If you believe Cenk Uygur, the reason that the Republicans are showing more enthusiasm about voting has nothing to do with them being shut out of power in Washington and displeased with the resulting ‘change’ from the Bush years. No. The problem has nothing to do with Republicans being riled up into a mob-like froth by the Koch brothers and Dick Armey and Fox News and Sarah Palin’s tweets and the faux-outrage of the week. This differential in base-support isn’t a totally predictable outcome we see nearly everytime a new president faces his first midterm election. The problem, says Cenk, is that Rahm Emanuel called us ‘effing retarded’ for running ads against incumbent Democrats. Well, that and the fact that Obama deliberately chose to go for tiny change, in total disregard for the overwhelming support he had in the Senate to double the size of the stimulus, pass a public option, and break up the banks into a billion local S&L’s.
So, as a result, progressives aren’t going to turn out to vote.
That’s the story he wants you to believe, but the truth is that the activist left is going to vote. They always do. Every once in a while they’ll split their vote between a Democrat and an independent candidate, but they never stay home and they never vote for a Republican. But let’s say that some progressive activists were to stay home, or just that they aren’t motivated to donate their time and money. Is that because Rahm Emanuel called them retarded or because Cenk and his friends repeated that quote fifty millions times to their readers and listeners? Who has been providing their audiences with an unrelenting stream of criticism? Do they not see that their message has a depressing effect on the base? Does an offhand remark by a foul-mouthed chief of staff trump a progressive media that finds every fault and ignores or poo-poos every accomplishment?
Cenk’s whole world-view is just flat-out wrong. The progressive base is centered among people of color who are less engaged than they were in 2008, in large part, because the president is not on the ballot. The smaller, academically-centered part of the progressive coalition may be frustrated and less active than usual, but they’ll vote. Unfortunately, despite being opinion leaders who write newspaper columns, magazine articles, and high-traffic blogs, they have generally not given their audiences any reason to vote for the Democrats and plenty of reason to be apathetic.
Rather than explaining the difficulty of passing health care reform through the U.S. Congress, they focus on the sausage-making and call it “no-change.” Rather than realistically assessing what kind of stimulus package could pass through Congress, they point to academic studies to call it inadequate. It’s all very interesting and, in most respects, it’s even true, but it ignores both reality and the elephant (GOP) in the room.
The most offensive part of it is the criticism Cenk makes here:
We all know that Obama struck the same exact deals with the big drug companies that Bush did. Obama had campaigned against those specific agreements, but once he got into office he was convinced that we couldn’t upset those deals and that we just had to shoot for a tiny bit of change. That we couldn’t change the way Washington ran, we could just play the old Washington game a little better. That is the essence of Rahm Emanuel.
The health care bill that passed, passed by the skin of its teeth. It would not have passed without the support of important stake-holders like the AARP, PhRMA, and the AMA. After a half-century of trying and failing to provide access to health care for all American citizens, the president succeeded and is greeted with the charges that this is ‘tiny change’ and that he’s just like Bush. Who’s depressing turnout? Rahm Emanuel, who helped usher the bill through Congress giving subsidies to millions of progressives living in poverty or near-poverty? Or Cenk and his friends who refuse to give the president any credit and take every opportunity to remind progressives that Emanuel called them retarded?
I share all the frustrations about what’s going on in Washington that I read about in the progressive blogosphere, but I have some perspective. I’ll be glad to see Rahm Emanuel go. If he had his way, we wouldn’t have provided subsidies for millions of progressives (and non-progressives) to buy health care. But he got it done when the president gave him marching orders, and that’s what matters in the end.
I’d like to see Cenk deal with two wars, an economy losing over a half a million jobs a month, a bunch of conservadems in crucial committee chairs, and a totally united Party-of-No opposition. He’d fail in epic proportions. He’d deliver nothing but righteous indignation. Thinking about it, that’s all he’s delivering now.
Bet he votes for the Democrats though.
