This Man Must Be a Half-Prophet

From a comment I posted to John Caruso's blog A Distant Ocean on February 29, 2008 (yes, before Obama was even the Democratic presidential candidate):

I would expect that if we get a Dem in the White House, and he or she fails to deliver the change he or she has promised, we'll get a Republican Congress in 2010 -- just as we got in 1994, thanks to Clinton/Gore's pushing NAFTA through, and a change like the one we got in 2006, thanks to Bush's callousness and brutality to America. It'll take more than a vote to make real change happen, though. I'd expect people to retreat into apathy once more after new politicians fail to improve things, but what with this very unpopular war and a growing anger, that might not happen. If I have any hope, it's not in any candidate, but in other people. Will there be a movement worth joining? I hope so, but if so it will be probably be despite Obama or Clinton, just as the movements of the 60s were despite Kennedy.

Well, I was half-right, and considering Republican victories at the state and local levels, I think my crystal ball was working well that day. (And I need to remember and use my closing line from this comment a week later.)

Inappropriately Touched By Iowa

Nobody deflates a pompous politician like Whatever It Is I'm Against It. He just demonstrated his filleting skills on Obama's post-holocaust press conference. My favorite:

WHAT THERE IS A INHERENT DANGER IN: “There is a inherent danger in being in the White House and being in the bubble. I mean, folks didn’t have any complaints about my leadership style when I was running around Iowa for a year.” So maybe you should be doing that, then. Also, you didn’t have a leadership style per se because you weren’t actually a, you know, leader yet.

WHAT THEY WERE ABLE TO DO: “And they got a pretty good look at me up close and personal, and they were able to lift the hood and kick the tires”. They did what you to you now? Show us on this Tonka truck where the Iowans touched you.

Or show us on the item in the (possibly NSFW) photo in this post.

In other news to complicate the story we're getting on the election, "The conservative Blue Dogs lost half their members, while the Progressive Caucus remains near eighty." Was America trying to send a message to the Democrats?

I Got Plenty of Awful

I paid as little attention as possible to the election returns, and then to avoid going to bed early tuned in to my community radio station at around 11:30. They were hooked up to Pacifica's postmortems, which featured Laura Flanders, Michael Moore, and some other folks I couldn't identify by voice. Looks like the Democrats got what they wanted: we've gone from a Congress controlled by Republicans to a Congress controlled by Republicans.

Moore and some others argued that there's no love lost between the Teabaggers and the Old Republicans, which is certainly true. Moore predicted a civil war in Congress between the two factions, which if true will be fun to watch. Someone else pointed out that the Tea Party hadn't done all that well, with only about 50% of their candidates winning. In Pennsylvania they all lost. On the other side, 50% of the Blue Dog Democrats lost their Congressional seats.

And despite their protestations, the Teabaggers I've dealt with aren't interested in "small government." Republican candidates (not Tea Party as far as I know) took the House and Senate seats where I live, but that's nothing new: it was a real surprise, but only a blip when Obama took Indiana's electoral votes in 2008. This is Klan country, so not much has changed.

O Waily Waily Waily, The Only Hope of America Has Fallen!

If I had a magic wand, or three wishes from a genie or Faery godmother, I'd quietly arrange for the Democrats to trounce the Republicans in tomorrow's elections. Right now it looks to me as though the Democrats have already given up -- they've been working themselves into a snit for months, and won't it be nice for them to stop even pretending to try? They can blame the Republicans, and the Professional Left, and just wallow in a big puddle of self-pity and Thanksralphery. I think they want out. And while I've written before that since most Democratic pols would rather lose to Republicans than vote against the corporate agenda, they should get what they want -- and I still feel that way -- at my most serious I despise the Democrats too much to let them get off that easily.

Today a co-worker of mine posted a link on Facebook to a CNN poll that showed the "number of Americans who say things are going badly in the country, at 75 percent, is higher than it has been on the eve of any midterm election since the question was first asked in the mid-1970s". That's higher than 1994, higher than 2006.

The top concern remains unemployment, with 58 percent saying it's the most important economic issue facing the country today, followed by the deficit at 20 percent, and taxes and mortgages tied at 8 percent each.

Interestingly, the article also mentioned that the "economy has been the issue most on the mind of Americans in CNN polling since the end of 2007." 2007, of course, is the Bush administration. Republicans have been furious that Obama has accused them of getting us into the current mess. Obama neglects to mention the Democrats' collaboration, of course, but the Republicans shouldn't escape their share of the blame.

So if I could, I'd keep the Democrats in control (hah!) of Congress et cetera for the next two years. Wouldn't it be funny if they woke up on Wednesday with the Republicans in defeat and disarray, their own script of betrayal by the Democratic rank and file belied by events? The corporate media would have to scramble to rewrite their own script of Democratic failure to be centrist enough, the True Pure Centrists would splutter in frustration, and the Democrats would still have to decide what to do about the banks, taxes, Social Security, and Afghanistan. I can't think of a better reason for voting Democratic tomorrow.

Buzzword of the Day: "Historic"

I happened to have NPR's news report turned on just now, and it began with the newscaster saying that the Democrats face "historic losses" on Tuesday. Considering how often right-wing pundits and propagandists have been throwing around the word "historic" lately in connection with elections, that little word package grated on my nerves. C'mon, every election can't be historic. (Was the 2006 upset that put Democrats back in control of Congress "historic"? Kerry's defeat in 2004? Bush's theft of the election in 2000?)

