Thomas Frank’s latest column for Salon is a perfect example of the kind of leftist anti-establishmentarianism that I always rail against. President Obama is faulted for nothing more than his willingness and success in propping up a government and a financial system that is rotten to the core and should have been left to die. He promised change and delivered stability. Nothing he did was good enough. His health care plan is inadequate; his stimulus package was inadequate; his regulation of Wall Street was inadequate; his change of U.S. foreign policy was inadequate. And these reforms weren’t lacking simply because he didn’t push a little harder to get a little more. They were lacking because they didn’t totally uproot our institutions and turn them all into something fundamentally distinct from what they had been. Never mind that Obama never promised the kind of hope and change that Mr. Frank wants to see, or that a financial collapse in September of 2008 upended Obama’s plans for his presidency. If Obama points at congressional Republicans to explain why he didn’t do more, it’s a cop out.
From a progressive point of view, the changes we’ve seen under Obama are inadequate, but this isn’t because Obama wasn’t bold enough or effective enough. It’s because people who disagree with us have a lot of power. For the most part, Obama didn’t promise us more than the system can deliver. I have medical insurance now that I can afford. Is it inadequate? Compared to what?
For someone like Mr. Frank, who really does understand the conservative movement, it’s amazing that he is so dismissive of their capacity to screw this country up. The following is astonishing:
Demonizing the right will also allow the Obama legacy team to present his two electoral victories as ends in themselves, since they kept the White House out of the monster’s grasp—heroic triumphs that were truly worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Does Mr. Frank really not want to contemplate what a McCain/Palin administration would have meant for the country and the world? Does he think a Romney/Ryan administration would have done anything about the price of a college education or rising income inequality? One of the most obvious political truisms in existence is that Obama deserves a prize simply for winning and saving us from a fate worse than hell. An end in itself? That’s exactly what Obama’s victories represent. Why deny it?
What percentage of the people does Mr. Frank think voted for Obama because they expected him to completely transform our political system and all our core institutions? How does he interpret the backlash of the 2010 midterms, if not as a rebuke of too much disruption to those self-same institutions? You can dismiss the 2010 electoral temper tantrum as an exercise in Know-Nothing stupidity, but you can’t deny that it happened and had massive consequences for Obama’s presidency. If you want to rail against the people, go ahead and rail against them. If you want to rail against the system, go right ahead. But don’t confuse the people and the system with the man in the Oval Office. He has a job to do, and that job comes with massive constraints. A different, whiter, president might have had a little more leeway here and there, but part of the hope and change we wanted to see was that America is now a place where a half-Kenyan, socialist, mixed-race, community organizer from an urban black congregation can get elected president and act mostly like any other president would.
Where the powers that be have allowed it, like on gay rights, the progress has been astounding. On things like Gitmo and climate change, they’ve erected an unmovable wall. So it goes.
If 2010 had never happened and Obama had been free to let his freak flag fly, people like Mr. Frank would be writing the exact same column, with the only difference being the particulars of their grievances.
This is America. It’s not a progressive country, yet.
You ignore his point that O himself played from further right than he was forced to and, had he started further left, the necessary compromises could have been further left.
Probably because that’s nonsense.
In which areas do you think the Obama administration could have gotten results which were further left than what they produced in reality? Foreign policy? Health care? Wall Street regulation?
Provide some concrete examples of how you think more progressive proposals would have gotten any traction at all against the Congressional opposition Obama’s been facing.
The point is that none of Obama’s proposals were getting anywhere at all. Obama always started his negotiations to the right of center and if cons had taken the bait, the final result would have been even further to the right than where he started. The sequester is an example. Boehner went along because they loved it and never had any intention of renegotiating. Obama should have let them take the country to the brink like he did in 2013. Once he realized the game they were playing he could have started left of center and it wouldn’t have made any difference to the outcome, but would have appeased a lot of the left.
I’d buy that argument to a degree, but that’s not what Philo said.
When haggling over a price, I’ve always found that I get the best results when I immediately start off by demanding that the merchant give me the item for free. That way the final position we end up in is more to my liking. I certainly don’t understand why nobody else negotiates the same way I do.
