out strongly to sell it while working aggressively inside to convince members of Congress. Within a few months or less, the numbers turned around dramatically and it was ratified.
He nearly pulled off Medicare the year before, in the face of a very aggressive opposition by the AMA and paid simpleton liar spokesmen like Reagan. In the end, he came within (effectively) one vote in the senate of getting that bill through. (interesting side story on that one vote, involving senate secretary Bobby Baker, a Lyndon loyalist, suddenly being unable to accurately count votes. He later claimed one senator made a last-minute switch to Nay because of a $200,000 bribe.)
The case for Medicare for All has yet to be made by a sitting Dem President, ever. As for very prominent Dem pols of recent times, probably only Bernie can be counted as a voice in favor, but recall his campaign a) was primarily about, and covered as, economic unfairness/inequality, and b) he got only a dime’s worth of coverage compared to Hillary, when the MSM bothered to cover someone other than Donald.
Public education — it has proved effective before if done effectively and consistently.
President Obama used his political capital on lots of things, and there is evidence he expended it all to accomplish what he and Congress did. One of the evidences: Democrats paid an immediate and severe political price for the actions of the president and the 111th Congress in the midterms, and it was because the voters who successfully mobilized were very uncomfortable by such an aggressive left turn in policy. There’s just no good evidence that the 2010 election turned on people being unhappy and rejecting Democrats because they wanted single payer.
Let’s recall where we were at the moment he took office, with the months-long catastrophic job losses. He and Congress prevented a second Great Recession by passing the stimulus package and taking other actions. We could go round and round round here again about whether he and Congress did the stimulus right, but please, let’s not? Let’s just accept the fact that the stimulus torched a ton of political capital.
We’re all doing public education on health care. We need to do more, clearly. People on the right, left and center are frequently misinformed on health policy and its outcomes.
Every President who took on broad health care reform before Obama had their political capital fully liquidated in their unsuccessful (and, in the limited case with LBJ, successful) efforts. Americans were so angry with Medicare and other leftist proposals of Kennedy that he received many death threats and tons of bitter political opposition.
The bully pulpit almost never delivers successful passage of unpopular proposals. If it could, Social Security would have been privatized in 2005, and the ACA would be headed to evisceration at the hand of the ACHA this week.
“He and Congress prevented a second Great Depression…”, I intended to write.
Yes JFK took some heat, and with his CR bill proposal in summer 63, he lost some white Southern Dem support. Yet even with that, he still maintained very high favorables leading up to the 64 reelect. In no way was a political backlash developing against him and his party over Medicare for instance. In the 62 midterms Dems did very well. Only his CR bill was expected to cut into his reelect support in 64. Goldwater sure wasn’t.
Finally on public education on the MfA matter, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, Strong and Right beats Weak and Wrong, only more so. There just hasn’t been an effective nationwide, sustained and well-funded effort so far, led by well respected and liked spokespeople, to drive home the Strong and Right, easily understood proposal. I suppose we’ve been too preoccupied enacting then defending ACA.
We shouldn’t let temporary and transient local opinion numbers make us so pessimistic. Public acceptance of gay marriage, to take an obvious example, traveled quite a ways in just about a 15 yr period, to the surprise of most of its backers.
LOL Esp since DNC Dems in state offices have done so well campaigning AGAINST single payer and being well compensated for it. See Colorado for the poster child. The defeats get more and more expensive, however.
Well, Kennedy and his Congresses didn’t pass Medicare. The deepest test of a political backlash during his Presidency would have come if they had. OTOH, President Johnson and his Congresses suffered a horrible backlash after passing Medicare and the rest of their incredible agenda.
This summary of Kennedy’s health care reform misadventures takes a different view from yours. This statement from a Kennedy Administration official poses a very worthwhile window into Jack’s sense of priorities:
“‘[P]eople who educated the nation without necessarily accomplishing their particular purposes rated, in his judgment, below those who accomplished their purposes without necessarily bringing the nation along with them,’ wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in A Thousand Days, his chronicle of his time in the Kennedy administration.”