And then toward the end of the short broadcast, the newscaster announced the death of longtime Democratic hack Theodore Sorenson, who, she said, helped John Fitzgerald Kennedy craft his "historic" inaugural speech. It was almost a rhyme, and an odd overuse of such a vacuous word in so short a time.

I Want to Vote for a Democrat! (Are There Any Around?)

The more Democrats and their shills demand that I vote for the Democrats on November, because the Republicans will do terrible things if they regain power, the more I remember what the Democrats have done.

Heaven forbid [via] that the Republicans win on Nov. 2!

They might escalate in Afghanistan and fake a withdrawal from Iraq.
They might pass a bogus health reform law written by the insurers, thereby entrenching them in the system for many years to come.
They might put EFCA (labor rights reform) on a back burner.
They might step up deportations of undocumented workers.
They might expand the military budget to an all–time high.
They might retain Bush’s apparatus of repression, including torture and assassination of US citizens by White House fiat.
They might keep Guantanamo open and tighten the blockade of Cuba.
They might threaten war with Iran.
They might cave in to Israel and the Israel lobby, and neglect Palestinian rights.
They might throw billions of our tax dollars at mega-bankers, but do little or nothing for ordinary homeowners.
They might tolerate a 10 percent unemployment rate, with jobless rates double or triple that for youth of color.
They might start overthrowing lawful elected governments in Central America.
They might start raiding the homes of leftwing antiwar activists.

I count my lucky stars for leaders who understand that the Republicans are the ultra right, and we must all vote Democrat to isolate the main enemy.

... and the more I consider throwing up my hands and staying at home on election day.

But I'll vote anyway. It's good exercise to go to the polling place, and it will entitle me to give me an extra slap to Democrats who will say darkly, "I'll bet you didn't even vote" when I criticize Obama.

Come to think of it, listening to Democrats warn about the horrible things the Republicans will do reminds me of an old joke from the USSR a friend told me in the 1970s. It's an elementary school classroom in the Soviet Union, and the teacher is telling the children how miserable people are in America: they suffer from racism, poverty, disease, and so on. While in the glorious Soviet Union, everyone has useful work, enough to eat, a comfortable place to live, free medical care, and everyone is equal!

A little girl bursts into tears. "What's the matter?" the teacher asks. "I want to move to the Soviet Union!" the little girl cries.

The application of this joke to the coming elections may be left as an exercise for the reader. But there's something else as well. To an American, the joke is funny, because everyone knows that the American standard of living is second to none! That's why communism failed! That's why people from all over the world want to move to America, where we have freedom and a great medical care system and amber fields of grain to feed the world and the streets are paved with gold! And that's why I don't just want to vote for a Democrat -- I want to move to America!

A Lose-Lose Situation

Professional Leftist Paul Krugman quotes himself:

We’ll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn’t been a success.

I've been harshly critical of Obama on many occasions and I'm not likely to stop any time soon. But it might not be inappropriate to mention that on one level I never wanted him to fail. That's the level where success is measured by (for example) getting the US out of the economic hole it's in, bringing our armed forces home and letting innocent people abroad go on living unscathed by drone missiles. If success is measured instead solely by keeping the Democrats in control of Congress and Obama in the Oval Office while pursuing destructive policies, I could hardly give less of a shit. Of course Obama and the Dems would like us to believe that things can't get better without them in the driver's seat. But as Krugman says, Obama's "actual strategy ... hasn't been a success," either in making things better for most people or, it seems, in maintaining Democratic political hegemony. So I guess the question to ask someone who accuses someone else of 'wanting Obama to fail' is "Fail at what?" If his goal is to give us a third Bush term, then he ought to fail; unfortunately, he seems to be succeeding. But Bush's policies failed for him, and they're failing for Obama -- and for the rest of us.

By the way, Gore Vidal recently lamented that Obama is "incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It’s a pity because he’s the first intellectual president we’ve had in many years, but he can’t hack it. He’s not up to it. He’s overwhelmed." So much for intellectuals! Vidal should have read more of Noam Chomsky on intellectuals and the state, but I think he seriously overrated Obama's intellectual prowess.

Which Side Am I On?

from alicublog:

One of the great things about Kudlow being such a hack is that you can make a decent post just by putting in the relevant facts he leaves out. But in this column the Republican Party's second-most-famous former cokehead goes beyond the usual card tricks to remind us of what the GOP is really about.

Of course, Obama never mentions the unions, including the SEIU and AFL-CIO, and all their foreign money from their big international affiliates. Instead, he extends his own cast of villains, attacking special interests, Wall Street banks, corporations, the oil industry, the insurance industry, credit-card companies, AIG, and ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil? What did they do? Oh, they’re an oil company.

Phew. Kind of anti-business, wouldn’t you say?

I was with him on the "all their foreign money from their big international affiliates" -- oh-yeah-what-about-the-other-guy is a time-honored electioneering gambit. But in this the year of the Tea Party, isn't it a little weird to be defending Wall Street banks, credit-card companies, and big business in general? I thought it was all about the grassroots overthrowing the "ruling class." And then:

Obama then blasts millionaires and billionaires, waging war on capital and investors, too. Next he talks about getting young people, African Americans, and union members to the polls. Even more division. Even more class warfare.

It's divisive for Obama to invite these people to vote? I thought working people were the bedrock of the Tea Party movement, and all the cool kids were wearing tricorner hats. And minorities -- why, Perfesser Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a whole scrapbook of tea-partying black folk photos!

A series of investor-related polls shows how totally detached the president is from the nearly 100 million folks who directly or indirectly own stocks.