Ever hear other ask why there is not more Democratic Party members elected in the states,county and Federal level. The article listed is a prime example of why the Democratic Party has not won more elections. You cannot win elections when members of your own party seem to gain joy and notoriety by posting articles attacking party members.
All of these people need to start waking up and smell the coffee. You want to win elections, state your complaints after clearly stating that you support ALL voting for Democratic Party members. Then end your article on the same note.
I don’t know about you — I don’t want to win elections. It’s nice if you can, sure, but I want to look good. Because for me politics isn’t about policy. It’s about social signaling, and telling other people who I am and how I feel by my choice in
consumer productsparties and politicians…I want to already seen that band live before you’ve even heard of it.
Bonus points given that Boo’s original post is about a Thomas “Baffler” Frank piece.
Well this era is sort of specializing in two term Dem admins that end up being somewhat disappointing, Clinton’s moreso than Obama’s IMO. Roberts Repubs changed the rules of the game with Citizens United, ushered in the great Dem slaughter of 2010 and pulled the rug out under from Obama. After that the Great Repub Gerrymander pretty much ended things and the Iron Curtain of intentional gub’mint paralysis descended, unlikely ever to be lifted. The corporate media of course played along, blatting out Repub lies and propaganda coast to coast 24/7.
I will quibble however on Obama’s response to the Great Recession, which was utterly the fault of the Wall Street Wizardz and their deregulation regime, aided and abetted by Clinton and Bushco, a largely bipartisan insanity. The Dems had their super majority in 2009 and the country understood that Wall Street had gamed the system, wrecked the economy, needed almost unimaginable bail-outs and were utterly to blame. The time was absolutely right for a return to real regulation, punishment (i.e. trials) of the instigators and perpetrators, with a clear declaration of fatal “conservative” failure in its financial “regulation” policies.
That window was allowed to pass, and as of now I think blame lies with the admin. Obama had the power to set the agenda in 2009. Financial regulation and the muzzling of the financial plutocrats was a real possibility politically and we demurred. We didn’t strike while the iron was hot, delaying legislation until the following year when Repubs were back with their filibuster power and the banks much less punch drunk. This will be seen as a failed opportunity by history IMO.
I suppose we’ll have our chance in future, as the weak new regs that were finally passed (and which have still not been fully implemented) have not really changed the banksters behavior or restricted their playing field, which is still wide open. Indeed, we have simply made the big bank oligopoly Too Bigger To Fail.
Don’t forget that short-lived “Democratic” supermajority included Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Evan Bayh, Jim Webb, Mary Landrieu, and Max Baucus.
…ointment is on civil liberties. Obama has largely followed W on eavesdropping and so on. He didn’t have to do that. Obama also took a number of non-progressives into his cabinet.
While I think you are absolutely correct that progressives have to recognize the constraints that exist on a President’s ability to move forward with a progressive agenda, it is also true that Obama probably isn’t as progressive in his heart as he pretended to be at various stages of his primary race against Clinton.
I know you dismiss the Netroots conference as a freakshow. Maybe you dismiss Rev. Barber as the same? If not, have you seen his keynote?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClTC8vlVnqE
“I get so tired of people talking about what can’t happen–you don’t know what can’t happen until you get together and start organizing and start fighting back.
Also, why would you want progressive activists to be satisfied?
What utility does that have?
Primarily so that one can market without criticism from one’s “friends” I guess. It allows a clearer and more coherent marketing message to the masses if there are no folks pointing out the contradictions between message and action.
How does he interpret the backlash of the 2010 midterms, if not as a rebuke of too much disruption to those self-same institutions?
Is it a rebuke? Core Democratic voters don’t show up in the mid-terms, for whatever reasons. It wasn’t new in 2010. Did C+ Augustus take 2006 as a rebuke? Yes, if you really think him firing Rummy and replacing him with Gates was a rebuke. Otherwise, no. I think what Frank really should be looking at is the party structure. And I mean the Democratic Party leadership. Who was the DNC head between 2008 and 2010? Tim Kaine? Everyone knew 2010 was a big year. What was the party doing to increase turnout?