One thing this reporting revealed to me is that health care providers were prevented from receiving Medicare reimbursements if they refused to desegregate their services. In 1965 and 1966, that must have been a hell of a thing in some areas of the country; it’s easy to imagine how these sorts of regulations could and did permanently change electoral politics.
If you want single payer, it is necessary for you to vigorously defend the ACA. Americans need to more fully accept the ACA’s increases in public funding for health care. We would need to hang onto that money and expand that money greatly to set up a single payer program. That’s why it’s been so very painful for me to hear single payer proponents talk such hostile shit about the ACA. If the public is made to permanently mistrust a decrease in privately funded health care, they will never accept a larger decrease in, or banishment of, privately funded health care. This simple but extremely vital concept escapes many single payer advocates.
I agree that we should work to change public opinion and should not assume it will stay in its current unhappy place. However, caution is advisable about drawing parallels between the path to single payer and the path to same-sex marriage. Ballot measures and Legislative actions were not moving us in the direction of same-sex marriage; it took State and Federal Judicial decisions to achieve that. Though there are some places where civil rights lawsuits might gain access to care for some Americans, I don’t believe single payer health care will be achieve thru court actions.
Since Kennedy campaigned for a major Medicare type restructuring, and as preliminary vote counts had it very close, he wasn’t going to not go forward with a bill in his first term. He had thrown his hat over the wall, and therefore had no choice but to follow it over.
The fact that he fell one vote short was disappointing — Kennedy might have felt he had reached the 50-vote magic number per expert counter Bobby Baker and maybe aide Larry O’Brien, and so didn’t think he needed to do more in the final days to move votes — and so ex post facto judgments about his ability to get the needed votes are a bit unduly harsh.
He also faced a public on Medicare legislation whose sentiment was closer to apathy than urgency (in stark contrast to recent years), as well as a Congress where he had no working progressive majority, one which wouldn’t come until after 64. Very hard to move a public towards pressuring their members of Congress on a bill when they aren’t significantly enthused that the legislation is necessary.
Well, there can be another kind of backlash, one of disappointment, a feeling this guy isn’t getting the job done, with a failed bill. But didn’t happen in the midterms.
As for LBJ and the 66 election, Dems partly suffered from a sense in the public that too much legislation had gone thru in too short a time, folks had been a bit overwhelmed in digesting it all. Other factors: growing worries over inner city unrest and campus protests, VN War escalation growing nervousness, inflation concerns. Iirc, Johnson didn’t campaign very vigorously, which, if I’m recalling correctly, was typical for Lyndon — he tended to prefer hiding out when things got tough.
In any case, of the 64-5 legislation package, the bills on CR were far more of a factor in the backlash than the more generally popular and uncontroversial medicare.
Another note on the Bobby Baker senate secretary issue: in addition to Baker’s allegations in his memoirs about a bribe for one Dem senator (Jennings Randolph, WVA), another more disinterested and credible source* charges that Baker quietly switched allegiances and deliberately miscounted (or “faked”) two votes as in favor, in return for a major personal loan, the day after the vote, from a bank partly owned by conservative Dem senator Rbt Kerr, who was leading the senate opposition.
Kennedy, who undoubtedly was quite aware of Baker’s skill (learned from Lyndon in the 50s senate) at vote counting but less aware of his moral-ethical shortcomings, was probably not unreasonably expecting 50 votes, the tie to be broken by VP Johnson.
Bottom line is while Kennedy could have done better in his major public speech that was televised (he didn’t like the prepared speech, and so went extemporaneous, appealing more to the live audience of elders in the hall as opposed to the larger audience watching at home), he probably should be forgiven for not sensing and sussing out all the senate corruption, led by Baker and Kerr, that ultimately shot down his bill.
A narrow defeat via a corrupted vote. But arguably Kennedy helped pave the way for the more robust bill to sail thru in 65 with a more favorable political terrain. And Kerr had died the year after the 62 bill was defeated, making it still easier to pass.
*see Prof Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 257
This quote from The Hill is amusing:
“She (HRC) can’t sit still,” the adviser said. “There’s no clear leader in the party. Bernie certainly hasn’t stepped up. So what does she have to lose now?”