A survey conducted by Citigroup Global Markets of 100 mutual-fund, hedge-fund, and pension-fund managers...

Hedge-fund managers!

Well, yeah, hedge-fund managers -- the Real America behind the faux Real America of the Tea Party. Where did you think the Tea Party gets their funding?

Teh O'Bama made a bad blunder in the way he went after the Chamber of Commerce. Not because they shouldn't be gone after, or because his approach was "McCarthyite" -- again, Joe McCarthy is a martyr of the American right. It's because the Democrats are every bit as dependent on big money and foreign money as the Republicans, and everyone knows it. They may even remember a few such scandals involving the Democrats in the recent past.

But that's okay, because as Jane Hamsher reports (via), the Democrats' own pollsters report that the party is pursuing a losing strategy in this campaign:

On Wednesday [Stan] Greenberg and James Carville released a research report summarizing the results of their extensive polling on messaging that is working for Democrats in this election cycle. It won’t surprise most people to learn that protecting Social Security, creating American jobs and opposing NAFTA-like free trade agreements are the messages most likely to persuade people to vote for Democrats.

(Remember, though, that the Obama administration wants to whittle away at Social Security, favors NAFTA-like free trade agreements, and has done a piss-poor job of creating American jobs, though it has done quite well at boosting corporate profits.)

But curiously, they left something out of their summary that set off red flags for a lot of Democratic insiders when they issued it as a Democracy Corps”Alert” on September 20. The Alert said quite emphatically that Democrats needed to change their framework in order to win in November. Greenberg buried the lede, but his polling reached a very clear conclusion: Obama’s “go forward, not backward” message actually moves voters over to the GOP ...

As Avedon Carol at the Sideshow Party puts it, "And the message reminds them [i.e., voters] that things have become worse, not better, since Obama took office."

Hamsher quotes Greenberg's explanation:

Because a “go forward” framework implies that Democrats and Congress have made progress those voters do not feel, the message re-enforces the Republican framework for the election – a referendum on the Democrats’ performance on the economy. In the experiment described above (where voters read the two Republican messages and the two Democratic ‘go forward, not back’ messages), votes shifted to the Republicans not only on which party can best handle the economy but also on the congressional vote. The 5 percent who shifted to the Democrats was exceeded by the 7 percent of voters who moved to the Republicans – a net negative 2-point worsening of the race.

Party loyalists keep telling skeptics that Obama and the party leadership know what they're doing, so the rest of us should shut up, put our shoulders to the wheel, and get the vote out in November. I'm not of the party, so this doesn't move me; I don't need the machine to get me to vote anyway. But the interesting thing is that those wise eleven-dimensional chess players are trying to shoot themselves in the foot. (Again.) Of course they aren't going to listen to Professional Leftists like me, or to silly-billy Democrats who see the glass as 90 percent empty instead of 10 percent full, but they're ignoring insiders, their own people, the very people they assigned to tell them what is going on and direct their tactics.

Hamsher has an earlier post giving the "Top 10 Reasons The Democrats Might Do Better In 2010 Than You Think," and they're good reasons, but that hasn't stopped various party hacks from attacking her. Avedon cites a prog blogger who warns, "At some point people need to consider the possibility that Hamsher doesn't have the administration's best interests at heart." (The entire post is even battier.) Like I said, for the Democrats this is about the Party and the Administration, not the American people, but the evidence is that the administration doesn't even has its own best interests at heart. -- But there I've succumbed to a significant confusion myself: the interests we're talking about here are winning elections, which are vital to a political party, but the best interests of citizens are different. Of course both parties work hard to convince their members and the country that, by an amazing coincidence, their interests and your interests are the same. I think it's fair to doubt it.

You're Either Laughing or Vomiting

After a brief aberration in which he linked to an actual sober conservative, my right-wing Facebook acquaintance reverted to form by offering up the latest effusion of classicist Victor Davis Hanson at National Review Online:

On his latest speaking tour, the president has continued to talk about a traditional midterm election — in which the country assesses the sitting administration’s agenda — as if it were some epic Manichean struggle, something akin to race relations: Jim Crow, civil rights, and now, most recently, the abolition of slavery. At best, Obama is implying that a referendum on his policies is of similar magnitude to an existential battle like the Civil War; at worst, he implies by analogy that he is the crusading abolitionist and his opponents the forces of slaveholding evil. And all of this from someone who campaigned on the notion of unity and national healing.

An embattled President who sees his glorious mandate and majority about to crumble can hardly be blamed if he heats up the rhetoric when he's on the campaign trail. Not that I have any sympathy for Obama and the Democrats, mind you -- they've dug, and continue to dig, their own grave -- but fair is fair.

It's not as if the Right hasn't cast its own struggle for hegemony in Manichean terms; they hardly know any other way to think. Look at the Tea Party Extended Tantrum (I'm not sure it really deserves to be called a movement), which has busily cast Obama, the Democrats, Liberals, and the Left as the Socialist Communist Kenyan anti-colonialist enslavers of America. The National Review itself has always been prone to the Manichean heresy. Hanson's column is basically a modified replay of Jennifer Rubin's, which my acquaintance linked to a couple of weeks ago, in which the Commentary blogger complained that liberals but not conservatives Hate Americans. As for "national healing," that's one of the most enduring and empty campaign tropes. George W. Bush, to name just one, promised to heal the nation.

I’m sorry, but opposing higher deficits or cap-and-trade is not the same as denying someone civil rights, and Obama, the Ivy League graduate, is not a Susan B. Anthony or Martin Luther King Jr.

