Kos is pissed:
Obama spent all year enabling Max Baucus and Olympia Snowe, and he thinks we’re supposed to get excited about whatever end result we’re about to get, so much so that we’re going to fork over money? Well, it might work with some of you guys, but I’m certainly not biting. In fact, this is insulting, betraying a lack of understanding of just how pissed the base is at this so-called reform. The administration may be happy to declare victory with a mandate that enriches insurance companies, yet creates little incentive to control costs or change the very business practices that have screwed so many people. But I’ll pass.
Democrats are demoralized, and have little incentive to turn out next year. The teabaggers will turn out. If this is how the Obama camp thinks we can energize the base — by promising them a health care pony for $5 to the same Democratic Party that is home to the likes of Baucus, Nelson, Lincoln, Lieberman, and the rest of the obstructionist gang — then we’re in for a world of hurt in 2010.
Look, I understand that things are not moving the way many people want them to and with the speed that some desire, but as far as I am concerned things are a HELLUVA lot better than last year. I think in all the doom and gloom, we forget that our President can now speak in full sentences, has not invaded Russia, and is not ducking shoes everywhere he goes.
I’ve been as disgusted and let down as many people by some decisions, but I look at where we were and where we are now, and there is no chance in hell I am going to be demoralized come November 2010. I’ve been watching the wingnuts- we need to keep them as far away from power as is legally possible. They are dangerous, and this Obama fellow, despite some letdowns, ain’t half bad.
blahblahblah
Cole: Offtopic, but you have to read this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/6764177/Ex-Fed-chief-Paul-Volckers-telling-words-on-derivatives-industry.html
(blockquote tag hosed on multi-paragraph citations)
—–
The former US Federal Reserve chairman told an audience that included some of the world’s most senior financiers that their industry’s “single most important” contribution in the last 25 years has been automatic telling machines, which he said had at least proved “useful”.
Echoing FSA chairman Lord Turner’s comments that banks are “socially useless”, Mr Volcker told delegates who had been discussing how to rebuild the financial system to “wake up”. He said credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations had taken the economy “right to the brink of disaster” and added that the economy had grown at “greater rates of speed” during the 1960s without such products.
When one stunned audience member suggested that Mr Volcker did not really mean bond markets and securitisations had contributed “nothing at all”, he replied: “You can innovate as much as you like, but do it within a structure that doesn’t put the whole economy at risk.”
—-
MNPundit
Well the bloggers are very much about movement and framing etc. And these are thing Obama does not do for the left. He does nothing to grow the left and actively tries to make the party about himself. While the bloggers were moving toward making the Dems more parliamentary (to counter Republican parliamentariasm) Obama was pushing the opposite way.
So aside from ideology, we think Obama’s process is emboldening the Republican enemy.
blahblahblah
Also, I agree with Kos. The Democratic Party has completely lost my support. It’s time to move to Canada or Europe. And I mean it.
Zifnab
Kos is pissed because time and again it feels like the conservative Dems are dragging the party behind it. He wants to knuckle the recalcitrant Senators into line and force a bill through. Markos wants a win.
All this compromise is wearing him down.
El Cid
It’s all part of the plan to not let the center-hawks think the hippies like the bill… Sssshhhhh!!!
martha
John, I’m with you…I do feel a bit lost some days. Those people are like ADD-inflicted third graders. WATBs to the max.
Anyway, completely OT, over 17″ of heart-attack snow, blizzard warnings, high winds, and our power went out at 2 a.m. Fortunately, power’s back on and the snow’s been cleared (somewhat). Can’t say we didn’t get our exercise today. Doggie is in snow heaven. “Working” at home now that power is back…also, thank gosh for a gas stove–coffee and oatmeal by candlelight this morning.
Fwiffo
I am coming down on the side of Kos with this. Seems best to come begging for money on some day when you didn’t just deliver yet another shit-sandwich to your supporters. And if those non-shit-sandwich windows are just too short to allow for proper fund-raising, perhaps one should reconsider the shit-feeding schedule.
It could have been...
We could have had troops in Tehran by NOW…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg
and who doesn’t get shivers thinking of Sarah Palin being one heartbeat away from having HER finger on “THE BUTTON”?
Ash Can
@Cole: This. Kos on a bad day still makes more sense than the entire RW nut-o-sphere on a good day, but I was definitely disappointed with him this morning. I think a lot of people have lost sight of the big picture. It’s time to step back and take a couple of deep breaths.
eemom
our very own version of the lunatic fringe is seriously off the deep end today. Over at hamsher’s house of crazy the Janebots are literally talking about teaming up with the teabaggers to defeat the healthcare bill.
Fuck these people. They and the teabaggers deserve each other.
Zifnab
He also really doesn’t like the incumbency protection racket that the DNC, DCCC, and DSCC are running. I think a lot of that stems from the ’06 Lamont race. And he’s right to be angry, because Liebermann has been a knife in the party’s back for the better part of the decade.
So getting those “Please give us money so we can prop up our most disobedient Senators” emails hasn’t helped much either.
Col. Klink
The truly
hystericaltragic thing is that the despite all of Obama’s exceedingly moderate centrist moves, the media and DC power structure has generally played right along with Reichwing Teabagger meme that Obama is America’s answer to Lenin. Imagine if Obama had really came out really swinging for progressive policies. Fred Hiatt would make Sarah Palin Co-Editor & Chief of the Washington Post.Jim
I posted a comment at FDL when Obama wrote the Constitution and created the filibuster that he was giving way too much power to the Senate.
He ignored me cause he’s a DLC sell-out.
OBAMA FAIL!!!!!!!!!!!
Lev
Yeah, I don’t get the healthcare stuff either. Kos should have done something useful back during the early days of this thing and pressured every Dem Senator to commit not to filibuster, instead of joining the rest of the leftosphere in fetishizing the public option. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of a public option, but this is the sort of tactics in lieu of strategy-style thinking you found in the McCain campaign.
The reason why the left (outside of the blogosphere–not the same thing) isn’t terribly excited has much to do, I suspect, with the lousy economy and the fact that HCR has taken so long to go through Congress. But it’s eventually going to pass. Eventually the economy will start recovering. And once the economic picture looks okay, the wingnuts will look distinctly unappealing to the electorate.
kay
@eemom:
They want Democrats to lose Congress so Obama can be impeached.
Then, bad things will happen, but that’s good because they will ultimately be proven correct.
El Cid
Where? I checked and didn’t see this. You mean main poster essays or commenter? If the latter, who cares? Commenters say lots of stuff.
HumboldtBlue
What has been so great about the past year? We saw the crooked bankers get billions, we saw an increase in an unwinnable and senseless occupation of not only Iraq but Afghanistan as well, and now they’re telling us that the bill they pass regarding health care will come with mandates and penalties?
Fuck that noise. When Congress has to obey the laws they pass I’ll buy, if not, fuck their mandates, fuck their agenda and fuck me for actually having some hope that adults had taken over.
The bankers, oil men and insurance companies will prosper, once again because Democrats scatter at the mere mention of the folks who put them back in charge.
So we have a smart guy as President, great, what’s that gotten us? More war, more tax dollars gone to the same crooks who gamed the system while Clinton was in office and went hog wild stealing from the American people for eight years while Bush was in power. Face it, the corporations and the banks have won. They own our elected officials and they could give a flying rat’s ass what we think.
Robin G.
I both agree and disagree. I don’t think there’s any question that things are better than last year; Obama can’t be blamed for not keeping a drama-queen-laden party entirely in line (hello, Harry Reid!); a decent bill passed the House, a not-completely-appalling bill is coming to the Senate, and when the two are meshed, things might look all right. I think, at this point, we’re going to get reform that will get the groundwork down for *more* reform in the future, and I consider that a win. Kos is flipping his shit over very little, here.
That being said, we need the DFHs to keep pulling on the other end of the rope. This kind of outrage is, to an extent, politically necessary; we can’t be forever used as “ATMs and batteries,” and we have to express anger when we don’t get what we want.
I’ll be out there next year. In some cases, it’ll be supporting primary opponents. But I’ll be out there.
ISLM
Though I’ve read his site for years, and continue to do so, I’m always a little suprised at a couple of things about MM:
1. How little policy (as opposed to politics) he understands.
2. How he ignores the role he played in electing the type of Democrats who now obstruct what he views as reform. I gave to people like Heath Shuler and Stephanie Herseth based on his advocacy.
Given his own constituency, I can ignore one. Two, however, strikes me as quite important. Buyer’s remorse generally arises because of a lack of information on behalf of the buyer. He seems deeply (and perhaps willingly) uninformed about the people he helps to elect.
scav
color me stunned. people don’t agree.
Joshua Norton
Good lord, this is all business as usual for the Dem. party. Are people’s memories that short? Just be thankful that the bulk of the Dixiecrats aren’t there to gum up the works any more.
Tsulagi
Yep. It’s 11-dimensional chess. Strategery, Democratic style.
You don’t see the big picture.
Mmmmmm….ponies. What else were you saying?
Brick Oven Bill
Obama August 2008: <a href=”http://brickoven.blogspot.com/2008/08/they-will-make-me-out-to-be-risky-scary.html” ‘[They will] make me out to be a risky, scary guy.’
Obama today: ‘Stop trying to frighten the American people’.
The President has an exaggerated opinion of himself. Check out the rear bumper on Obama’s bike in the first link. Note that the rear tire is under-inflated. Obama is Milli VanUrkel.
Arrogance typically covers for insecurity. The reality is that less money + more people = rationing, which is not a bad thing. Dishonestly is a bad thing though. Dishonestly can only be covered for a limited time in a high-profile position.
“the Jewish vote, the A-I-P-A-C vote, that’s controlling him, that would not let him send representation to the Darfur Review Conference, that’s talking this craziness on this trip, cause they’re Zionists, they would not let him talk to someone who calls a spade what it is.”
When Obama cracks, he will probably turn against his handlers, having sat in Wright’s Church for decades. Obama selected Wright to baptize his children.
kay
@Zifnab:
Right, but he celebrated 60. And he knew darn well how they got to 60, and that it wasn’t 60 liberals.