This right here is a big part of the problem. We are the party, it’s not some thing off in the distance.
What did we do to increase turnout in 2010?
Could we have done more? Could I? I think the answer to both of those questions is yes.
I canvassed for Sestak in ’10. So I certainly wasn’t sitting on my ass. I also know from that experience that the PA Democratic Party wasn’t exactly in sync with Sestak’s campaign. The point being is everyone wasn’t working together in the same direction. I could name a lot of other states where the state party is a mess too. What is the DNC doing about that? Otherwise, what’s the point of the DNC?
What is Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the doyenne of the DNC doing about that? Hobnobbing with Third Way, No Labels and other groups out to sabotage reform.
What is the US Senate doing? Voting 100-0 to reaffirm their subservience to Benyamin Netanyahu.
What is the NC Democratic Party doing? Depending on Rev. William Barber and Moral Monday to bail out their sorry asses while they do nothing at all but duck and cover and pretend to be Republicans.
Meanwhile ordinary thinking Republicans, independents, and Democrats are restless as hell but they are not getting good reasons to go vote. Just depressingly large reasons to vote against Republicans. One GOP smiley face media blitz can wipe that away. “See the GOP doesn’t have horns and a tail.” Wasn’t that the Ronald Reagan jiu-jitsu against the cliche to boredom liberal line on conservatives. In fact, they did turn out to be the spawn of the devil. And they are stoking the fires of hell even hotter. The judgement–consequences–of the 46-year arc of movement conservatism have yet to be booked. The destruction of society, nature, civil society, and the economy of the world is huge. And that’s before the destruction of infrastructure done worldwide in the name of “freedom”.
There are two years yet in the Presidency of a rope-a-dope campaigner. The book on President Barack Obama is not complete. But the comparisons that come to mind of this Presidency are Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower. We are living with the revival of the economy of the first (Hoover just got the fall-out), the persistence of the deep state created by the second, and the blowback from the foreign policies of the third.
Interestingly, none of the people I will vote for in November will result in the defeat of an incumbent Republican. All of my votes will be defensive of the Democratic status quo at best. But I don’t go with the ballot I want; I go with the ballot I have. Geographical determinism. And I can’t afford to move and change districts.
I think Obama actually did suggestchange on that scale but didn’t promise because of politics and because he fundamentally thinks the current institutions are okay but need reform. I voted for Obama in 2008 because there was a slim outside chance of the big changes needed with him and we were not going to get it with Clinton. But that’s all it was.
I do think the way the financial system was handled was a mistake and some of that is on him though of course that was also an intraparty fight.
Unlike Frank I think Obama should have delegitamized the right from inauguration day since that’s the direction it was clear they were going to him. Unless centrist Dems demanded it, any engagement with the right before Scott Brown’s election was an error.
What if the Democratic base didn’t want Obama to delegitimize the right from inauguration day?
After four years of obstructionism, they still don’t.
How do they define compromise? Is it the way the GOP does as getting the other side to capitulate? In the link Teabaggers are about as likely to want compromise as anyone else. It sounds good but whats it really nean?
Is there a limit beyond which democrats say too far and desire for compromise goes down? And finally is the desire for compromise rooted in getting stuff done–so they won’t care if their leaders compromise or not if policies they favor are being enacted? Compromise may be seen as a means to ends better achieved by other methods.
When I read this sentence I thought for a moment that I had either strayed onto some kind of vicious right wing site or BT had been hacked. Alas, I was wrong on both counts. Fevered defenses of Obama’s failures are only going to have one result. They are going to push people away from the Democratic party. We needed an FDR-level performance and instead we got a “better safe than sorry” approach. He was simply the wrong person for the job.
Later Booman writes:
He won two presidential elections as a brownish man. The only thing really related to race that got in Obama’s way was the following:
He learned to play it centrist and safe early on. Dassit. It’s what he does and it served him well. This is understandable, of course…had he not played that way for most of his adult life he would not have become president. The observation made by Dr. Adolph Reed Jr. way back in 1996 when Obama was just a relatively unknown cog in Illinois machine politic sums up his entire presidential career.