You don't have to be a right-winger to agree with the second half of that sentence, but the whole premise of the Republican Right is that higher deficits are un-American -- despite their Presidents' consistent creation of vast deficits -- and a plot by liberals to destroy our country. (For that matter, the American Right was perfectly happy to deny civil rights to African-Americans and to demonize Martin Luther King Jr. while he was still alive. Ditto for women's rights and Susan B. Anthony.) Obama has shown that, far from being radical, his policies and aims are mostly consistent with those of the Republican Right. Hanson claims that Obama's policies "seem to millions to be radical and contrary to the notions of limited government, lower taxes, and personal freedom, notions that have long set us apart from our Western constitutional cousins in Europe."

Ahem; in a country the size of the US, you can find "millions" who'll believe almost anything. Bush's policies also seemed "radical" to millions, and millions more rejected them decisively in 2008. But Bush and his political allies never were interested in limited government or personal freedom; lower taxes, maybe, though Reagan raised taxes, and the US had higher income taxes than we have now for most of the twentieth century. The notion that a social safety net -- unemployment insurance, Social Security, public education, Medicare, Medicaid, public health measures, and so on -- is a threat to "personal freedom" is a particular and obsessive hobbyhorse of the American Right, but not one that seems to be shared by most Americans, even those who hate Obama.

Now, me, I don't think that most Americans agree with me, even though I think I'm right. It's not only the right that tends to succumb to the belief that whatever they want, everybody wants; but I, who know that I'm weird, am weird in this respect too.

More Like Voter Antipathy Than Apathy

Ian Welsh has a good piece (via) with some useful reminders in it:

In a midterm election where they need the base to come out, they have spent the last six months insulting the base and engaging in policy after policy meant to enrage it. ...

It is, for whatever reason, more important to Democrats to “hippie punch” than it is for them to win elections. It is more important for them to serve Wall Street, even if Wall Street gives more money to Republicans, than it is to win elections. Further, they are very happy to do very non-liberal things, like restrict abortion rights, forbid drug reimportation, gut net neutrality or try and cut social security.

Hm, you know, this sounds familiar. Someone else said something similar not so long ago:

It just occurred to me that many (most?) Democrats would rather lose to a Republican than vote against the corporate agenda. Why should I deny them their druthers?

And since it appears that they will get their druthers in November, we should be prepared for the propaganda blast that will follow. One, the corporate media line, will be that the Democrats failed because they didn't move to the center, that is, to the right. The other, the Democratic line, will be because of all the treasonous whiners who sat on their hands in the face of "a Republican Party that has moved to the right of George Bush and is looking to lock in the same policies that got us into these disasters in the first place ... But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place," said the Commander-in-Chief, and I won't bother to quote Biden. Those are pre-emptive strikes to excuse their own incompetence and villainy. And what is Obama saying there, anyway? That because the Republican party moved to the right of George Bush, it's okay for him and the rest of the Democrats to occupy the space where they used to be?

Welsh also addressed this matter.

Look, if the left is so powerful that is is responsible for Democratic fortunes, well, that’s not something we should shrink from. We should say “Yes, we can destroy Democratic prospects. If you don’t do what we want, we WILL do so.”

Powerful groups get what they want, weak groups don’t. If the White House wants to portray us as that powerful, we should embrace that description, because it is a blade which cuts both ways.

And there is an argument for it. While certainly the economy is factor one, the people whom left-wing bloggers reach are the sort of folks who traditionally don’t just vote, they volunteer, they give money and they are themselves influential, who convince others to be enthusiastic, vote, volunteer and give. When, last year, I felt parts of the blogosphere lose their patience with Obama, I knew it would cost him, and it has.

Don’t run from this, embrace it, wrap yourself in it. You are part of the left, and the left is capable of destroying governments which don’t do what it wants. And this is good, because objectively Obama has not fixed the economy, has presided over further destruction of civil rights, has reduced access to abortion, and so on.

Remember too Obama's Catfood Commission, as many libbloggers have called it, which is intended to present a brief for cutting Social Security benefits -- after the 2010 elections, of course. In the first article, Ian Welsh wrote,

Yes, the Republicans will do worse things, but that’s going to happen anyway. And in some cases, as with Social Security, it is better to have Republicans in power, because it is easier to fight Republican efforts to gut SS than it is to fight Democratic efforts to do so.

I know a lot of people don’t like this calculus, but the math is clear. These Democrats cannot or will not deliver. They cannot or will not do what needs to be done. They have to go.

Wasn't there a lot of talk before the 2008 election, about how progressives would be holding Obama's feet to the fire to make sure he didn't sell out to the big money? I believe Obama himself paid lip service to the notion. That's what they've been doing, and now the Democrats are complaining that they're uncomfortable. That's the whole idea, fools.

In conclusion, this nice bit addressed to Joe Biden, also via the Sideshow:

Thank you for your letter asking me to donate to elect Democratic candidates. I've given some money to the Democrats over the last two years. I think you should stop whining and get behind what I've already done.

Double-Obama, Licensed to Kill

Oh dear, I was going to get so much done tonight. In lieu of productive activity, let me quote Glenn Greenwald once again. Obama told Rolling Stone, "If we want the kind of country that respects civil rights and civil liberties, we'd better fight in this election."

Greenwald wrote:

To summarize Obama's apparent claim: the Republicans better not win in the midterm election, otherwise we'll have due-process-free and even preventive detention, secret assassinations of U.S. citizens, vastly expanded government surveillance of the Internet, a continuation of Guantanamo, protection of Executive branch crimes through the use of radical secrecy doctrines, escalating punishment for whistleblowers, legal immunity for war crimes, and a massively escalated drone war in Pakistan.