I feel as if this was bound to happen. The side effect of running Democrats in red districts and states is you tend to end up with some fairly conservative Democrats, short term.
Which was anticipated. The idea was you would have built an organization within those red districts and states that would elect (eventually) more progressive Democrats.
That was the plan. A plan he endorsed. He’s at stage one and he wants to quit?
Brien Jackson
@eemom:
Well look, I don’t know how many times this has to be said, but legislating simply isn’t about policy to Hamsher and Kos. It’s all about various form of tribalism, more or less the same way it is to wingnuts. So in this case, it really doesn’t make any difference whether any compromise comes out better on the policy merits than the watered down public option, they’ve already staked out their claim on that, and they can’t back down now.
eemom
let me add that the healthcare bill, whatever flaws it has, is STILL going to save a lot of people from dying or going into bankruptcy, and end the absolutely intolerable status quo that exists today.
That’s why I support it, and that is why I fucking detest these purity trolls.
Let him who is without health insurance among you say that this bill should be killed. Otherwise, shut the fuck UP.
paolipress
That a large percentage of congress is bought and paid for by the corporatocracy was a known. That the man who campaigned as a reformer…remember the thing about getting the lobbyists out of the legislating mix?…is also bought and paid for, well that wasn’t well known.
Obama appears in many aspects to be Bush Lite. Maybe you are satisfied with it, but I’m not, and I don’t think a lot of independents are either. Maybe that sounds harsh, but one thing is for sure, he’s no leader. Leaders don’t start out by compromising before the negotiating has begun. Leaders don’t make secret deals with the opponents before things even begin.
I’ll give him this: he would be an effective politician in the Politburo.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
DailyKos has become a caricature of itself, as a website. I don’t see how anybody can frequent the diaries and comments any more, they are just crap.
Despite that, for a long time, I maintained my respect for Markos. He seemed to be able to see through the fog of political noise and spot the essential facts.
But lately, he has seemed to me to be just another internet wanker who gets pissy every time something doesn’t go his way. And on healthcare, particularly, I haven’t seen him shed any useful light on any aspect of the process or the goals or details of any bills. Just horse race and beltway insider cheering or booing, which is crushingly boring AFAIC. Not helpful at all.
If I come out of this healthcare battle better off than I am now, which I full expect to happen, I will be pleased and I will consider the last two years to be a success. Simple as that, whether the giant egos among progressives are being stroked, or not. Fuck them, and as usual, I mean that in the most caring and nurturing way.
Markos is marginalizing himself, as far as I can see, and I’d say, who cares, if he weren’t so smart and so full of potential win. But that potential is not showing itself lately. He helped elect a basically centrist president who has a brain and and can string two thoughts together, and now seems to think that he should get a benevolent progressive king as a reward. Fuck Markos, very much.
Brick Oven Bill
Try Number Two, Link Number One
Obama August 2008: ‘[They will] make me out to be a risky, scary guy’.
SpotWeld
Ever watch a football team start a season with a really awesome lineup… maybe they even had some amazing pre-season game. And the first game is with a long time rival?
Now imagine that the coach decided to start the game with all the 2nd string plateys, and run a defensive running game despite the excellent passing strategy could be using.
Sure they are probably going to win with a point or two over the other team, but somewhere in your mind you are cursing them for denying you that glorious blowout.
Let’s say that coach, after the opposition’s coach drops a long foul-mouth tirade on how they were robbed, .. let’s say that coach states he decided to run the game like that becuase he respected the other team and “didn’t want to be a poor sport”
How would you feel?
J.W. Hamner
You’re a better man than me John Cole, because commentary like Kos’s and other left wing concern trolls actively enrages me… whereas you seem pretty sober and evenhanded about it all. The fact that Kos is suprised and disappointed about how health care reform is shaping up, shows how little he knows specifically about the issue and generally about politics. If you expected Obama to craft something fundamentally different than we are getting, then you clearly weren’t paying much attention during the primaries and election.
Doug
I think one of the annoying aspects of this process is that assbags like Lieberman keep getting rewarded for bad behavior.
Col. Klink
Sorry, but I cannot buy the wasted year, Obama has done nothing BS. We were heading for the Great Depression part II a mere 10 months ago. If we had had 6 more months of Bush I think it is safe to say that the entire national train would have come off the tracks. So yeah, Obama gave billions to banksters and other evil doers, but the consequences of having not having put Obama in office last January would have been utterly catastrophic.
Alex S.
I think it’s good to have voices like Kos or even Jane Hamsher. The trick is to keep them in your team and never let them become more than 10% of it. I don’t agree with Kos in this case, and I hope (and somewhat expect him to) he gets behind the plan when it matters (2010 elections).
Max
Many of the people going all PUMA/ODS on the left are so attached to the phrase “public option” that they have lost all sense of the fact that the policy matters, not what they fucking call it.
You have Bernie Sanders saying this compromise might be better than the public option proposed, and yet, the wack jobs on the left still are all ODS.
Daily Kos, Talk Left, Taylor Marsh, etal have really gone round the friggin bend today and it’s based on conjecture and rumors.
Wankers.
An O-bot I remain.
SpotWeld
B.O.B. your mom said to stop playing on the computer and do your homework or you can’t wear your cape when you have your juicebox.
Now scoot.
gbear
@blahblahblah:
Have you set up a pay-pals account for your gas money yet?
@MNPundit:
Wow. Obama’s whole trip has been to grow the middle. He’s been pretty obvious about it all along. I would have never seen that as a grab to make the party about himself. Is that supposed to be snark?
ricky
I am sorry, but KOS is to the Democrats as teabaggers are to
Republicans. Purity is important? Well the only victory his group and lay major claim to is Lamont over Liebermann.
Not energized? Kool, Kossy. Kampaign for Kucinich.
Scott
I agree with Kos on this one. Yes, I’ll be in line in 2010 to vote for every single Democrat on the ticket (though that may not be many on my side of Texas), but after making the Democratic base suffer through several months of “We have to cater to anything Baucus, Lieberman, or Olympia Snowe sniffles about,” it’s a bit much to come to me looking for a handout. Let him hit up Goldman-Sachs for that cash — I hear someone made sure they got a wad of it…
leo
Good post. I can understand where Kos is coming from. We all can.
I’d just say this, we only ‘win’ elections in as much as the number of people who reflect our values, namely liberals, get into office.
The goal isn’t to run away from 2010 but to make sure that our people get in and not the ‘likes of Baucus, Nelson, Lincoln, Lieberman’.
I’m perfectly happy to go banging on doors in 2012 to prevent Lieberman from getting reelected.
2008 was great but it doesn’t end there.
eemom
@El Cid:
yeah, I meant the commenters (that is why I said Janebots). And, sure, they say lots of things, but that is the kind of attitude that place foments.
Brien Jackson
@Doug:
As opposed to what?
Brick Oven Bill
SpotWeld, your mom said for me to tell you ‘hi’.
kay
Decisions were made. I don’t want to lose sight of that.
The first and most important decision made was to go forward with an ambitious legislative agenda, regardless of the economic meltdown. If I recall correctly, liberals endorsed that approach. I did. I saw the risk, though.
That came with a cost, because they fact is they had to deal with the economic meltdown while dealing with healthcare, and energy. This is really ambitious.
Obama could have gone a different way. He could have focused exclusively on the economy and financial reform. It would have been a perfectly reasonable thing to announce.
He didn’t do that, and I wonder what the reaction would have been had he done that.
valdivia
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
what you said. and what John said.
self defeating purity dems every step of the way.
D-Chance.
Today has been a fun day. Liberal cannibalism is almost worth paid admission…
Robin G.
@kay: Win.
Martin
I agree with John.
Kos is throwing pitches at the batter, and Obama just wants to win the damn game. It’s not Obama’s job to get the Senate in line. That’s Reid’s job. Obama has a shitload of other things that need doing that nobody else can do, and he’s doing them, but everyone needs to pull their weight here. I’m afraid that Kos and Hamsher are motivating those core voters to take their ball and go home for next year’s elections.
PeakVT
I don’t see Kos as saying anyone should stay home, just that many will – especially marginal voters, who aren’t generally found in forums like this and don’t really pay attention to the sausage-making process and who is to blame.
Also, I don’t blame Kos for being mad at the Democratic Party leaders. They have not been able to keep the caucus unified on procedural votes. And AFAIK none of them has spoken out about the new de facto supermajority requirement for every meaningful piece of legislation. That’s what enabled the summer-long farce that was the “Gang of Six” negotiation. Since the DCCC, DSCC, and now the DNC are all incumbent-oriented, there’s no reason to give to those organizations.
MikeJ
Go complain to M. Duverger. Do it quick though, the man’s like 95 years old.
The Grand Panjandrum
He’ll get over it. He’s a big boy.
cleek
i am disturbed by your lack of purity, Mr. Cole.
ChicagoTom
Way to set the bar up high there Mr. Cole. Saying at least our president isn’t a clownish buffoon isn’t much of an endorsement. This is exactly why politicians don’t give a fuck about the voters and why Dems don’t care about pissing off the base. Cuz we play stupid relativity games. Oh he’s marginally better than Bush? Well la-di-da.
Obama has been miserable on the things that he promised to do (His “transparency” is a joke — he even banned press from his making government more transparent summit, on GLBT issues he’s done next to nothing, he’s just as bad as Bush on issues of “National Security”, “State Secrets” and spying and holding terrorists without trial. He only pays lip service to the rule of law. His current economic team doesn’t differ much from his predecessor and they basically caused the mess we are in — he is ignoring the Volcker wing of his team and empowering the Summers/Geithner folks )
Even his signature issue, Health Care, has gotten completely away from him. He hasn’t used the bully pulpit to express what he wants (apparently all he wants is a bill, any bill, to say he “reformed” health care), he hasn’t threatened to veto anything that he finds unacceptable…hell he hasn’t even said said that he would find anything unacceptable.
I remember that when this process started out, part of the goals were to : 1. Decouple Health Insurance and Employment 2. Control costs 3. Make it more affordable and more accessible to the middle class (those who dont qualify for medicaid) 4. Get somewhere near universal coverage for the uninsured.