And there it is. He made his compromises…the kinds of compromises that essentially ended up crippling his presidency…well before he was deemed nationally useful by the corporate PermaGov fixers. So it goes.
I am tired of the whole “Race, race and more race” spiel from all sides of the political spectrum. Lemme tell you something, Booman. The opposition to Obama was not “racial.” Sure there are race haters out there. They are at least partially balanced out if not thoroughly outnumbered by people…of all races…who wanted to give him a break because of his racial makeup, people who believed in the great possibilities of a truly post-racial United States. Bet on it. It didn’t pan out. So that goes as well.
The Dems are about to take a shellacking in the 2014 midterms. The reason? Obama has failed. No more ranting about “those damned Republicans,” please. Had Obama attacked them directly from the get-go, had he spoken the truth to the American people about the rising security state, about the corporate-owned PermaGov complex, about the vast criminality rampant in the financial industry and about the dangerous evils of Blood-For-Oil foreign relations, perhaps he would have succeeded. Or, of course…perhaps he would have failed even worse or quite possibly been “removed from office” by one tactic or another. But he didn’t do this and now here we jolly well are, aren’t we. Up the creek without a paddle. Meanwhile he’s planning his post-presidential library. Lucky him.
Get real, Booman.
Too much mealy-mouthing going on around here.
Get real.
It’s time to take off the gloves and fight!!!
Don’t do so and by 2016 we will either have another neoliberal Dem president, a Tea Party-nominated Republican president or the dreaded Rand Paul years. You don’t like those three options? Then fight, fer chrissake!!!
Stand up and fight.
Had Obama done so he’d be the FDR of this century.
But NOOOOoooo…
He danced with who brung him, instead.
You wanna keep up the same lame dance?
WTFU.
We’re nearing last-dance time.
Get real before the band packs up and goes to some other dancehall.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
Oh please. FDR wouldn’t have been the FDR of this century if he had to deal with the Republicans of this century. There are no Hiram Johnsons or Bob LaFollettes among this century’s Republicans.
I also think it’s funny that you quote that assessment of Obama as if it proves something. Perhaps you’re familiar with Walter Lippmann’s famous assessment of FDR:
This also gets at why you’re out of your mind if you think you’re going to convince anyone around here to take Rand Paul seriously. Rand Paul is the anti-Roosevelt. His whole ideology is dedicated to dismantling Roosevelt’s legacy. The only problems he doesn’t want to solve by dismantling the government are immigration (let’s militarize the border) and reproductive rights (total abortion ban). This is the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt:
I’m not saying Obama entirely measures up under those standards, mind you, but I do like having a president who isn’t fundamentally opposed to the whole concept of government.
(I do applaud you for breaking from Paulist orthodoxy in your opinion of FDR, by the way. The party line, of course, is that he was almost as great a tyrant as Lincoln.)
Yeah, but Lippman’s view turned out to be wrong. FDR was a master politician. Obama? Not so much. On the evidence.
As far as party lines go…I toe no one’s line. Ever.
Maybe we need an “anti-Roosevelt”, Don. The New Deal done got old. It has been taken over by the .01% and misused for their own puposes.
Thomas Jefferson:
Yup.
It’s about time for a little rebellion. This shit has become fossilized. The people of the United States are beginning to understand this despite the best efforts of the media to keep them on the straight and narrow. Things are going to jump off soon. Watch.
For better?
For worse?
We shall soon see.
Watch.
AG
Yeah, well, good luck with that. I’d say we’ve had enough anti-Roosevelts already.
This belongs in the trash heap along with all the inane, ignorant, wrong pronouncements by partisan political pundits that never seem to be in short supply. To see it dredged up on a left of center site as evidence that FDR was no FDR is beyond frustrating.
Technically, he had more qualification for the office than most Presidents — but few bother to look at and consider his resume before assuming that office.
As for not being a crusader, one need only look at who he chose for executive positions. If he hadn’t been FDR, he would have re-appointed Mellon as Treasury Secretary. If wouldn’t have appointed the first woman member of his cabinet — the great Frances Perkins — and he had to beg her to take the job. Who did Obama appoint? Clinton and GWB has beens. The architects of the “new economy” that collapsed and people that believed there were WMD in Iraq and Afghanistan could still be won.