As if it’s Bernie’s fault that there is a vacuum. Bernie was told to sit down and shut up, although he is not listening to the Dem establishment. If the Dem elites were smart–which they aren’t–Bernie would be one of the faces of the party. Being an Independent would attract the Independents, which the Democratic party badly needs. Independents are springing up like mushrooms after a heavy rain.
Not quite. The month to month fluctuations of independents are a bit noisy, but the impression I am getting is that the days of independents springing up like mushrooms ended about four years ago. One might even be tempted to suggest that there has been a slight decline in independents in recent years. Even the name is a bit misleading, as independent is a catchall for everyone who does not declare a party affiliation. Nor does that take into account that independents often lean – sometimes quite strongly – toward a particular party (some may lean toward the Democratic Party, some GOP, a handful of others to various third parties).
Bernie is extremely popular within the Party. His numbers are basically the same as Biden’s.
How is he not stepping up? He is traveling the country giving speeches. It is not clear what more he should be doing.
There are some extreme Clinton partisans who don’t like him, but Bernie is the most popular active politician among Democrats, and the most popular politician in America, period.
You write:
“There are some extreme Clinton partisans who don’t like him, but Bernie is the most popular active politician among Democrats, and the most popular politician in America, period.”
Indeed.
But…he has tried to “step up” in the Dem party twice now. Once as a presidential candidate and once in an attempt to get new blood and new ideas injected into the moribund DNC by getting Keith Ellison elected as chairman.
He failed in both attempts, although he now has much wider recognition values in the U.S. than he did when he first started his presidential campaign.
I think that he is outnumbered and outgunned in the mainstream Democratic Party. All he can do is nudge it to the left a few inches, inches that will be obliterated after 3 weeks after whatever elections they win or lose in 2018.
This is a tough position for a 75 year old man. He can’t afford to wait around 5 or 10 years to let the party fail seriously enough to want to try another direction.
So it goes.
Damned if you start another party and too old/too early if you don’t.
Later…
AG
Technical opinion is concluding that most of the abusive trolls that the Clinton camp was so quick to label “Bernie Bros” were in fact pro-Trump trollbots aimed as key Democratic operatives, activists, and bloggers. Attribution of the motive is easy; attribution of the source is not. My current opinion is that the accusation that Russia did it displaces the anger that should be directed against the Republican Party and the Trump campaign and administration.
Who in the Democratic Party is trying to damp that anger and normalize the Trump administration?
If Russia was indeed involved, the response of the US needs to be nuanced and not the usual reactive unthought-through lashing out with all guns a-blazing. Not exactly the US style for 240 years, but still.
Not going to be any apology from Democrats for thinking that racists and neo-Nazis are deplorable. Easy to spin words against who were the intended targets. Not all white working class are racist, xenophobes, or neo-Nazi. But the ones who are were among the most visible and vocal supporters of Trump.
What the Democratic Party needs to apologize for is failure to advocate clearly for white working class interests like a $15 minimum wage, single payer healthcare, equal pay for equal work, and reinvigorating or the economy. Too much was given away in the weak proposals and opening bargaining positions. And that was the result of serious Democratic disunity that still persists.
Tarheel…
You write:
True.
But this “deplorables” label was taken quite seriously by all kinds of white working people.
Here’s the quote:
I repeat:
The undecideds in that general “white working class” group looked around…looked at the Trump supporters in their own families, in the neighborhoods in which they lived, in their workplaces, the ones that they saw at the televised rallies, the ones who were interviewed…and that statement simply did not compute! What they saw was a massively privileged, rich white woman who they could be sure hadn’t walked down a working American street in almost 40 years…since her husband was first elected governor of Arkansas…without a massively armed police escort and a rabble of fawning reporters…throwing half of a large sociological segment of the U.S. under a “deplorables” bus in a speech to a group of .01 percenters. A sociological segment that boasts a very high voting percentage, I might add.
DUH!!!
This pissed off the undecideds and moved them towards Trump, plus it motivated the already “decideds” to “decidedly” get out and vote.
Which they decidedly did.
You also write:
Also true, at least partially. Much of that current and rapidly increasing “Democratic disunity” stems from a growing disgust with the contradictions between what the party talks about doing…what it publicizes, what it constructs as its public image…and what it is really doing.