1 and 2 have been completely erased. 3. Isnt really happening unless you are 55+. And 4. has taken the form of a mandate. Mandating coverage is not providing universal coverage.
So while many of you might like the taste of this shit sandwich that is nothing more than a blow job to Pharma (with their bullshit deal that the WH tried to pretend didn’t happen) — and to the Insurance companies (who get to drop expensive 55 year olds into medicare while younger healthier are forced to buy insurance on the private market — one that has no cost controls or any real downward pressure or expanded competition) — the rest of us aren;t a bunch of suckers who are gonna take what they can get.
As someone who wouldn’t benefit at all from these changes I say I hope it fails.
It’s the height of naiveté and wishful thinking to believe that if we just accept this BS reform that it will lead us down the path to single payer or that somehow ponies will appear in the future because of this crappy legislation.
We get one bite at this apple. The time is NOW for real reform and real big changes. Not incremental changes and hoping that we hold control of Congress to make more changes in the future.
Realistically speaking this is probably the biggest majority the Dems are going to have for the foreseeable future, and the fools want us to believe that we should just accept some crumbs now and that the rest of the meal will come later — when we have slimmer majorities or none at all???
If whatever this Congress does now doesn’t make a significant positive impact on a majority of people’s and business’s health care costs and relieve most of the problems they are facing (denying valid claims, recission etc), nothing will be done again for decades.
But hey…at least Obama isn’t Bush.
Noonan
It’s not like Obama traveled across the country for two years and talked about needing to reform health care while staying within the existing framework.
Ryan Cunningham
I hate to point this out, but:
Iraq policy = Status quo
Afghanistan policy = Status quo + 30k
Economic policy = Status quo
Guantanamo policy = Status quo
Health care policy = Status quo
Climate policy = ?
Any major decisions he has made are to the RIGHT of Bush! Meet the old boss. Same as the new boss.
We’ve got the return of Clinton’s triangulation, but Obama is triangulating with the teabaggers to his right. Aside from speaking nicely and being slightly more diplomatic, has anything substantial really changed in the past year? Can anyone point me to substantively different policies on any important issues? What has actually changed in the past 11 months?
August J. Pollak
Yeah I know, kos is totally irrational. I mean if there’s one section of the Democratic party that has totally just not made their fair share of compromises this year, it’s progressives and liberals.
RSR
>>I’ve been watching the wingnuts- we need to keep them as far away
I think one irony is that the teabagger set would be angry/motivated/etc no matter what was done. Whatever placating that was done in the name of ‘centrism’ had/has no hope of lessening the anger/etc in the far right. There is no ‘less is more’ in this equation. Less is less, and more would have been more.
I thought the ‘Judgment of Solomon’ post was on target and fits this outcome. We got so little out of this opportunity and yet we’ll suffer just as greatly as if we had done so much more. We might as well have done more.
Robin G.
@ricky: I think that’s unfair — DKos can legitimately claim influence in a number of wins, particularly Webb and Tester; ’06 was an excellent year for the Dems, and excellent online activism and organization contributed significantly.
Martin
@Col. Klink:
Actually Obama didn’t. Bush did. Obama steered that money around a bit differently than Bush would have, though. Obama’s only real failure here (given that the TARP money is likely to be repaid in full) is not getting Geithner to put his boot on the bankers necks and pushing Holder to start raining indictments on the world. Wall Street still doesn’t get it – and I’m going to give Obama the job of giving Wall Street the come-to-Jesus moment. But I also blame Congress for not getting financial regulation through. That shit should have started rolling out as soon as this Congress opened – even if it was just the finger-in-the-dike stuff.
cleek
Obama isn’t the problem, you fucking idiot. the problem is the Blue Dogs and Lieberman, coupled with an intransigent Senate GOP.
Obama has been a huge disappointment in many ways, but on HCR, he can only do so much, and so can only accept so much blame. HCR is a legislative effort, and the Senate is the place where the action happens.
this is an outright lie.
The Dangerman
This is all the halftime show; I’ll get pissed (or not) after the bill gets through the conference.
Now, I get Kos; I’m so fucking tired of the Powerbrokers running the show to the ill of the greater populace. I’ve been deluged with so many commercials that I have to wonder how many fewer Gulfstream trips Insurance executives will take to pay for this airtime, how many fewer outings to La Costa they will take to pay for this airtime, and how much their bonuses will decrease to pay for this airtime. The answer to all, of course, is zero. I want these modern day Robber Barons rolled and rolled hard; I want them screaming “green balloons”. Fuck them, fuck them hard, and fuck them mercilessly.
windshouter
I agree with Kos that it might be time to move beyond giving to mainstream Democratic groups. Their goals and yours may not be aligned. I wish the DSCC would announce if there are 51 senators in the democratic caucus in 2011, a strong public option will be voted on through reconciliation so that to avoid the public option, you have to vote against Senator Lincoln.
There is probably some 2-d chess here that I don’t understand. Anger probably gives you more leverage on the bill as it goes through the process, but assuming you’d rather have this bill than nothing, you’ve got to swing back to defending the bill for the 2010 elections and I don’t know how to do that after denouncing the core of the bill it as a giveaway that’s sure to fail.
jrg
Someone needs to tell Kos that you legislate with the Senate you have, not the one you wish you had.
I understand why he’s upset, but I don’t understand how he could have expected a different outcome, regardless of Obama’s treatment of Baucus and Snowe.
Perhaps Kos would rather see the kind of feces-hurling partisanship we saw from Bush… as if that would have helped get HCR passed.
Martin
@August J. Pollak:
Everyone has made compromises – but that’s no reason to give up. GOS is giving up. They’ve lost sight of the GOP being the problem and have carved off 1/4 of Democrats to be their enemy.
Morbo
Obama gets my middle finger raised at him today for this: Let Yoo Free!
As far as health care reform goes, I’m not going Chicken Little before the final product. It could very well suck; it could also not suck.
kay
@Robin G.:
It confuses the hell out of me because these were the Deaniacs, correct?
I took Dean’s plan seriously, in my red district. We now run Democrats. They lose, always, but we try, because the whole premise was you can’t just cede vast areas of the country to Rush Limbaugh, and you have to have a contested race.
We were supposed to be building an organization, which we have tried to do, and had some success. We knew we weren’t going to be electing liberal Democrats. The point was to build the thing and try for a win.
So, what happened? Now we’re only working for liberal districts and states? How is that different from our previous failed strategy?
4tehlulz
>As someone who wouldn’t benefit at all from these changes I say I hope it fails.
How Republican of you.
richard wang
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
That’s a bit harsh. Like most things there are some good diaries and some crappy ones. No one has to read the crappy ones but Meteor Blades, McJoan, emptywheel, and many others write some good insightful stuff.
jurassicpork
Most Americans want a public option and almost as many want single payer coverage. Yet, the Senate has already abandoned the public option while Obama is allowing his name to be used in mass emailings that beg for money to prevent this from happening.
Elie
Kos and left bloggers want to get to majority left progressive government from the top down without doing the hard grass roots education and bringing along. He and his other similarly misguided left bloggers assume that they can get to left progressive majorities in this country just by intimidation and their say so.
This country is still majority right leaning, not left. If we play our cards right, and bring awareness along that government does work, that self interest for most Americans does not line up with corporist interests and the ability to stick up for ourselves, we will go really far to making the left progressives a true, grass roots based majority.
Without that underpining, its just talk — and destructive talk at best. I dont read any patience or desire to build that grass roots awareness. Only anger and impatience about why the Democrats can’t purge out their moderates just like the Republicans and cram down anything we want — as though that should be a goal that we aspire to..
I am really concerned about these folks. Initially, I just thought they wanted more hits on their blogs and attention. Now I am thinking that they could be a high destructive impediment to achieving the long term progressive majority that we all ultimately desire but know we have to work towards…
kuvasz
Kos is not coming from the same place you do Mr. Coles.
Until a few years ago, before you crawled over the barricades to “our” side, Kos had been standing on top of the barricades fighting the so-called “good fight” against many of the things you finally abandoned in disgust. It is not really logical for the two of you to agree that Obama sold us out because you bought into his rhetoric years after Kos did. Kos is right to feel abandoned, and treated like a two dollar whore after a john walks away without payment due. Kos gave up his maidenhead for Obama, all you did was give Obama a disinterested handjob.
Libby
I miss nuance. Maybe it’s just because I’m coming down with a wicked cold, but it feels like everybody picked their own hard line and has become so ideologically rigid that we’ll never find a consensus that we can work together towards. Seems like most people have become addicted to confrontation.
I have to agree with John Cole, that while there’s certainly a lot of stuff I don’t like, Obama is still the best president we’ve had in a very long time and I don’t really understand why the left is blaming him for everything. There’s only so much one guy can do to challenge institutionalized gridlock.
And whoever pointed out that Kos was pushing electing even bad Dems to get a majority not that long ago is right. Not sure he has so much room to complain. On the other hand, Kos is right that we shouldn’t reward the Congresslizards or the party with money if they don’t deliver some meaningful progressive legislation. No easy answers.
Lisa K.
@eemom:
Word. I stopped reading the Daily Kos a while ago. None of them have to make a hard decsion or herd a bunch of cats.
What people seem to forget is that, ‘way back in the day when Republicans and Democrats actually talked to each other, these types of compromises were made all the time and nobody blinked an eye. It was how legislation got done.
Kos and the rest are pissed because a) moderate Republicans don’t exist anymore, and b) conservative Democrats still do, and they hold a lot of power. There were never 60 Bernie Sanders in the upper chamber, and sooner or later they were going to be reckoned with.
Elie
@kay:
Totally agree with your observation…there is a lot of confusion out there and weird expectations in the left about what they can expect from Democrats and even who Democrats are right now…
Ryan Cunningham
@Noonan: And yet, a public option was clearly a part of the health plan he outlined on the campaign trail:
“Any plan I sign must include an insurance exchange: a one-stop shopping marketplace where you can compare the benefits, cost and track records of a variety of plans – including a public option to increase competition and keep insurance companies honest – and choose what’s best for your family.”