He understood and knew who Republicans of his time were and he wasn’t about to cozy up to them and use their failed policies.
Hang on now, I’m not saying FDR was no FDR. My only point in quoting that was to show how relevant some dude’s assessment of Obama from 1996 is today. Of course Lippmann was spectacularly wrong.
And in fact I wish there was more of FDR in Obama myself, but the comparison can also be unfair. Roosevelt had bigger Democratic majorities than Obama ever did, and he even had supporters among the Republicans. Of course he got more done.
Adolph Reed, Jr. isn’t “some dude.”
wrt Lippmann
Lippman’s 1/32 dismissal of FDR likely intended to discourage others from voting for him. Reed’s comment on Obama was made in 1996 and had less to do with Obama than what Reed was observing among a certain class of young politicians.
All right, fine. I meant no disrespect to Adolph Reed, Jr. This isn’t about Adolph Reed, Jr., and it isn’t about Walter Lippmann either. It’s about waving around random quotations as if they prove something.
I think you’re misreading Stephen. The Lippman quote just shows how people then underestimated Roosevelt in terms that strongly remind us of how Obama is regarded by a lot of sort-of-left intellectuals today, as a non-leftist and a lightweight. You can argue Obama deserves the criticism and Roosevelt didn’t, by all means, but the point is it takes a certain historical distance before you can be sure. We still can’t understand why Roosevelt decided to go back to budget balancing in 1937, and we’ll probably never understand why Obama hired Geithner and Duncan (hey, his rock-bottom worst appointments weren’t Bush and Clinton holdovers).
Going to disagree with you on this. Lippman was one person and public opinion shaper that criticized FDR from the right. Criticism of FDR from the left was that he moved too slowly or too incrementally. They generally stuck with him because FDR’s team was laying down structures that could (and were) built upon.
Geithner had been at the NYFed (FDR didn’t appoint NYFed Chair Harrison (R) to Treasury either) — working is way up the ladder in service to Wall St. Duncan is part of the Chicago School that is close to Obama and I should have included that segment of his appointments in my prior comment, but they aren’t any better than the others.
wrt the 1937 budget balancing, I don’t know that it’s all that mysterious. Keynesian economics were still new and the initial test run results had been good, but if the patient had recovered, shouldn’t the medicine be withdrawn? The point isn’t so much that he tried budget balancing, but that he reversed course as soon as it became an obvious failure.
I think FDR is way overrated, personally. I see him as an average politician that had an amazing hand. Two of his mistakes — the court-packing scheme and the Roosevelt Recession — were some of the biggest boneheaded mistakes ever made by the Democratic Party. Not to mention that his complete apathy on social issues, especially that of women and racial minorities, would get him condemned as a plantation owner-fellating quisling if he didn’t have the fog of nostalgia backing him up. The black cabinet and Perkins is exactly the kind of tokenism that Clinton and Obama get slammed for and yet somehow he gets a pass on it.
It was a different age, though.
Today FDR would be found sadly wanting on those issues but no one then, outside the Communists, was doing anything on racial issues that would be found left-enough today.
And on gender issues, essentially no one. Hell, women hadn’t had the vote for 20 years, yet.
It’s like complaining about Truman’s stand on net neutrality.
I don’t begrudge him his indifference on civil rights. The United States was still violently bigoted at the time and the fulcrum of his majority depended on this element.
I only bring it up to put things in perspective. I can think of very few political or moral calculuses that allow FDR to be a tactical genius who was the best thing that happened to American liberals in a good long while but simultaneously allow Obama/Clinton to be worthless sellout collaborateurs. Unless you think of course that the bar should be raised as history advances which, while a defensible position, allows a level of goalpost-shifting that I feel is misguided. Especially since, like I said, FDR held an amazing hand while Obama is holding a deceptively mediocre one.
If he were indifferent to civil rights — as opposed to having to work with white southern racists to get elected and get anything done — there would not have been the Federal Council of Negro Affairs. He wouldn’t have received 71% of the Black vote in 1936. Marian Anderson wouldn’t have been invited to perform at the WH and he wouldn’t have approved her concert at the Lincoln Memorial.