He also responded to

Obama supporters [who] often claim that those who object to this White House messaging are reacting emotionally and personally because they're "offended" by these criticisms. Speaking only for myself, that has nothing to do with any of this. I'm not the slightest bit "offended" when Obama officials and their apparatchiks voice these accusations. They have the same right to condemn their critics as their critics have to condemn them, and it's hardly a surprise that Obama officials harbor these thoughts about the "left." Contempt for the left is one of the unifying beliefs of the Washington establishment, which is why most conventional establishment journalists -- Maureen Dowd, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank -- cheered Gibbs' outburst about the "Professional Left." None of that is new; none of it is a surprise; and none of it is "offensive."

What is notable about it is what it reveals substantively. The country is drowning in a severe and worsening unemployment crisis. People are losing their homes by the millions. Income inequality continues to explode while the last vestiges of middle class security continue to erode. The Obama civil liberties record has been nothing short of a disgrace, usually equaling and sometimes surpassing the worst of the Bush/Cheney abuses. We have to stand by and watch the Commander-in-Chief fire one gay service member after the next for their sexual orientation. The major bills touted by Obama supporters were the by-product of the very corporatist/lobbyist dominance which Obama the candidate repeatedly railed against. Rather than take responsibility for any of this, they instead dismiss criticisms and objections as petulant, childish, "irresponsible whining" -- signaling rather clearly that they think they're doing the right thing and that these criticisms are fundamentally unfair.

That is what makes these reactions significant: not that anyone's feelings are hurt by the name-calling, but that they believe that this record merits gratitude rather than valid condemnation, and that anger over the state of the country is nothing more than irresponsible whining. It's fine to tout accomplishments and try to unify the base behind them -- it's election season and they ought to be doing that -- but it's just mystifying that they think they're going to accomplish anything other than feeling better about themselves with these incessant, name-calling attacks on those who are dissatisfied with their behavior -- their policies -- in power. Talk about "self-pitying and self-indulgent."

I've been seeing comments on a few blogs which try to explain how important it is to vote. Sometimes it's more in anger than in sorrow, but then there are the nice people like La Digs at Who Is Ioz? (no permalink to the comment, posted 6:43):

I'm sorry that we can't all be ecstatically singing along to a Will.I.Am video this time, but these just aren't inspirational good times. Right now it's about stopping something very ugly and bad rather than feeling all gooey and good. And that's an important part of politics too. It isn't all Oprah and hugging strangers in crowds.

That's very gooey and good, but how do we stop the ugly and bad Obama administration? Obama is, overall, worse than George Bush, who never claimed he was licensed to kill American citizens without any kind of due process or accountability -- not even to the courts, because his plan is a state secret. La Digs warns ominously that "The Democrats, sadly, will not learn the right lessons if a bunch of neanderthals take over and history shows that in times of great stress and transition, very bad things can happen when you let these people take the reins." If the Republicans are "neanderthals", the Democrats must be Ubermenschen, the superior race, and history shows what happens ... No, I take that back. It's enough to say that history shows what happened when the Democrats won Congress and the White House in November 2008. (If you've already forgotten, go back and reread Greenwald's summary above.)

Yesterday Once More

I want to write about something other than politics, but life keeps throwing me provocations.

The other morning a right-wing acquaintance on Facebook posted a link to this article from the Commentary blogs, by Jennifer Rubin. According to her,

After the across-the-board defeats in 2008, conservative pundits didn’t rail at the voters. You didn’t see the right blogosphere go after the voters as irrational (How could they elect someone so unqualified? They’ve gone bonkers!) with the venom that the left now displays. Instead, there was a healthy debate — what was wrong with the Republican Party and with the conservative movement more generally? We had a somewhat artificial debate between traditionalists and reformers. If anything, the anger was directly (unfairly, in my mind) against George W. Bush (whose tax cuts even many Democrats now want to extend, and whose strategy in Iraq allowed Obama to withdrawal troops in victory), and to the hapless McCain campaign (which spent the final days of the campaign ragging on its VP nominee).

That's one way of looking at it, I guess. Another way is that the right was furious at their loss, and while they blamed their candidate, they attacked everyone else in sight. To say that they "didn't rail at the voters" is, well, bonkers. Roy Edroso, whose alicublog is most useful as a Rightwing Watch, started collecting the evidence right away. Here are a couple of his examples, the first from Ace of Spades:

America is a special country for going for the Jeremiah Wright's and Bill Ayers' most famous disciple.

We might have elected more qualified blacks to the presidency -- Colin Powell, Michael Steele, the guy who does the funny sound effects in the Police Academy movies -- but we went for the guy who would do his level best to demolish the country.

I couldn't be prouder.

Then this, from Dave Smithee at American Thinker (oh, click through anyway, to see the image of Uncle Sam):

The cyclical nature of human wisdom is well documented in both secular histories, and the biblical record. Blessing, Discontent, Rebellion, Suffering, Penitence, Restoration. Wash, rinse, repeat. As ancient Israel whined to have monarchs rule over them to be like their pagan neighbors, so too are American leftists smitten with the illusory sophistication of the crumbling European economic and social models. They salivate for the esteem of tyrants, socialists, and every manner of grandiose failure; the more extravagant, the better so long as the mission statement is sufficiently lofty. It's said that liberals are like any other people; only more so. In this case, it's their turn to perpetuate the ancient cycle of rejecting what works, turning their backs with disdain on America's incomparable blessings and crying "Give us what they have!"