“My plan builds on and improves our current insurance system, which most Americans continue to rely upon, and creates a new public health plan for those currently without coverage. Under my plan, Americans will be able to choose to maintain their current coverage if they choose to. For those without health insurance I will establish a new public insurance program, and provide subsides to afford care for those who need them.”
62across
@ISLM:
This buyer’s remorse applies to how they feel about Obama too and it comes from the same lack of information or maybe wishful thinking.
Some of us worked hard to get Obama elected precisely because he was a pragmatist. Though there are obviously some things he hasn’t come through on that I am upset about, for the most part he is governing the way he said he would.
Lisa
I am just as pissed off as Kos, but I am not quite ready to cede the country to the teabaggers and Palindrones out of a fit of pique.
I will keep the current gang thanks. They suck sometimes, but they suck way less than the torturing warmongering autocrats we just got rid of.
Original Lee
@blahblahblah: I really have to say, I never thought I would hear that coming out of any money guy’s mouth. You go, Volcker.
John Cole
WTF? Iraq- the drawdown continues with a residual force of 35k to be complete by August 2010
Economic policy was a 800 billion stimulus, extension of unemployment benefits, with a new program of 200 billion for job creation.
Gitmo- Did you miss we are trying people in NY and that while moving slower than I want, they are working to draw down Gitmo.
Health care policy- the bill will be signed in the next couple of weeks.
There have been major disappointments. I think Reid and Obama have caved too much to the troglodytes. I hate that in many regards Obama is just as bad as Bush regarding state secrecy. I hate that there has been no major reform of the banking and financial industries.
But the same as Bush? Gimme a break.
Libby
@Robin G.:
Webb has been one of the greatest disappointments in my book. Can’t really blame Kos for supporting him though. I did too. I thought he was going to be much better than he turned out to be.
Arguingwithsignposts - ipod touchs
What? Don’t blame me. I gave yesterday.
Eric S
He’s done a couple of three things. (Hope this isn’t a repeat. I don’t get to read all the comments all the time. Damn you, work!)
Splitting Image
As I’ve said before, Canada’s own health care reform in the 60s allowed doctors to bill patients whatever they wanted over and above what the government would cover. If the national insurance was willing to pay $500 for a service and your doctor felt like charging $10,000, he could take his $500 from the government and send you a bill for the other $9,500.
That loophole wasn’t closed for another 18 years. If reformers in the sixties had turned on Douglas and Pearson for leaving it open during the 1966 reforms, they would have scuttled the process completely and Canada would probably be in the same boat as the U.S., still hoping to get things off the ground.
I’ve heard many people say similar things about FDR and the New Deal. Better to pass an imperfect bill that you can fix later than to tear it up and go back to square one.
Also, Kos is wrong to think that progressives are the Democratic “base”. The base by definition are the people you can reliably expect to show up and vote. Anyone throwing a hissy fit and threatening to sit out the next election because they didn’t get what they wanted this time out isn’t anyone’s base.
If conservative democrats will be there next time out regardless of what happens, the party is right to cater to them instead of to flaky “progressives”. If progressives want the democrats to cater to them instead, they need to develop a reputation for being there when the party needs them. This ain’t the way to go about it.
admiralh
@ISLM: Markos always had two steps.
1) Elect More Democrats
2) Elect Better Democrats
So Markos has moved on to Phase 2.
soonergrunt
To say that things are better than last year is to say that the sun came up this morning. So what? That’s not remotely impressive in itself.
It would be nice if Democrats occasionally acted like Democrats. Every so often, for a change you know. The screw over the party base over something that EVERYBODY who is not either insane or working for the insurance industry likes, and then they want more money from me to stay in office? Fuck ’em.
ALL of my political donations the next round will go for primary challengers to these so called moderate Dems who aren’t moderate so much as on the insurance company payrolls, and for collecting up the last two Republican Senate seats in the Northeast.
You can’t run a country “post-partisan” when the other party has absolutely no morals, standards, honor, or decency.
You also can’t do it when there are members of your own party who fit the same description.
Ryan Cunningham
@cleek: Outright lie? Why would I want to “lie” about any of this? Do you really live in a world where anyone who says something you don’t agree with is a liar?
To be honest, I’d really like to be WRONG about this. I’d like the man to take a stand on important issues. I just don’t see him doing it anywhere.
Can you point me to a substantial decision he has made that is different? I outlined several specifics in my post. Can you be specific?
Elie
@Libby:
The only thing that I would add Libby is that its not up to us, ordinarily, to punish our Congress critters if we are not in their districts. What we have to do, if find a way to get the right candidates to be successful in districts where we can get a true left/progressive. But therein lies the rub, right? Some districts would not support left progressives as strong as Kos would like. So what to do? In his mind, the answer is to punish the centrist Democrats to make sure, what? – that a Republican is elected? That is better somehow than a centrist Democrat?
Dont get me wrong…I am not arguing FOR centrists — only that they exist for a reason and if we are going to shift these to the left, we have to build the constituency underneath to not only support them but support the policies we want. Basic civics…
Original Lee
@ISLM: This. “Who helped make this mess?” “Not Me!”
strawmanmunny
OK. Let’s see. You need 60 senators to get anything passed now. So, with Nelson,Lieberman,Lincoln and Conrad, what is it exactly that Obama could do to them to get them to vote for a public option? You think stripping Holy Joe of his chairmanship would really work on him? Oh, maybe we can just strip them of some stimulus money. I’m sure that will work.
Again, I ask those bitching at Obama. What could he do? Should he just say, screw it and let the bill be filibustered? Or should he try to get something done and then maybe expand on it like say….I don’t know….Social Security was?
I just don’t understand what people expect the guy to do to these 4 Senators. THEY were not going to vote for cloture. Period. Be pissed at them or tell me what Obama could do to change their vote.
It’s funny, the same people that complain about Obama worshippers and how they think he is a GOD,etc….are the same ones that think by snapping his fingers he can get 4 Senators to vote differently. Unreal.
kay
@Ryan Cunningham:
I really object to people continuing to repeat this.
Here’s where we are on the detainees, an issue I have to say, judging from your comment, you don’t actually follow.
Since September, we have been conducting hearings in federal court, on whether the state has grounds to continue to hold them. I’ll post the stats if you’d like.
Holder floated the idea of transferring detainees to the US for detention, charges and trial. They did a winnowing process. It was difficult: they have been held for years.
Holder’s floated idea met fierce resistance in Congress, in a shameful debate that included several Democrats endorsing the idea while voting against it.
The Obama Administration went forward anyway, deciding to allocate a prison in Illinois as the eventual destination, for obvious reasons, because Obama is from Illinois.
As it stands now, they need express Congressional authorization to bring a Cuba detainee to the US.
They’ll get it, I think. No thanks to the detainee’s “staunch defenders” on the internet, who abandoned the whole issue when it didn’t “get fixed” overnight.
The detainees have turned into a talking point. It’s more complicated than that.
Kristine
@ISLM:
2. How he ignores the role he played in electing the type of Democrats who now obstruct what he views as reform. I gave to people like Heath Shuler and Stephanie Herseth based on his advocacy.
This bothers me, as well. A number of Dems who received funds from Blue America and other lefty blog-supported sites turned out to be, well, not so great. I think the hypothesis at the time was “any Dems for now–better Dems tomorrow.” This hasn’t gone very well.
MNPundit
@gbear: The people he energized were energized around HIM. Not the ideals of the Democratic party and no effort was made to do so. When Obama is gone, all his new voters will be gone because he made no effort to tie them in for the long hall. This means the party collapses to 2006 base or worse once he’s done.
The purpose is to grow the left and destroy the right. Anything other than that, means the person is a traitor.
Seebach
I think Kos or SOMEBODY has to bitch vocally in public. Someone has to be the voice of the outraged left. If nobody on the left ever screams foul, then they always get away with it.
Citizen Alan
I could forgive Obama for what will probably be a shitty health care bill if we’d gotten some real movement on ending our two ongoing and pointless wars.
I could forgive Obama for ensuring that we’ll likely be in Afghanistan for another decade at least if we could have had some meaningful reform of the financial markets.
I could forgive Obama for bailing out the banking industry and setting them up to fail even worse in another six or seven years, if we’d gotten some accountability for Bush era criminality.
I could forgive Obama for ensuring that the entire Bush administration could walk despite committing war crimes if we’d at least gotten some meaningful advance on civil rights for gays.
I could forgive Obama for the way his DOJ has actively supported anti-gay discrimination repeatedly if that same DOJ would at least stop arguing that lawsuits over torture and wrongful imprisonment weren’t barred by the “state secrets” doctrine.
And on and on and on.
Look, I voted for the man, and I anticipate voting a straight D ticket in 2010 and 2012 and as far as I can see into the future. But I am so very, very tired of being told that “compromise” means that we progressives must give up everything that we consider important and expect nothing in return, and also that we’re the assholes for even daring to complain about it.
Eat that shit sandwich. Eat it all up.
Noonan
@Ryan Cunningham:
Well, the plan includes insurance exchanges. If you want the plan to live and die on a strong, robust public option then it’s dead.
Elie
@admiralh:
You elect better Democrats by making sure that you bring the community underneath them along to support their being elected. You cannot elect “better” left progressives if the population that would elect them is not aware and ready to do so through education and grass roots outreach and constituency building. Its simple but not easy to do “just-like-that” snap. Has to be worked for on the ground in the home districts…not dictated from above on blogs. Sorry.
Svensker
@Morbo:
This.
Also this:
@Citizen Alan:
Yossarian
Much of the left blogosphere’s conception of politics is actually disturbingly similar to the neo-conservatives’ “Green Lantern Theory” of international relations, as Matt Yglesias dubbed it. With enough “resolve” or “will” on the part of the president, there’s no political problem that cannot be solved. Whee!