Most of the black vote in 1932 couldn’t actually vote… and that’s part of the problem.
FDR and his team of progressives built the New Deal. Clinton promoted the dismantling of major portions of it. Obama advocates for “entitlement” reform and his education dude would destroy public education in favor of privatized corporate run schools (a progressive ideal that began in the 19th century). We can give Obama credit for signing the repeal of DOMA, but what the hell was Clinton doing supporting discriminatory legislation in 1996?
Compared to who?
Are you daft? Token appointments, for sexual and racial equalities, weren’t made back then.
The one item on her agenda that she couldn’t get was a national health care policy.
“When I read this sentence I thought for a moment that I had either strayed onto some kind of vicious right wing site or BT had been hacked.”
Admit it – you’ve never actually read a word Booman’s written before, have you?
He rails against outsider lefty purity politics all the damn time, d00d.
And that’s one of the reasons I visit this site…
Of course I have. Daily. For years. I used to agree with him most of the time. Now I do not. Not very often, anyway. My positions have changed. His…to a great degree…have not. So it goes.
AG
shorter booman: Vote Democratic. In return, you’ll get nothing and like it.
That’s not really fair.
I think he’s saying, ‘Vote Democratic: we’ll marginally improve a broken system if the Powers That Be allow us to, instead of stomping the whole thing into rubble.’
Vote Democratic: we’ll marginally improve a broken system if the Powers That Be allow us to, instead of stomping the whole thing into rubble.
Personally, I’m extremely suspicious of people and movement groups that promise to radically overturn suboptimal and even (in their view) irredeemible political systems that they nonetheless have a political voice in. I’m sympathetic towards the millennialist and manichean rhetoric of, say, the original Nation of Islam and Black Panthers. Not so much modern liberals.
“I’m extremely suspicious of people and movement groups that promise to radically overturn suboptimal and even (in their view) irredeemible political systems that they nonetheless have a political voice in.”
I agree; I’m a deeply conservative person by nature.
Given those choices, I’ll take marginal improvement. I’d like to avoid rubble at least until my kids are grown. Are there other choices? I’d like to believe so, but I’ve seen no evidence yet.
I’ll take marginal improvement that The Powers That Be allow, too. Hell, given those choices, I’ll phone-bank for marginal improvement that TBTB allow.
There is some evidence that other choices exist, though. There are programs in place, enacted at a time when social attitudes were generally far more reactionary, which are tremendously more progressive than anything currently possible.
Ultimately, I view Obama as our version of Nixon. Erm, as far as long-term trends go.
Nixon’s administration was, from a policy standpoint, not as conservative as it could have been and was doubtless disappointing in a lot of ways for the libertarian/paleocon contingent. However, Nixon’s administration and coalition provided the map for the New Right and Republican Party’s success for the next almost 40 years. Even though Reagan is viewed as the highwater mark of the New Right and the real founder of the modern Republican Party, Nixon was the man that made it all possible.
That’s what I predict Obama is going to mean for the Democratic Party. His administration was a marked break from how the post-1968/pre-2008 Democratic Party governed and wielded success. The Democratic Party being able to compete as a national party without the Solid South/Appalachia and without the assent of the white working class heralds a very different path for the United States.
Both of these points deserve more explanation. A diary perhaps?
Well, other people have been able to explain it much better than I can. Probably the best starting place is Ruy Texeira and John Judis’s The Emerging Democratic Majority. It was written back in 2002 but it’s our version of the equally prescient Emerging Republic Majority by Philips. This link will help whet your appetite, hopefully: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/progressive-movement/report/2012/12/04/46664/the-obama-coalit
ion-in-the-2012-election-and-beyond/
Long story short is that until very recently it was pretty much impossible to win the White House without the South/Appalachia. What the 2008 election showed us was that the Obama coalition could just barely win without the Southern states. Of course, the leftist wing of the Democratic Party is simultaneously also able to better compete in certain regions of the South (Georgia, Florida, hopefully Texas soon) without diluting its agenda.