Well, we've gotten it.

Admittedly, Smithee blames "American leftists" for Obama's election, but if 67% of the American electorate are leftists, then the Republicans have little chance now or ever. His claims only make what little sense they do if he is blaming the voters. (See also the comments on this post.) This sort of equivocal blurring all the American people and those the writer hates is also common among liberals and leftists, of course. In any case, a good portion of the right blogosphere, while they did ask what the Republicans did wrong, claimed that Obama had led the American people astray with his socialist promises and Jeremiah-Wright/Bill-Ayers anti-Americanism, which always goes over well with Liberals (though how did it win over the honest yeoman average Americans who also voted for Obama against McCain?) -- and they were quite willing, as these examples show, to blame the lazy, greedy American masses for being gulled by Obama.

Rubin also says:

When things go wrong for the left, it blames the people; when things go wrong for the right, it blames the governing elites. It is not in the nature of conservatives to demean and attack fellow citizens. To the contrary, conservatives’ vision is grounded in the belief that Americans are competent, decent, and hardworking, and it is the heavy hand of government that threatens to squelch American virtues.

First, as already noted, the right also blames the people; and the left also believes, or claims to believe that Americans are "competent, decent, and hardworking." Neither really believes it. The right favors government regulation of sexuality (laws against fornication, adultery, and sodomy, for example), marriage and divorce, and other private conduct (drug laws), opposes contraception and abortion, and wants the government to set a good example by exemplary religious observance: enforced school prayer, official days of thanksgiving (not fasting, though, that is so 18th century), and a President who pays lip service to Christianity even if he rarely attends church. (By "religious" of course they mean Christianity, and usually Protestant Christianity, though anti-Catholicism isn't the political force here that it used to be). They also want most Americans to suffer nobly when disaster (hurricanes, oil spills, catastrophic illness, old age, unemployment, bank failure, etc.) strikes. They also like officially enforced patriotism, except when their party is out of power; then they feel free to attack the government as vehemently as any hippie.

Second, the right enthusiastically supports government elites when the right is in power. They adore spoiled rich kids like George W. Bush and movie stars like Ronald Reagan. They celebrate captains of industry and are very worried that the rich might have to pay an extra percentage point or two in taxes. As Noam Chomsky says, when you hear about "special interests" in the media, what is meant is usually working people, the elderly, the young, people of color, the poor -- the overwhelming majority of Americans, in short. When you hear about "the national interest", that refers to a tiny minority of business and political elites. Something like that is going on with Rubin's claim that the right doesn't attack "the people," since by "the people" she means right-wing Republicans, an embattled and dwindling minority; by "governing elites" she means everybody else. Therefore the Tea Party movement, representing a rather small and not especially popular portion of the electorate, presents itself as We The People, and demands that the new administration listen to the voters who voted Republican, not those who voted Democratic. (On the other hand, the new administration has been happy to oblige.)

Rubin is correct that there is elitism on the left; I've written about that myself. But as with the essay by George Scialabba I criticized, in more charitable moods the right agrees that the People are good, but since they obviously don't know how to vote correctly they need to be educated. Thus we get jokes like the Pledge to America, which among other things proposes to replace the Affordable Care Act with the Affordable Care Act. The Republicans humbly present themselves as ordinary Joes who happen to be in Congress, and so will lead America out of the Wilderness and into the Promised Land.

However, rejecting elitism (as I hope I do) doesn't mean you can't criticize the people. White America is still pretty racist, in varying degrees of virulence. The United States has brought war, chaos and pestilence to much of the world through war, neoliberal economics, and multinational corporations; most Americans are either unaware of this or don't much care -- which has something to do with why they are unaware of it, I suppose. The passage from Joe Klein that Rubin linked (in the first paragraph I quoted) was not disrespectful and made a good point: that many Americans on the right (but also elsewhere) are noticeably ignorant about their government and what it does, and very inconsistent in what they want it to do. ("Keep the government's hands off my Medicare!" for example, as if Medicare wasn't a government program.) I'm not a fan of Joe Klein, but Rubin's blithe dismissal ignores some serious problems. I think Americans need to educate themselves; there's no one else to do it.

I posted a snarky comment to my right-wing acquaintance's Facebook status when he linked Rubin's post, thanking him for giving me a laugh to start the day and expressing surprise that the Right was into glossolalia. Maybe I shouldn't be snarky; but remember, Rubin is the kind of conservative that my acquaintance considers "sober" and rational, as opposed to Koran-burning Yahoos.

Know Your Enemy

It's always good to have your excuses ready and your enemies in your sights, and at least some Democrats are getting ready for defeat in November:

Actually, have been havinbg a conversation with friends who are really deeply involved in political work, who see a lot suspect about the pushing from leftie appearing commenters to keep Dems from voting. Seen too many dirty tricks. No, Avedon, I know you well enough to know you're every bit on the up-and-up, but the rest of you...not.

Another (former?) Dem blogger posted this comment to Avedon's latest at The Sideshow. Avedon begins by reporting how Democratic blogger Susie Madrak took on Obama's senior advisor David Axelrod in one of those conference calls where the White House "reaches out" to alternative media.

My favorite part was where Axelrod - who is essentially talking to leftish bloggers to beg them for money and support - had the temerity to imply that being criticized on a few lefty blogs was equivalent to a continuous stream of insults and kicks from the White House, via both policy and pigeon-droppings in the pages of the Newspapers of Record. Right, David. Get back to me when you guys can start pumping for something that isn't a GOP policy goal, huh? David Dayen's response to it is more straightforward than Susie's retelling, but hers is funnier.