Noonan
@Seebach: Exactly. Kos is playing his role. People can decide whether to believe what he’s selling. But he’s always going to be selling the same thing: we need to move left.
valdivia
@kay:
excellent point kay. thanks for making it.
sparky
chris hedges agrees with those of you who say we have gotten what we deserved with Obama
so far as i can see, it doesn’t seem like it’s a good idea to sit on one’s hands in the next election cycle if only because it will guarantee a faster fall, but aside from that it’s not at all clear to me that there is any reason to be pleased with Obama other than from the “he’s not Bush/McCain” standpoint.
what i really don’t understand is those of you who say Obama is doing a great job. i mean, seriously, what has he done differently than what anyone other than Sarah Palin would have done?
strawmanmunny
@Eric S:
Nice List. But…wait, he hasn’t come to me personally and kissed my ring…that ungrateful Bush Lite person.
You want to know the difference between the success of Republicans vs. Democrats? Republicans, until 2006, NEVER aired their disagreements in public. No matter what. While Democrats can’t wait to run to the stage lights/blogs to run down their own side.
Now, I understand that liberals are “better” because of this and they “talk truth to power” and all that stuff, but that’s why they lose elections. So, while we are “talking truth to power”, the other side is exercising said power.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
This has to be spoof, or else this is just a world class fucking wanker at work here.
This is the kind of shit that has turned DKos into an unreadable pile of nonsense every day. I assume that is where this poster came from.
Elie
@kay:
Yes, thanks kay…
Ajay
I kind of agree with the sentiment you have. I didnt really expect much from Obama except to just use common sense, unlike the chimp we had before.
Having said that, It feels like his administration (not all his fault) just doesnt have the things together, especially on issues which are popular (HCR, Finance industry reform). Its sad as things like this can actually make you win elections, pushing republicans even further out.
Ryan Cunningham
@John Cole:
“Iraq- the drawdown continues with a residual force of 35k to be complete by August 2010”
Yes. “To be complete” We’re waiting.
“Economic policy was a 800 billion stimulus, extension of unemployment benefits, with a new program of 200 billion for job creation.”
Sure. He skimmed off a bit for us rubes. But the rest of the money went to the very same extremely rich and connected people that caused the problem!
“Gitmo- Did you miss we are trying people in NY and that while moving slower than I want, they are working to draw down Gitmo.”
As with Iraq, working. Some maybe getting military tribunals. Bagram still seems to be operating in the same way.
“Health care policy- the bill will be signed in the next couple of weeks.”
I guess I am being unfair here. We’ll have to see just what ends up in the bill. It just doesn’t seem like it’s going to do a hell of a lot for the uninsured, which is the entire point of this exercise.
“But the same as Bush? Gimme a break.”
I was just trying to look at the major decisions as coldly as I could. No, he’s not the same as Bush. But he’s definitely not making firm, principled decisions and sticking to them.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@kuvasz: Cute imagery combined with total wanking. Good work.
I was a regular at the GOS going back to 2004, and have one of those 4 digit UIDs to prove it. Kos may have been on the barricades back then (although I thought people like MB had a better grip on the realities of what it would take to bring about effective change and a more liberal political agenda), but Kos and the GOS have morphed into nothing more than a machine for “progressive” demagoguery. @ISLM and @AngusTheGodOfMeat have it right.
Sniping at John is just bullshit on your part. Yeah, he was a wanker. He ain’t a wanker now.
Ryan Cunningham
@Noonan:
You gave the impression that he had campaigned on exactly what he’s delivering here, and anyone who didn’t notice just wasn’t paying attention. He did, in fact, campaign on a public option.
Elise
Ignore Kos’s poutrage. He doesn’t even understand what’s in this proposed deal. He’s just reacting the way Jane told him to.
Comrade Scrutinizer
__
Spoken like a wingnut.
Citizen Alan
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Are you suggesting that we have had meaningful reform of the financial markets that will prevent the kind of wild speculation that caused the latest downturn? Or are you suggesting that we will have all our troops out of Afghanistan before the end of Obama’s second turn (assuming he wins in 2012, and I am starting to have my doubts)?
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
I came here as a refugee from DKos, and never went back.
Better alfalfa over here.
fasteddie
I am frustrated that instead of starting with single payer and compromising from that, we start with “public option” and then compromise that. But like FDR said – “make me”. This is a marathon – not a sprint. There is no cake at the end – we just have to keep on fighting. It’s frustrating to think about but there it is. We will never get to rest on out laurels. We have to keep pushing leftward until we have a reaonably civil society and then we will have to keep pushing to keep it there.
John Cole
In the course of ten minutes you’ve gone from claiming every decision Obama has made was to the right of Bush to agreeing with me that on every issue you listed, Obama is better than Bush by a measurable quantity.
I’m not going to listen to you wax eloquent about principles and sticking to them.
Ajay
@Noonan:
>Kos is playing his role. People can decide whether to
>believe what he’s selling. But he’s always going to be
> selling the same thing: we need to move left.
I am not sure anything that Kos has asked for is moving to the left. Asking why we bow to Lieberman, Snowe etc is simply saying govern the way you were elected to. There is no reason for minority to enjoy veto power.
Noonan
@Ryan Cunningham:
On Gitmo you’re way off. Congress blocked the quick closing of Gitmo. Nothing Obama could do about that.
Same with Tarp. President McCain doesn’t sign anythign resembling the huge investment Obama made in infrastructure, unemployment insurance etc.
I actually think he is making firm, principled decisions. The kind of decisions constrained by political reality.
The one thing I’ll give you is doing nothing on regulating Wall St. That’s bullshit. But then he picked HCR over Wall St. reform.
kay
@valdivia:
Yeah. They didn’t have anywhere to release the detainees, because no one would take them, and they can’t hold them in the US.
They’re doing (essentially) video arraignments.
PanAmerican
Typical Markos. Throw a sop to the flying monkeys when they’re butt hurt. “….but he said he loved me…sob…and promised a magical unity pony….” He knew where this was headed. Rubbing their noses in it would only drive traffic to Jane.
Elie
@Citizen Alan:
“But I am so very, very tired of being told that “compromise” means that we progressives must give up everything that we consider important and expect nothing in return, and also that we’re the assholes for even daring to complain about it.”
I hope that you are working as well on educating and spreading the word locally in those places where either republicans or right leaning democrats have been elected.
For example, on a local level recently, we had some good progressives voted out of office in an off year election with low turn out. Come to find out, a key progressive constituency could have provided enough votes to get them in, but they voted on partner equality legislation only and did not vote for any of the progressive candidates. THAT is failed outreach and failed realization of connected dots. Hopefully, the democrats learn from that and the next election, those folks are engaged and brought into the process. Unfotunately, we have some conservative council people until that time. Fail!
My point is, its fine to have the ideals. However, the ideals are not about demands from above, but building from below
ChicagoTom
Exactly.
John Fucking Cole and his minions of morons are going to call out Markos? Kos has been supporting Dems (progressives and conservative ones) while John Cole was defending Bush the rationale for the Iraq War and attacking Dan Rather and pretending like “Memogate” was a real issue.
And Kos has a right to ask…why? Why did the he and the base work so hard to get the majorities we got. Why did he go out there and gin up support and funding for Dems? First it was “we need to get the gavel”. Well we got them the gavels in ’06. Then it was “we need to get to 60 we need to get to 60” well we got to 58 in ’08 and then we got Specter (who has been pretty progressive on HCR so far since his switch) and Franken and then our side said “well 60’s not enough” What’s that now? How long do we accept moving the goalposts as to what’s needed to actually get something progressive done?
Reid and the caucus (since a large majority of them want real reform) should be threatening any Dem who works against the Dem agenda with the loss of any committee positions they have and have their seniority targeted. If they support a filibuster because they don’t get their way (like Ben Nelson and his threats over his version of Stupak) should be punished.
You don’t get it Mr. Cole because you haven’t been sold out over and over and over. You were busy cheering on Tom DeLay and Bill Frist and W. You don’t get it because you aren’t the base. You’re a johnny come lately who thinks he has the authority to tell real liberals/progressives what they should and shouldn’t accept.
What the fuck has anyone other than the liberals/progressives of the Dem party compromised? What have any of the Blue Dogs given in on? What have the conservadems compromised?
Joe “I supported McCain over Obama” Lieberman (I-CT) is given veto power democratic legislation? A man who Democratic voters in his state rejected gets that kind of power over the signature Dem issue? And you fools defend that as smart politics?
Obama and Reid should be demanding that those who are threatening filibusters because they aren’t getting their way that either they start negotiating in good faith and be willing to compromise themseleves or reconciliation *WILL* happen — instead all they have been doing for the last few months is seeing how much they give away to get 4 senators board. And in the end they are gonna give away the farm, and I would bet they still don’t get the votes they need to end a filibuster.
You go into a fight like this from a position of strength. Obama, Reid and Baucus and the leadership should have started negotiating from the most liberal position — Single Payer — and then started compromising from there. Instead, Single Payer advocates weren’t even allowed a seat at the table with Baucus and Reid and Obama said nothing.
Do you know why the GOP doesn’t filibuster their own legislation and eat their own? Because the GOP base and the leadership won’t have it. There are consequences for bad behavior on the other side. In that aspect our side needs to be similar. You don’t allow 1 or 2 people to exert that much influence of 50 others.
Yossarian
“There is no reason for the minority to enjoy veto power.”
Yes there is. It’s called the rules of the U.S. Senate, and Obama most certainly did not campaign on abolishing those. Even if he had, he doesn’t have the power to do it.
kay
@Ryan Cunningham:
* Total Habeas Cases Decided: 38
* Habeas Cases Granted: 30
* Habeas Cases Denied: 8
* Habeas Granted and Released: 18
* Habeas Granted and Still Detained: 12
* Current Guantanamo Population: 215
Federal court.
ibid
@Ryan Cunningham:
I haven’t seen any evidence that Obama still wouldn’t favor these things. It’s true that he said “I will” do this when it may not have been able to do so single-handedly, but you don’t win many presidential elections by saying “This is what I would like to do, if the Senate will let me.” There’s all this talk about how liberals need to start as far left as possible and then compromise to get what they want. Well, Obama started with about as liberal a stance as you can win a national election on, and we’ve compromised to get a significant (but not sufficient) reform bill within one year, with three, and hopefully seven, more to go. If we don’t see any more progress on health care after this I’ll be disappointed, but for now I’ll celebrate an achievement that has eluded us for decades.