What this means is that unlike the New Deal Coalition, the post-Obama Democratic Party will be able to run an unapologetically socially liberal agenda and also be able to expand the welfare state without risking a Southern revolt. Also, unlike the Clintonian consensus, the Democratic Party won’t need Wall Street money to be able to compete nationally and can run a more populist agenda. The big thing is that the Democratic Party no longer has to face the Sophie’s choice of stabbing the New Deal Coalition or the Rainbow Coalition in the back.
“Forward together; not one step back.” has been a powerful message for people of good will in the South regardless of their ideology. Moral Monday, like the coalition behind the civil rights movement uses a moral formulation to frame policy issues. For the generation that never heard that formulation in the 1960s, Rev. Barber’s message has some power in the South. Whether that power translates into Democratic votes depends greatly on the positioning of Democratic candidate and more importantly their own moral integrity.
A huge number of people in the South want to put the historical divisions behind them. They could if someone would shut down the conservative radio and TV talkers (indeed all radio and TV talkers) and let them think through sound policy. The constant proselytizing distracts from sound policy.
Now they have the Hobson’s choice of stabbing the New Deal/Rainbow coalition in the back or stabbing the DLC/Third Way/No Labels coalition in the back. Tell me how that is going to work when Democrats stop trying to be “business friendly” and start pointing out public/private partnerships for the corrupt scams that they have been.
Now they have the Hobson’s choice of stabbing the New Deal/Rainbow coalition in the back or stabbing the DLC/Third Way/No Labels coalition in the back. Tell me how that is going to work when Democrats stop trying to be “business friendly” and start pointing out public/private partnerships for the corrupt scams that they have been.
By the old-fashioned way. Prescient Democrats notice that with the current demographics a full-throated liberal agenda gets them more votes than one diluted with economic conservatism and displace by inertia or direct primary defeats Democrats who don’t get with the program. The Democratic Party of 2012 is more economically liberal than that of 2008 and certainly 1996.
You can of course posit that there’s some kind of conspiracy such that the more centrist Democrats counter this popular agenda with money bombs. I’m sure that’s the playbook they’ll try to run, but, ask the post-Bush Jr. Republican Party how reliable that strategy is.
The post-Bush Jr. Republican Party has won elections because the money bombs were behind the ideologues in the primaries and again in the general election. Where the crazies have lost is where the candidate showed his horns and tail in the run-up to the general election–Akin, Mourdock, O’Donnell. The stealth candidates backed by money walked into office — Walker and Johnson in Wisconsin, Snyder in Michigan, McCrory in NC. It was only after gaining office and a majority in the legislative body that the process of ramming through crazy began. And it will take at least a decade to reverse all that damage.
Democrats have no such strategy for reform or for reversing the idiocy of the past decade, nor are they running on the idea of doing that.
Those prescient Democratic candidates have not arrived in enough numbers to transform the Democratic infrastructure.
Democrats have no such strategy for reform or for reversing the idiocy of the past decade, nor are they running on the idea of doing that.
Of course. It would send people like DWS, and Rahmbo, around the bend if they did.
the truth about the great wouldbe mediator and reconciliator that needed four years to discover what most of us political junkies already knew — that you can’t change the minds and ways of the Beltway Hive from the inside.
That he’s now bringing out the sometimes less than “civil” rhetorical club now long after it was was needed as Frank argues, would seem to support his povs on the matter, in terms of failing to meet the need then as well as a legacy-salvaging device.
You have done a great job with this essay. I particularly like one of the closing lines:
If 2010 had never happened and Obama had been free to let his freak flag fly, people like Mr. Frank would be writing the exact same column, with the only difference being the particulars of their grievances.
Some people have their phasers jammed on “shoot own team in foot” to the point that I have come to believe that they want and need a George W Bush every couple of election cycles, just so they can have a criminal administration to hate without reservation and buff up their purity cred.
As Steve M. points out at No More Mister Nice Blog:
“184 DAYS: THAT’S HOW LONG DEMOCRATS HAD 60 VOTES IN THE SENATE IN OBAMA’S FIRST TERM”
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2014/07/184-days-thats-how-long-democrats-had.html#links
Well worth reading it all.