However, I think Susie was too kind to Axelrod. What I'd be saying is, "You have to give us a reason not to want to see you primaried, and it has to be a better reason than the one you've been giving, which appears to be that the Republicans will be less polite about passing exactly the same policies, and will show even less remorse than you do." (Although calling it "a historic victory" isn't exactly remorse, is it? A historic victory for whom?)

And I see Atrios just found another fine example of motivating the base - by fighting to keep Don't Ask/Don't Tell. Why should we support this administration when they so obviously want to lose?

The commenter's reaction? If she didn't know Avedon, if she hadn't been reading her for years, she'd suspect that she is a Republican plant trying to "keep Dems from voting."

Now, it's certainly true that the Republicans have done underhanded things before, as have the Dems. Most recently we've seen California Republicans recruiting street people to run as Green Party Candidates for Arizona Corporation Commission. But it's not as if the Democrats haven't done plenty, of their own free will, to alienate Democratic voters.

Hey. Maybe Barack Hussein Obama is a paid Republican agent whose mission is to keep Dems from voting. Who knows? It would explain a lot of things ...

Let's Do Another One Just Like the Other One

There are a lot of things I've been meaning to say about the upcoming midterm elections, especially now that the Republicans have announced their Pledge to America, but this evening my right-wing acquaintance posted a link on Facebook to Peggy Noonan's latest exercise in glossolalia at the Wall Street Journal. His comment: "This rings true." Of course you all know that the Opinion page of the WSJ has always been a fantasy world, but this header really did wonders for my mood:

If you thought the 1994 election was historic, just wait till this year.

If I believed in omens I'd be diving for the storm shelter. The 1994 election was not historic. The Republicans did hand a humiliating loss to the Democrats, but it was an off-year election and turnout was low, as such elections usually are. True, Bill Clinton had, like Barack Obama now, collaborated shamefully with the Republicans, especially on NAFTA, disillusioning his base and keeping Democrats away from the polls in droves; there is that similarity to our depressing present. In 1994 the Republicans put out something they called the Contract with America, which few voters had heard of, let alone accepted as a political manifesto, and which had nothing much to do with their victories at the polls. And what happened?

Why, the Republicans tried to shut down the Federal Government at the end of 1995 by demanding budget cuts in various social programs, which Clinton refused to accept. Robert Reich writes at TPM Cafe,

I was there November 14, 1995 when Newt Gingrich pulled the plug on the federal government the first time. It proved to be the stupidest political move in recent history. Not only did it help Bill Clinton win reelection but it was a boon to almost all other Democrats in 1996 (Gingrich's photo was widely used in negative ads), and the move damaged Republicans for years.

So, Peggy Noonan (a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, for those who've forgotten) and numerous other right-wing wackos want a replay of the mid-1990s, in which the Republicans had their heads handed back to them on a platter: their attempt to gut social programs failed spectacularly, the President they hated won re-election handily and continued to push through various Republican programs, like "welfare reform," while nursing numerous economic bubbles that made the rich even richer while just barely improving the economy for the rest of us. The Republicans also failed to impeach Clinton on trumped-up charges, and sexually tinged scandals toppled several Republican leaders, including Gingrich himself. They had to steal the 2000 election to regain power.

There's certainly no love lost between me and the Democrats, but if this is what the Republicans want for the 2010s, I'd be the last person to deny it to them. Some of the Republican leadership are denying that they have anything like a government shutdown in mind, which in politics is a virtual confirmation that it's exactly what they have in mind. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) told The Kudlow Report, "It's absurd. And I think this is just the left trying — you know, the media trying to create an issue that doesn't exist." Absurdity, of course, is what the Republicans and the Democrats have been giving us for a long time now. "But understand, if we continue to run up all this deficit and debt, the shutdown will come because we'll basically be bankrupting the country," Gregg said in an apparent attempt to sound reassuring. "That will cause the shutdown."

Meanwhile, the Democrats are doing their best to help the Republicans in this difficult campaign, most recently by postponing the vote on the extension of Bush's tax cuts until after the elections, which spares both sides the painful necessity of going on record about what they stand for.

Oh, and one other thing: if the Republicans were able to be "obstructionist" with just 40 votes in the Senate, one would think that even if the Democrats lose 20 seats this November and the tables are turned, the Democrats could then obstruct any Republican efforts to do bad things, threatening filibusters at every turn, making outrageous left-wing demands to undercut the Republicans programs, and so on -- especially with a Democratic President wielding a veto to back them up. But no, looking at the Dems' recent record, one wouldn't think that at all, would one? They're the collaboration party, and they'll just surrender absolutely.

Two self-destructive parties on a collision course. I don't know whether to cry or laugh.

The Time Is Fulfilled; or, DTMFA

"Right-wing crack whores" as a term for those who are nowadays called "conservatives." That has a certain ring to it. I like it, though I'm not sure it's fair to crack whores.

On the other hand, the same site quotes Bono, of all people: "God, my friends, is with the poor and God is with us, if we are with them. This is not a burden, this is an adventure." No no noooo. "God" is no more with the poor than the Republican Party (or Bono, for that matter) is with the poor. I'm reminded of Abraham Lincoln's infamous bromide, "God must love the poor. That is why He made so many of them." Sure, and by the same logic he must love cockroaches too.