The whole “Peace President” hype about Obama is a perfect example of this. He was not a “peace president,” he was a “more covert war” president.
A “kinder, gentler war” president.
It took a while for people to realize what was up, but the evidence is now plentiful and quite obvious.
I will say it again:
No matter how successful the Dems may be in painting Trump as a Russian stooge (even to the point of forcing him out), unless they regain the trust of the American people…all American people, black, brown and beige, because the so-called “minorities” have lost faith in the party as well…until they do that, they are going to be on the losing end of the schtick.
And they will not be able to do that under the so-called leadership of the Senator from AIPAC and the daughter and sister of a crooked, racist, mob-allied Baltimore political dynasty.
Sorry, Charlie.
Starkist don’t play that game no more.
It’s all used up and years after its “Do Not Consume” date.
Later…
AG
I have no idea why you think that it would be universally appealing to white working class Americans if a political Party were to “…advocate clearly for white working class interests like a $15 minimum wage, single payer healthcare, equal pay for equal work, and reinvigorating of the economy”.
Trump supporters who have been interviewed couldn’t make it clearer that:
No political Party wins votes by apologizing. This theme we hear occasionally is just bizarre. When I have heard people express it in my presence, most often it has been expressed by Bernie supporters who want others in the Party and the Movement to fully acquiesce. It’s a weird fantasy that gets us nowhere. It reflects literally nothing that voters care about.
By pointing out these realities, I’m not claiming that the white working class is permanently lost to the Democrats at the rate it was lost in 2016. The Trump movement can’t afford to lose almost any voters in many crucial States, and we may win a few with some economic populist positions now that Trump supporters are getting a load of how they are/will get screwed over by most of the President’s policies. I am pointing out that the policy positions mentioned here, which act well as a standard economic critique of the Democratic Party by the Bernie movement, don’t cut it as a broad method of winning back most Trump supporters. Trump loudly and clearly opposed each of those policy proposals, and they voted for him.
You haven’t a personal clue who “they” are, nor did you understand what Tarheel is saying.
Right out front, you equate” “white working class Americans” with “Trump supporters.”
That’s a PermaGov media meme, and it appears to me that centrist media are where you get all of your so-called arguments.
Turn the fucking TV off and go talk to some people.
You need to get out more.
AG
Read TarheelDem’s post again; he’s seeking to assert why white working class voters became Trump supporters and/or Democratic Party opponents. I questioned his specific policy premises. You offered no rebuttals to my questioning of his specific policy premises.
You did engage in another Two Minutes Hate, though. So there’s that.
I read Tarheel’s post, and I read yours.
Tarheel wrote:
And you wrote:
Tarheel started right out with his opinion…a quite accurate opinion, in my extensive socially interactive experience with the sociological group in question …that “Not all white working class are racist, xenophobes, or neo-Nazi.”
And you established within your first several sentences that you are more than willing to equate the term “white working class” with the term “Trump supporters.”
There is no argument about this, You clearly start out by saying “white working class” and immediately switch, first to the term “Trump supporters,’ then substitute the pronoun “they” for the Trump supporters that you have equated with “white working class” and then…after you have thoroughly established your elitist position, you soften it a little and use the term “the white working class which supports Trump.”
Once.
Other than that, it’s all “white working class = Trump supporters.”
And I’m calling you on it.
That was…and remains in most media coverage and Dem rhetoric…the single greatest mistake that the Democratic Party made during the election other than bumping Sanders out in favor of HRC. It was quite clear that they thought a massive turnout of minority voters and females would sweep her into victory. They were wrong; you are wrong and both you and the Democratic Party remain wrong on this one, very important question.
Deal wid it.
AG
P.S. I do not actually believe that you are even conscious of this “white working class = Trump supporters” thing. It’s just knee-jerk regurgitation of he slime that you have been fed by the media. Wake the fuck up. You been had.
It is a fact that the white working class went more strongly for Trump than they did for Romney and McCain and Bush. Working class white Americans in many counties in crucial swing States went from 60% Republican support to 80% Republican support. This ended up allowing Trump to eke out a win despite getting poor support from non-white Americans. This fact has been written about here by BooMan, fladem and others.
