If President Obama is doing what is within his power to depress his base vote and give the Republican party a new lease on power, well he’s doing a great job at it. If his goal is to be a strong leader and a great Democrat, he’s failing miserably at it. 2010 was a repeat of 1994 and 2002, when all the force of moral good on the side of liberalism can’t overcome a Democratic party that simplywill not fight. If he continues on this path, and nothing – absolutely nothing – has shown me otherwise, he’s setting himself up to replicate the Democratic losses of 1980 and 1984 no matter who the Republican nominee is.
We sent him to Washington to stand up and fight. Instead he’s cowering and retreating.
… they are watching a President be submitted to racist smear campaigns by folks outside the party that make any and all of the bullshit the Clintons went through look like small potatoes, and NO ONE is raising any hell in defense of the President. It’s all go along to get along. The only congressman who called the Republicans out was defeated. The rest just sit there and whisper behind the scenes about how Obama won’t tell them what he wants.
So basically fuck everybody, is what I’m left with at the end of today. Except Nancy. Nancy’s the only one I like anymore. I’m all for primarying Obama in 2012 if Nancy can be the nominee.
I’m done wondering which bunch of nitwits is the worst bunch of nitwits, really, Obama’s nitwits in the White House or the Democrats’ nitwits on the hill. As far as I’m concerned they all suck, and I’d like to kick them all in the nuts. I don’t think I’m in the minority in that opinion. They’ve got a president whose kink appears to be making everybody like him, not that surprising in a career politician, and ten to twelve attention whores on any given day who know the only way to get on TV is to fuck their own party with a rusty chainsaw, and it’s been hard because Bush broke the whole country.
And so okay, it’s hard. It is hard. If I’m in there, in the fishbowl, and not out here among the barely employed, I see where it looks hard. I hear all the teabagging screaming and the nonstop Republican chorus on the Sunday shows and I read the wanky editorials and I think that’s all there is. If I’m in there, I hear that it’s hard. But I’m not in there. I’m out here. And out here, it’s harder.
It’s harder not just because the economy has sucked for the last three years but because for the Midwest, for any place at all that makes stuff besides hedge fund managers and other Future Douchebags of America, the economy has sucked for the last three decades. Three decades in which Democrats in power have cheerfully repeated Republican propaganda that anything that actually helps people is just too expensive for our wondrous free market to bear, and we must immediately cut it all so that we can have a budget surplus. Which we will then give back. To some people. Thus making the market free.
Or something. It’s been a 30-year mishmash of supposed reform all meant to tighten the vise of the great around the necks of the powerless and what bothers me isn’t so much Republicans winning that argument, it’s watching Democrats give it to them. That’s what’s pissing people off today. It would be one thing if Obama, having lost critical votes, gave a press conference talking about what a tough fight it had been and how we just don’t have the votes and blah blah blah fuck-the-Republicans-cakes.
Instead it’s “we had to do this to get unemployment extended,” which even if that is true and I don’t grant that it is, puts a temporary solution above the long-term fix.While I sympathize with this:
So too here: if the President had failed to negotiate with the robbers in the Senate, they would have begun starving the hostages, who arenot in a position to sacrifice themselves to the cause of Republican obstructionism. Instead, by pushing through this compromise, the President has (hopefully) enabled the unemployed and underemployed Americans to find their way to relatively safety. Now, it’s only a battle for political, not actual, survival, with only elections rather than meals and homes at stake in the near term.
Trouble is, it isn’t only elections at stake in the near term. Elections are about things, fundamentally they’re about how we want to run the country and we can either have the argument about how we’re doing that or we can say fuck it and just make it all somebody else’s problem. Republicans have been starving the hostages for years now and they keep getting away with it because the temporary solution is always the easiest, the most popular, the most expedient thing. And so we never actually have the argument, and we never actually win or lose it. And thus we lose it anyway, because the status quo is the middle- and working- and lower-class loss.
I sympathize, I do, with the argument that Obama couldn’t win here, with the crap-ass Congress he has and his own inherent bent towards being concilatory. Trouble is, his job at that point wasn’t to win. It wasn’t to compromise in the hopes of winning even just a little.
It was to sharpen his teeth and lose, HARD.
The way we’re all going to be losing, year after year after year, because we keep avoiding the argument.
A.