And your other comment about Obama being to the right of Bush is patently ridiculous. See Cole’s response. I don’t doubt that you would like him to be more liberal, but I also think that saying he is to the right of Bush demonstrates that you are a bit too eager to declare your disappointment in him.
Noonan
@Ajay: Seriously? As much as we like to joke about President Lieberman and Snowe their political power is a reality. We need 60 votes. They are votes 60 and 61. Or 59 and 60. Or whatever. Don’t get pissed at Obama for bullshit rules in the Senate.
ISLM
@ 62across
I think the remorse comes from a lack understanding of policy. As has been repeatedly pointed out by health care economists and policy wonks, a “public option” is neither necessary nor sufficient to obtain universality of non-discriminatory coverage at reasonable per capita cost, which were the goals that Obama and Clinton campaigned for during the primaries and which Obama campaigned for during the general.
@ admiralh
MM treats these steps as sequential, which they are not. Indeed, they may be mutually exclusive. The fact is that Shuler and Herseth will hold their seats until they decide to move on or are replaced by Republicans.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Citizen Alan:
I’m not “suggesting” anything. I am stating that the quoted rhetoric is just inflammatory crap. It doesn’t even make sense.
And nobody who posts here has any godlike powers and needs to fret over ‘forgiving’ Obama or any other official. When election day rolls around, make an assessment of your interests and vote accordingly.
If you think Sarah Palin will make a better president, for example, vote for her. And good luck to you.
sparky
@kay: but that has nothing to do with the US’ continuation of the same practices. putting them in Bagram is smarter in that they are further away but there’s no difference in policy.
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2009/09/16/is-bagram-obama’s-new-secret-prison/
J.W. Hamner
Ryan Cunningham: He did campaign on a public option, but has always made clear it wasn’t essential. He says that because it’s true. Jane Hamsher and Markos Moustakis think that a public option is essential because they don’t know what they are talking about.
Sly
I understand the need to get all huffy when you don’t get everything you want, and cry and carry on about how everyone abandoned you and your cause and orange whiskey helicopter asparagus fire engine melancholy….
But Markos temporarily forgets the fact that the purpose of putting Democrats in office is, ultimately, to help people. The Republicans are the ones who were all about permanent majorities and conservative realignments and all that bollocks. And in the process they put China above stateless terror on the threat list, got us into an unsustainable shitstorm of a war, let predatory lenders run wild, and let a major American city drown. That’s what happens when you’re more interested in keeping your job than actually doing your job.
He and Hamsher will all be gloating, ten years from now, about how they did all that hard work helping Obama win and how he accomplished great things that helped a lot of people and made America a better place.
They’re activists. It’s what they do.
Libby
@Elie:
I’ve thought a lot about how to get better Dems out of conservative districts. I’m of the mind at this point, that we’re better off running progressives that can’t win, and letting the GOP take the seat if the price is to elect a Dem that has to vote with the GOP to keep the seat anyway.
My thinking is, a conservaDem just dilutes the whole identity of being the party of progressive populist policy. It allows the conservanuts to point to them and say – see, the Dems are just as bad. Wondering if it isn’t better to just let the GOP take ownership of that policy and keep fighting for liberal candidates. Over time, that’s how you educate the the low-info electorate. So I guess on that point, I support the left side screamers. Which is not to say I demand purity on all issues, but on the large policy positions like hcr, I guess I do expect some reliability.
What I don’t support is blaming Obama for everything. Don’t think it’s realistic to expect him to turn straw into gold, so to speak.
Robin G.
@kay: No, I meant your comment was made of win. Oops. I can see how that was unclear.
I completely agree with you.
ISLM
@ Kristine
It bothers me as well. I reserve my ire for them.
Adrienne
@Zifnab:
This.
Say what you like about Kos, but he’s speaking the truth here. The numbers aren’t lying – look at the polling. Dem approval isn’t dropping b/c Repubs hate them, it’s dropping because DEMS are unhappy. The Democratic base is demoralized right now as we watch this thing slip from our fingers despite *everything* we worked so hard for last year – a Democratic President, 60 Democrats in the Senate, and a strong majority in the House. The elected democrats are refusing to actually BE democrats and stand up for democratic principles. That shit is depressing. We cave on our principles in a way that you *NEVER* see the GOP caving on theirs. They got EVERYTHING they wanted through Bush’s first term and I mean EVERYTHING – Hell, they got stuff passed they hadn’t even thought of when they first took over, but we can’t even get our CORNERSTONE piece of legislation through without being suckered into compromise after ridiculous compromise, followed by more ridiculous compromise into the bill is rendered a clusterfuck?
Where Kos is, is exactly where I am right now. Now, I’m not gonna take my ball and go home, but I want a win, not some watered down version that sorta, kinda, in the right light, if you squint really hard and turn your head to a 45 degree angle, resembles a win. Is that really too much to ask for? HCR is a cornerstone of the Democratic Party platform and we have compromised and sacrificed enough… and for what? ZERO Republican votes and for a handful of WATB centrists to gut the bill?
We need a bill that Dems at home can be excited about. We need a bill that Dems can point to and say, “See, THIS is what you elected us to do, THIS is what we’re doing, and THIS is what we will continue to do if you come out and vote for us.”
Right now, we don’t got that. What we do got right now is a toothless bill that forces ppl under 55 to purchase shitty private insurance, without any meaningful regulation of shitty insurance practices, without any real competition or the price controls that come with it, which equals a huge giveaway to the insurance companies who get even MORE profit because they now get to keep the younger, healthier, cheaper portions of the population (who are now forced to buy their shitty product) while dumping the most expensive ppl off onto the buy-in portion of Medicare, all coupled with a “trigger” that will be so convoluted that it will never actually be pulled – and still no guarantee that we’ll even get THAT because negotiations are ongoing.
I know I sound like a concern troll, but I’d rather no bill than this bill. As it stands, this thing sucks. I’m all for “starting points” and everything, but this sucks even as a starting point. This is not something to hang your hat on. When Social Security first passed, even with all its flaws it was a good starting point – it ESTABLISHED something, it represented the establishment of an idea that took root and could be built upon. This bill is NO comparison.
Tsulagi
An optimist.
Or maybe pessimist depending on the final bill.
ChicagoTom
Not if reconciliation is on the table.
If Nelson Liberman Lincoln and Landrieu belive that reconciliation is on the table (and thus effectively marginalize them) they will either change their tune or they will have zero influence.
And why pray tell didn’t the GOP need 60 during their time in the majority? Because they don’t filibuster their own caucus’ legislation.
Why are people supposedly on “our side” so willing to accept members of their own party thwarting their party’s agenda?
Nelson Liberman Lincoln and Landrieu don’t have to vote for the bill…they just have to allow for an up or down vote. (Something Lieberman and the gang of 14 seemed to be quite keen on during the Bush years)
Cat
@ChicagoTom:
I agree with Tom, not being an idiot should be the bare minimum we ask of our presidents, not something to be thankful for when they aren’t.
Obama is only marginally better then Bush and on a lot of the major issues people care about he’s not deviated enough from Bush to call him an improvement. There have been some positive changes, but we aren’t extracting ourselves from the Iraq/Afghanistan quagmire Bush43 got us into and we still have Bush43 policymakers running the US Economy.
People are mad at the Healthcare issue because they don’t trust the Dems to buck the Oligarch’s and to pass a bill the cuts the Insurance/Pharma industry’s profits in half or more.
To have faith that the proposed changes are not a huge giveway, but instead a down payment on an eventual affordable universal coverage is really a hard when the Bailouts haven’t resulted in any reform and those bailed out have suffered no consequences. Its hard to have faith they Dems will do the right thing when they haven’t done the right thing by Iraq/GITMO/Afghanistan yet.
Obama’s ability to speak well doesn’t lend him credibility when his actions and his lack of actions destroy it.
Zifnab
@kay: Kos backed guys like Jim Webb and Jon Tester. The DKos Dems haven’t given us much trouble.
It’s largely the institutional Blue Dogs and conserva-Dems that were in the Senate well before 2002 that have given us the most trouble. They also (probably not by coincidence) have weaker ties to the netroots and stronger ties to industry lobbyists in their homes states.
Ajay
@Noonan:
>Don’t get pissed at Obama for bullshit rules in the >Senate.
You are looking only at what Senate is doing for HCR. Even there, Obama could use some influence regarding pehaps going with Reconciliation.
Afghanistan has nothing to do with Senate. It makes no sense to spend more money on it. Iraq was supposed to be done for sooner and with fewer troops over there. He skipped that. IIRC, Obama also did campain on strong Public Option and I dont think he is as committed to it as he was.
This all can be a turn off even for a strong supporter.
Citizen Alan
@Elie:
I actually live in an extremely red state and am represented by a Blue Dog congressman with whom I have been in regular contact since his election (to the point that we are on a first name basis). I understand that there are areas where I can realistically approach him with a progressive viewpoint and areas where I cannot. In some of the latter areas, he actually agrees with me on the merits of things like the public option (or at least says he does — it’s possible he’s just blowing smoke up my ass), but he thinks that taking the progressive position on those issues renders him electorally unviable in our state. I don’t begrudge him that and I certainly think he’s better than any Republican we’re likely to get.
It’s more of a macro problem with me. I look at our huge majorities in the House and Senate and contemplate what the Republicans could have achieved if they’d gotten similar numbers back in 2004, and my blood runs cold. I just boggles my mind that we should feel so fucking helpless despite what was billed as a filibuster-proof majority. I also can’t help but remember Pelosi’s promise of subpoenas if the Democrats took the House. Seen any subpoenas floating around in the last few years?
cleek
apparently he forgot that step one pretty much guarantees that a lot of not-so-liberal Dems would get elected, which leads to exactly the situation he’s bitching about today.
then again, this is precisely why i’ve never read dKos. it’s got more screeching than a sack of cats.
Rick Taylor
Odd. Conservatives go crazy when they lose (well, crazier anyway), while liberals go crazy when they win.