TarheelDem established in his post a need for the Democratic Party to respond to these voters more effectively. Quoting Tarheel:
“What the Democratic Party needs to apologize for is failure to advocate clearly for white working class interests like a $15 minimum wage, single payer healthcare, equal pay for equal work, and reinvigorating (of) the economy.”
I questioned these specific policy proposals, and brought evidence to support my doubt that these specific policy proposals would win back significant portions of the white working class voters TarheelDem said the Democratic Party needs to appeal to.
You still haven’t refuted those specific points. You didn’t even attempt to do so.
You got in another Two Minutes Hate. Again, that seems to have been your priority.
You may be surprised to find that many skilled workers oppose the $15 minimum wage. Their thinking is “Why should should some High school burger flipper make as much money as me when I have invested time and money learning my skill.” Personally, I think raising the floor puts pressure all up the line to raise wages, but I also think they have a valid point. Surely wage compression will result, although I have no idea whether the amount is significant. For myself, I would prefer that everyone was paid the same and people worked at jobs because they loved them not because the field made money. But that’s not reality. It will never happen because some jobs are more valuable than others. Oh, that reminds me. Corporate executives often say they must pay outlandish salary and benefits to induce people to become CEO. If that were the criteria, garbagemen and plumbers would make more than CEO’s. The idea that nine figure salaries, personal chef, corporate jets et cetera, are required to induce executives to take the top job is ludicrous. The main incentive is status, for which humans (male humans at least) will plot, scheme, cheat and even kill to get.
Thank you for providing a demonstration of my point.
What point? That white blue-collar workers are animals that should be beaten into submission by the godlike Liberal elites?
Good lord, no.
Voters are hating everybody, pretty much.
March Suffolk poll:
Pence: 47%/35%
Trump: 45%/47%
GOP: 37%/48%
Media: 37%/50%
Dem Party: 36%/52%
Hillary: 35%/55%
Congress: 26%/52%
Don’t think voters are finished with their impetus for change..change…change
Yes, but…
If they are not given viable options…and that is exactly the tactic that is being employed by the bipartisan, PermaGov-owned, totally fixed center in its efforts to tank Trump (“Leave ’em with no options other than what we offer!!!”)…then what’s left for the dissatisfied?
Nothing, except refusing to vote.
And that doesn’t work either, as we learned last year.
Is a puzzlement.
Ain’t it.
AG
That poll tells me that voters don’t know Pence.
Given that Obama’s head of the White House council of Economic Advisers is in the Wall Street Journal arguing for corporate tax cuts, I would say an apology isn’t coming soon.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-make-tax-reform-bipartisan-1491164051
I think it was pretty clear some of the Clinton trolls were getting stuff from David Brock. We know he was helping Larry Johnson with DKOS diaries in 2008.
Many of the deplorables were just that. The problem is that some were not, and some of those may have included people who voted for O in ’12 and Trump in ’16.
A really good piece this morning about China was linked to from Krugman’s article.
Down. At 35% it is one of the highest in the industrialized world and small and medium businesses who don’t have an army of tax lawyers and accountants to find every loophole end up being at a huge competitive disadvantage both domestically and abroad. For example Norway’s legislative rate is 27% and that is the highest in Scandinavia.
In tandem with the legislative rate coming down, almost every loophole needs to be closed so that the effective rate tracks much closer to the legislative rate. If I had my way every tax loophole would have a 5 year sunset provision. After all what is today’s incentive to encourage the right kinds of investment is tomorrow’s loophole.
Also in tandem with both of those we should move to some form of a territorial tax system, again like most of the industrialized nations have including the Scandinavian countries.
Still for self proclaimed progressives to scoff at those who say the corporate tax rate needs to be lowered all while holding up Scandinavian countries as economic utopias is discordant at best.
Thank you, AG. You are 100% correct.
The D Party has totally thrown the WWC, BWC, BWC under the bus. What they support is the Illegals working class. The only people who the Dems will support for jobs are illegals.
I don’t give a shit if people don’t like that word. It’s the word. They are illegals.