Glenn Greenwald today drew attention to the Democrats' current electoral strategy: to say, often and loudly, that they aren't Republicans. And they especially aren't Sarah Palin. Surely, comrades, you do not want Bush back?

... the more significant point is what this tactic says about the Democratic Party. They have controlled both houses of Congress for almost four years and the White House for almost two. Yet rather than run primarily on affirmative accomplishments (some Democrats are even running against them), they're reduced to this not-very-inspiring or hope-laden message: at least we're not as bad as Sarah Palin.

It's not hard to see why Democrats are relying on what Maddow called this "soul-sucking" tactic. With no end in sight to the unemployment crisis, almost no real benefits yet in effect on their central legislative achievement (health care), a high likelihood of Social Security cuts following the election, few of the promises kept on the issues most important to their core base, and even hardcore Democratic pundit-partisans now finally -- and angrily -- acknowledging that Obama has continued the vast bulk of Bush/Cheney civil liberties/executive power abuses (ones which drove many progressives to remove the GOP from power), what else can they do to motivate people to vote for them besides try to scare people into thinking about the Sarah Palin menace? It's exactly the technique Republicans used in 2006 when they had little to offer Americans alienated with what they did in power, and thus tried to make the election center around the frightening specter of Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco Values. That tactic didn't work out very well for Republicans that year, and it's unlikely to work any better for Democrats this year (and at least with the GOP campaign, Pelosi really was an actual office-holder whose power would increase with a Democratic victory). People want to see results from those in power, and fear-based campaigns about the other side in lieu of actual accomplishments are quite limited in their appeal.

Greenwald also links to a post by John Aravosis (whom we've met before), who points to the lack of action by the Obama administration on GLBT issues, and says ominously, "I for one am not feeling an overwhelming desire to donate another $1,000 to, or raise another $43,000 for, a candidate who promises me the moon and then seems almost embarrassed of me the morning after the election." I don't believe him. Not with Sarah Palin skree skree skree lurking in the wings.

jeffroby at Corrente Wire (via, via) argues that it's time for a movement to Dump Obama, or DTMFA as Dan Savage might (but probably wouldn't, in this case) put it.

Some have argued that Dump Obama is too simplistic. But in fact its simplicity is its beauty.

Progressives are constantly bemoaning that the masses can’t grasp their complex analytical arguments, their profound understanding of the system. Masses are too easily swayed by slogans, all that. Dump Obama is a nice slogan and fits on a bumper sticker in real big letters.

Many progressives have issues dear to them, and the blogosphere reflects that diversity. Diversity is fine, but so is unity. Obama is, among other things, a symbol of the government, not just a symbol of the Democratic Party. He can “unify” our progressive opposition.

Dump the system? Sure. Go after the Senate? Why not? Go after the Republicans? If we advance progressive issues, they will not escape our ire.

The presidential primaries provide a vehicle to express that opposition. Can Obama be beaten there? Probably not. The incumbency is a powerful tool. But [Eugene] McCarthy didn’t “beat” [Lyndon] Johnson either. Still brought him down.

Earlier this year I noted that "many (most?) Democrats would rather lose to a Republican than vote against the corporate agenda. Why should I deny them their druthers?" jeffroby makes a good argument; you should read his post.

Plus, I Have Some Wonderful Oceanfront Property That I'll Sell You For Next To Nothing

So, there was something called Netroots Nation or something going on in Las Vegas, a gathering of "progressive activists" as the Wall Street Journal called them (via), or leftists as the headline of this MSNBC article called them (though in the body of the article they are called "liberal activists and bloggers." Roy Edroso was covering it all for his alicublog, so I'd quit paying attention, but apparently President Obama addressed the convention in a "surprise video appearance" to urge liberals to "keep up the fight." This suggests that Obama has figured out that his frequently-expressed contempt for the mass of the population and their concerns wasn't such a good idea after all. According to the MSNBC piece,

"Change hasn't come fast enough for too many Americans. I know that," Obama said in a surprise video appearance to liberal activists and bloggers at Las Vegas convention. "I know it hasn't come fast for many of you who fought so hard during the election." ...

In his remarks to the annual Netroots Nation gathering, the president said the combat mission in Iraq would soon end, and that the administration is working to repeal the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays and close the U.S. prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

"In ways large and small we've begun to deliver on the change you fought so hard for," Obama said.

"We can't afford to slide backward. And that's the choice America faces this November," he added. "Keep up the fight."

Yeah, I felt my gorge rise, too, when I read that. Even if the "combat mission in Iraq" ends, the occupation of Iraq by our forces won't -- the idea is to let Iraqi troops protect US interests -- and "the combat mission" has already moved to Afghanistan and Pakistan. As for repealing DADT and closing Guantanamo, Obama has shown himself to be as half-hearted about those projects as he was about a public option for health care or the Employee Free Choice Act. Or the economic stimulus and rolling back Bush's tax cuts for the rich. Or in standing up to Teabag Nation and its media enablers.

I like the way the Huffington Post paraphrased Obama's "slide backward": "Obama warned about returning to Republican policies 'that got us into the mess.'" Come again? Obama has continued and enhanced the Republican policies that got us into this mess, whether in foreign policy or in domestic economy or civil liberties, while protect the worst malfeasants from accountability for their crimes. According to the article (which embeds the Obama video), "Obama urged the crowd to 'consider what we've accomplished,' then rolled a clip of Rachel Maddow laying out some of the administration's legislative victories." So much for Maddow's standing as a journalist, when she's pimping for one side in an electoral campaign.