Yossarian
I’m beyond tired of lefties muttering “reconciliation” like it’s some magical incantation. In addition to ruining any chance that the conservaDems will ever work with you again, you end up with a bill that’s far more gutted than what you have now.
Don SinFalta
I’m demoralized, no doubt about it. I think Obama is about the best we can do for an executive in this country at this time. And it’s not good enough, no matter how much better than the nadir we saw in the last 8 years it may be. What I see going forward is nothing more than a continuing slide of the Overton Window to the right, with the Republicans pushing us to the brink, and the Democrats following along legitimizing it all, while maybe temporarily cutting back only the most egregious of the excesses. Obama, like Clinton before him, is just playing the usual Dem role in all this, there’s really no significant pushback toward sanity and functionality, just a temporary slowing of the slide. Not good enough. I don’t care if we fall off the right side of the flat earth more slowly under the Dems than under the Republicans, we’re making steady progress in that direction in any case, and the pain will be the same when we get there.
As for health care, while I am willing to believe that the tradeoff of the pathetic remnants of the PO for concessions on Medicare and the Fed Employees Exchange extension may well have been a good one for reform supporters, I was surprised to see Ezra say the other day that
“Basic passage here is a liberal win, and evidence that liberals are running the country.” On this planet, I don’t see any evidence that liberals are running the country.
Brien Jackson
@fasteddie:
Well I don’t get why we didn’t start by proposing to make everything totally free all the time for everyone and start compromising from that.
Seriously though, I get the sentiment, and it makes a sort of intuitive sense, but you still have to stay within the realm of things that are possible. Getting outside of that doesn’t move any windows, it just gets you dismissed out of hand.
Ron
I somewhat understand Markos’s frustration. He wants the democratic majority to pass progressive legislation. But in this frustration, he misses a lot of realities. Reality 1 is that there is a 60-vote obstacle to overcome in the senate. It might suck, but those are the rules. Reality 2 is that one of the ways that the democrats got such large majorities is that they have been willing to include moderate “conservadems” in their party. With these realities it is unrealistic to simply assume 60 seats in the Senate means automatic passage of any democratic-sponsored bill. It’s easy to make snide comments about people like Lieberman and Baucus being paid for by the insurance lobby, but the reality is that the more conservative democrats do not support some of the reforms that the more progressive democrats want. Heck, the house is more to the left (for the most part) than the Senate, and yet the health care bill just barely passed the House. The compromise being bandied about (unofficially at this point as far as I know) is far from perfect. A perfect bill isn’t going to get passed. I’d rather get SOME reform through, even if it isn’t everything I’d want, rather than let health care reform die. And I tend to agree with John that this “compromise” is probably better than the crappy public option that was originally in the bill. Hell, Anthony Weiner, who is about as progressive as they come, especially on the health care issue, has supported this. Howard Dean has supported it. Sure, I’d love a “medicare for all” bill, but right now that’s probably tantamount to saying “I’d love a pink unicorn”.
harlana pepper
Let’s all bash leftist blogs. They certainly deserve it after raising all that money and galvanizing all that support for progressive candidates, causes and (cough) Obama. Those ungrateful fuckers.
Will
First we had Presidents Snowe, Lieberman, Nelson, Landrieu, and Lincoln (not that Lincoln).
And now?
President BURRIS!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/09/burris-threatens-to-filib_n_385677.html
AngusTheGodOfMeat
People don’t know enough about the “issue” in terms of what is happening on Capitol Hill, to even have a valid opinion.
And from what I can see, this includes Markos. This whole year has almost gone by, has the guy ever posted one article actually illuminating this issue or deconstructing the chaotic “news” stories that float down the ditch every day?
No, all he does is react to them like some geezer sitting in the park and watching the pigeons. Nothing useful from him at all that I have seen.
cleek
@Ryan Cunningham:
the stimulus.
i don’t see how you can overlook that.
plus, he lifted the travel ban on people with AIDS.
TaosJohn
I’m with Kos and Jane and all the lefty crazies. Sure, Obama is better than the last guy, but the REAL bad guys are just entrenching themselves even deeper with all the corporatist bullshit boojum.
I want the health care reform bill defeated. There’s no health, no care, and no reform in it. I want us out of foreign wars. No more silly compromises. As for the teabaggers, yes, they’re nuts, but they’re also essentially correct — they just have the villains wrong. We need to communicate and make common cause with them, believe it or fucking not. BIG JOB!!! But the current Democratic party is for shit.
As for leaving the country, I am absolutely for it, but it’s very hard to do. Probably better to stay in El Norte or move to a corner of Nebraska and buy a cheap little farm.
Makewi
Obama has managed to convince people that there are worse things than the GOP leadership. The Republicans are the stupid party, no question, but it is astonishing at how horrible the current crop of Democrats are at governing.
In less than a year majorities are ready to give the reigns back to the other side. Quite an accomplishment.
Noonan
@Ajay: Fair point on Afghanistan. I don’t agree with his decision but I also understand it.
As for reconciliation, I’ve always thought that was a liberal pipe dream. Passing tax cuts through reconciliation is innocuous. Nobody gives a shit if their taxes get lowered. But passing health care through reconciliation would terrify half the country, embolden the right and turn every lobbyist and monied special interest into a raving lunatic. It would be open season on Democrats. Money would pour into their opponents. The center would flee. And the political attacks about Obama being a radical would gain traction.
strawmanmunny
@ChicagoTom:
I’m not willing to let these Senators thwart the agenda but what can you do? I wish they wouldn’t put up road blocks but it is what it is.
If they used Reconciliation, on something like Health Care, all hell would break loose. In the political environment right now? By the time any benefits came from the legislation, Republicans would be in control.
Even so, why is this Obama’s fault? Again, what can he do? He’s the President not a dictator. Be mad at these Senators(I am), vote for better Democrats(I would if I could) but to blame Obama for this is wrong sighted in my view.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@ChicagoTom:
__
You make it sound like Kos and “the base” are one and the same. They aren’t. People who voted for Dems in 2006 and 2008 were a mix of yellow-dog Democrats, independents who tired of the incredibly screwed up mess that Bush and the Congressional Repubs made, and some disaffected Republicans who saw that we as a country were well and truly fucked without some change in direction. Many of those who voted against the Republicans in the past two elections aren’t interested in liberal causes and progressive agendas, they were just seeking to put adults back in power.
Kos wasn’t the player you make him out to be. I remember when Obama was trying to post on the GOS and was promptly hooted off by the Purity Police. Things there really haven’t changed. Kos seems to want to evolve into his own version of the DLC and become a eminence grise, but he’s not sophisticated enough about politics and policy to make the transition.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
By that you mean, liberals, not Democrats. And a pretty good slice of Dems are not really liberals, nor have they ever been. They are parasites on a political machine, not ideologues, and this has been true for my entire lifetime of political awareness which goes back at least 50 years.
This is nothing new, and should not have come as a surprise to anyone. Why do you think healthcare reform has languished since 1948? Because the world wasn’t listening to Markos?
MrSparkle
To paraphrase Chris Rock, you’re supposed to fucking do that! What do you want, an Emmy? One would think this is the bare minimum you need to do to be President. The knowledge that a shit sandwich is being sold to me by a guy who can speak whole sentences and doesn’t wear a shit-eating grin like Bush does not disguise the fact that I’m still being sold a shit sandwich. The fact that he’s asking for money in a fundraising E-Mail so that he may continue shoving these shit sandwiches at us is just adding insult to injury.
But hey, at least President McCain’s not in office right? I mean, he would continue shoveling money to the banksters, squashing real health care reform, endless fighting in the middle east and destroying any chance of accountability for the Bush years, amirite?
ChicagoTom
And good for him. Why should only the Conservatives be demanding concessions.
It’s time for the conservatives to start making compromises instead of just demanding them.
What all Dems should want is the best possible bill NOW, not a good foundation for getting stuff in the futures. Come 2010, the Dems will have slimmer majorities in both houses of Congress, at which point it will be near impossible to revisit health care.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
No, they are not ungrateful as much as they are stupid.
“Dems are demoralized and will stay home from the polls.”
Really? Then their (sniff) demoralization is justification for President Palin? Or how about President Gramm?
Give me a fucking break. You are as much as conceding that WATB Dems are the reason we just suffered eight years of the Cheney Administration.
Fuck the WATB Dems,then. Fuck them very much. They deserve to lose with that attidue.
DougMN
‘Oh just wait a little… bit… longer, you’ll get what you want’
and/or
‘Oh we don’t want those crazy Republicans to get in’
I’m with Kos- I’m tired of this shit. Quit spending all your time appeasing the assholes and spend some time getting me some real wins.
Brien Jackson
Read more Booman.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2009/12/9/134615/705?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boomantribune%2FSvpw+%28Booman+Tribune%29
Citizen Alan
@Yossarian:
In addition to ruining any chance that the conservaDems will ever work with you again …
Well since that likelihood is already statistically zero, I don’t see that as anything to be worried about. Name a single issue that is actually important to the progressive wing of the party that Nelson, Baucas, Landrieu, Lincoln and Lieberman wouldn’t fight tooth and nail.
Robin G.
Honestly, I think the people saying “Obama’s almost as bad as Bush” are suffering from PTSD-induced memory loss, and have blocked out 2001-2008.
kay
@sparky:
No. It’s not the “same practices”. Bagram is in Afghanistan, and they’re claiming “prisoners in an active war zone”. That isn’t Gitmo, which was indefinite detention anywhere in the world until hostilities cease.
We can discuss this, but only if you’ll at least consider how complicated it is.
We can discuss if they should be designated under Geneva, or whether the Obama Administration plans a different designation, they’re not using “enemy combatant”, but they’re not going to federal court and we’re not holding hearings on prisoners held in Afghanistan. Under Obama or anyone else.
Edward G. Talbot
I guess that I take kos’ post literally and don’t try to look for hidden meaning that says he’s abandoning Obama. He basically only says two things: one, that the base believes – with some justification – that Obama and Congress has paid too much heed to corporate interests. and two, because of the first item, they and he are angry at being asked to donate money to celebrate a shitty bill and are likely to not be motivated to work hard for Obama and most congressional dems in 2010.