It is not just the illegals. The entire immigration system is FUCKING over the US. We have now the HIGHEST percentage of immigrants (legal and illegal) of any time in our history. Our kids can’t get good jobs. The middle class is getting fucked over. The lower class has been fucked over for 40 years by illegals and legal immigration alike.
And Dems want MORE FUCKING ILLEGALS. It is killing the party.
The issue with illegals is that the Dems support, as one of the few actual policy, a robust, complete, and total violation of the immigration laws. It’s the Calhounization AGAIN of the Dems. Prior to the Civil War, John C Calhoun advocated nullification of the laws about slavery. Today’s Dems advocate nullification of the laws about immigration. It is an abdication of the responsibility of major parties to support the governance of the country. And it is a hollowing out of the party. By supporting a criminal class of 15,000,000-20,000,000 people, the Dems have made their party ANATHEMA to any person who is a moral voter.
Illegals are killing the Dem Party.
Illegals are destroying the Dems’ relationship (what is left of it after 20 years of pimping for illegals) with working class voters.
Illegals cost Hillary the election. Donald J Trump owes the election to his policy on illegals. But Dems and most people here are TOO FUCKING STUPID to actually think through policy about immigration.
Again. Booman asked you months ago not to use it and you are persisting in doing so. Try to make your point without the racist pejorative.
No “Mea Culpa” for me about categorizing the GOP as the Deplorabilist Party. Any party that sets about choosing the voters for its candidates through disenfranchisement and gerrymandering is deplorable, full stop. That white working class voters voted for that party is deplorable. That the Democratic Party did not have the economic and foreign policy positions that overrode the screeches of shock jocks is deplorable.
And now we have show trials in North Carolina by the Deplorabilist Party trying to cover up their crimes.
WRAL-TV: Worker charged with trying to clear felons for voting in Granville
I just hope this lady has a good lawyer defending her. I see many possibilities is this Trump-inspired vindictive move to cover up widespread vote-caging.
What do you do if you find out that the voters listed as felons are indeed not felons and you have personal knowledge that they were caged falsely based on someone else’s identity?
The swiftness of the state GOP Party response to this means that the GOP intends to use this as its cover on vote caging. It is no coincidence that the defendant is a black woman. The charge is “unlawful voter registration”.
If the defendant can prove that the changes she made converted an unlawful denial of registration to a lawful registration to vote, will the court accept that as proof of innocence or at least as a mitigating circumstance for changing the registration without the GOP boss’s permission. The boss was participating in a crime that no one has yet investigated because law enforcement is compromised.
This is where the Deplorabilist Party has taken us no matter what the white working class thinks or wants. We are far from the democracy we had a generation ago.
Tarheel…you write:
Indeed we are. And that was far from the democracy that we imagined we had a generation ago…even 50+ years ago.
Bet on it.
Circling the drain in the falcon spirals of the William Butler Yeats poem, The Second Coming.
Sound familiar?
It does to me.
As does the rest of the poem.
i repeat:
What rough beast, indeed?
“Bethlehem” is located only a few hours’ drive away from Damascus…half that to the Syrian border. A couple of minutes by Air Force time.
And what “rough beast” is making growling sounds right now about Assad’s supposed chemical atrocities???
Yup.
And…who would you rather use as a diversionary, wag-the-dog target? North Korea/China or Syria/Russia?
Trump seems to be cozying up to China these days…
Trump on Xi visit: We’re going to have a great meeting
Hmmmmm…
UH oh!!!
As Yogi Berra said:
And it ain’t over yet.
Not by a long shot.
Watch.
AG
Watching what he was doing what Trump counted on in the campaign to keep the media hooked and talking about Trump, Trump, Trump — just to see how it comes out.
That is still going on, but as President with the football nearby, a lot of people who were relaxed during the campaign are now paying attention more closely.
Yogi was right, and that is the biggest clickbait of all.
Wag The Dog
Trump is not (yet) without options.
Bet on it.
AG
Here we go…
Trump strikes against…not Assad…but the PermaGov.
The only weapon he has left.
Wag-dogging.
Will it work?
We’ll see…
AG
Doesn’t NC require a court order to restore voting rights? Illinois does. An election worker has no authority to do that on her own. The intent is laudable but not legal.