I didn’t see kos saying he won’t help direct money to progressive democrats. I didn’t see him saying he wouldn’t vote or would encourage people not to vote. And I didn’t see him suggesting that things are worse now than they were a year ago. He is simply reflecting both personal frustration and party-wide frustration – the polls also support the latter concept.
IMO, our system is fucked. I think that right now is the most progressive our government will be for at least a decade, and that is pretty moderate. The only reason dems control everything is because the republicans messed up so badly when they were in charge. In practical terms, things are much better now, but independents and dems are not happy with the democrats. Many independents will stay home or even shift to Republicans in 2010 and especially 2012.
And we’re not going to convince them by pointing out how Obama is better than Bush was. They’ll be convinced when they see real change. You correctly point out the stimulus as one visible item and I agree that in theory independents should be appreciative of it. But the absolute lack of accountability and reform for Wall street has totally overshadowed it. beyond the stimulus, Obama hasn’t done much that comes across as real change to anyone who doesn’t follow things closely (that’s 99% of Americans).
Guantanamo still isn’t closed and the real steps in the right direction carry far less weight than that fact. No hearings or indictments from any of the Bush era scandals have suggested accountability is forthcoming. With Wall Street, he is seen as in bed with them – Summers, Geithner, etc. In Iraq, troop deaths were already way down before Obama took office and the combination of shifting troops to another likely lost cause and continued high profile bombings in Iraq certainly doesn’t play as real change.
Healthcare, though is where I think the democrats are really screwed. Those independent voters are first and foremost going to look at the bill and ask how it helps them and people like them. And the answer is that their premiums will continue to increase by 10% a year and most of them will not have any extra options – I suspect that this group will be disproportionately affected by the mandate to buy crappy coverage as well. Not to mention the multiple years before most of it kicks in. sure, the bill may not make things worse and may help some people, but that is hardly going to sway anyone.
You could argue that any of the items I cited would be worse under Bush and you’d be right. You could argue that the media coverage has not fully done them justice and you’d be right. You’d be citing things largely irrelevant to political reality.
This will go one of two ways – either the Democrats’ moderate approach will start to bear fruit in the next two years in ways that are highly visible. or it won’t. I have trouble seeing the former happening and I suspect kos does too. And that is why he says “we” are in for a world of hurt.
Makewi
@cleek:
A joke. It would have been better if they had just tracked down the poorest people in the country and given them a million each.
Pork
Fraud
Effectiveness
Elie
@Libby:
I DO see your point. It is difficult either way, however. If you are saying that there is no difference in letting an increasingly more hard right Republican get into office, establish themselves and reinforce their power in the supporting population, then I must strongly disagree…
As frustrating as many of the centrist Democrats are, you don’t see them or hear them spouting some of the extreme crazy you get from the Republicans. Also, the job of outreach to the supporting community is much easier when you have at least a slightly progressive beachhead than if you are starting at ground zero with a far right Republican. Ordinary citizens just accomodate themselves to the far right as “norma” — which is kind of the situation we have now. We have to reconvince the average American — particularly in conservative districts (which is mostly what we are talking about here), of where their true self interests lie.
My other quibble with your arguments and those of the Kos supporters is that you speak from top down — what we want overall as a progressive national constituency. That’s fine as long as you remember that it starts at home, at the grassroots where we get the change and not up above where we just demand it without doing the necessary ground work to bring that change along…
We had a decade of hard right policies and frames that really took hold in the south. We have to work hard in these regions to change that and giving it back to the increasingly extreme Republicans just is not a solution for the way you say you want to go. It definitely does not work for me.
Cat
@John Cole:
We are only trying people in NY who we are very sure we can convict without using any information from people we tortured. Do you think they’ll be released if they are acquitted? I think Holder has said they won’t be.
If the only evidence we have against you can’t be used in a US court you’ll either get a show trial or detained indefinitely. Remember, Obama supports “Preventative Detention” which vile.
Maybe reasonable people can disagree on how status quo Obama has been on the other big problems we face, but the Enemy Combatant/Gitmo/State Secrets issue isn’t one of them. Obama is endorsing Bush43 policy by refusing to take action to correct it and implementing policies which deny the detainees their basic rights.
Tecumseh
(Long time reader, first time poster)
-Reconciliation isn’t happening because it won’t work. Not from a political standpoint but even from a legislative on (it’ll have to be divvied up into pieces with a vote on each piece among other things).
-If I remember correctly, what Rahm and the beloved Howard Dean wanted to do was to build a Democratic majority by having Democrats win in Red States/conservative states and to do that, back Democrats who wouldn’t be considered liberal by progressives. So they backed a bunch of candidates who were pro-gun, pro-life, etc. The result is a lot of moderate to conservative Dems in conservative states. This is how you build a large base and this is how you build a majority coalition. If you decide to put a litmus test on every candidate to see if the bloggers approve, you’ll have a minority party but one the bloggers will love. Large coalitions always involve trying to find compromises between different groups and that’s just the way it is.
-Financial/banking reform is slated to be worked on next. Obama/Geithner have proposed one (which is kind of weak), Barney Frank has one in the House and Dodd announced a pretty serious one in the Senate.
-As to the whole taking a stand thing, if you consider we’ve been living almost thirty years of conservative dominance, have a “center-rightish” nation, and a political press that only believes in conventional wisdom, the very act of doing progressive things is difficult and, yes, ballsy. Think how many people flipped out over the very idea of spending money to create jobs? Think of how many people, even pundits, are freaked out over something like health care? Obama’s numbers are done partially because health care is such a messy thing to accomplish and yet he and the Democratic leadership tried anyways. Their approval numbers could be up if they didn’t do it, but they did
(sorry for the length)
cleek
and that’s what we’re getting.
the political landscape (esp the one in the Senate) is not conducive to the handing out of sparkly rainbow-striped ponies.
Adrienne
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
No, I think I meant what I said. I want them to be Democrats. They don’t have to be liberal. Shit, they don’t even have to vote for the bill. But, I should be able to expect that a fucking minimum they DON’T block legislation on the party’s cornerstone issue, they DON’T threaten to join with the GOP on a filibuster, and they vote with the party on procedure. Basically, they shouldn’t get to call themselves Democrats, and get money from Democrats like myself if they are hell-bent on crippling the party! It’s fine to not always vote with the party, I get that. I get that you have to vote your district/conscience/whatever. But it is NOT fine to kamikaze your own party. PERIOD.
jl
With stuff like this going on…
Aetna Forcing 600,000-Plus To Lose Coverage In Effort To Raise Profits
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/04/aetna-forcing-600000-plus_n_380130.html
Aetna understated profits, overhead, lawmakers say
http://www.news-medical.net/news/20091209/Aetna-understated-profits-overhead-lawmakers-say.aspx
and in the face of 20 to 30 medium and high income countries that have shown you can have universal coverage at cheaper costs and with better outcomes,
AND the financial bail out, AND lack of financial market reform, AND the inadequate stimulus that does not restore needed investments in our frayed human and physical capital,
it is clear that the US is, as several wise people have noted recently, an emerging third world country run by an entrenched, corrupt, incometent decayed aristocracy.
Obama has acquiesced to corruption, incompetence and ignorance, rather than fighting for ordinary people, and fighting to restore rational evidence based policy.
The health reform bill must be strong enough, through cost-control, access to universal coverage, or access to care, or something, anything at all, to provide relief to ordinary people and small business.
Health care reform is being weakened to the point where it may accomplish nothing.
I will contribute moneay and I will vote next year, but in order to get better people in Congress, not for Obama.
I think there is reason to be pissed. Obama has not delivered in substance or even rhetorically in fighting for what he said he valued during the election.
The alternative right now is disaster, so I will work for the forces of reason and good. But I think people do have a right to be pissed. We should let Obama know we are pissed.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@ChicagoTom:
__
Because “our side” is broader than the Republican side. We can and do elect people to the left of their Republican opponents, but those same people are more conservative than the leftmost members of the Democratic Party (again, Shuler).
The Republicans keep a tighter rein on party discipline and ideology (if obstruction can be called an ideology), but that has a cost, too. If there isn’t deviation from Party line, that Party line is rigid, and over time drives more moderate voters and office-seekers into other avenues. This makes the Republicans vulnerable, and it showed in 2006 and 2008. All their vaunted toe-the-line party discipline did was to help them lose those two elections.
People who call for tighter control of Democratic caucuses should ponder that—the breadth of opinion in this Party can be a source of strength and resilience, even though having to deal with it on issues such as HCR is pretty much a pain in the ass—a pain in the ass made even more difficult by the Purity Police.
ChicagoTom
Kos and the base line up quite well. You don’t seem to know what “base” means.
Indys aren’t the base. (Independants, by definition aren’t dems are they? So how can they be the base?)
And the Blue Dogs supporters aren’t the base. Most people who vote for Blue Dogs vote GOP for president and only support blue dogs as long as they act like republicans. Those people aren’t the base.
And the cross tabs of most polling tends to back Kos’s belief. It’s the base that is getting impatient with Obama. A significant amount of his disapproval is coming from the left. Many liberals are rightly upset at his unwillingness to try and pull this country back to the left (after being pulled to the right for so very long)
All the more reason to pass liberal legislation. The people who lodged protest votes aren’t going to be long term Dem voters unless the Dem party pulls to the right and abandons it’s base and the majority of its platform. Disillusioned republicans aren’t the future of the Democratic party nor are they it’s strength.
And if, as you say they voted to put adults in charge, than the Dems should act like adults and not give in to every petulant demand from a whiny ass conserva-dem who doesn’t get their way. They need to show leadership and courage and principle — that’s what adults do. They don’t cower in fear every time Joe “With us on everything but the war” Lieberman says boo.
kay
@sparky:
Look at the stats I posted for the hearings that have been held on the Gitmo detainees. Some of them are being held with sufficient cause. That’s now been determined, by a judge. The idea that the US attorney general was just going to open the gates and start sending them packing is just crazy. He’s not going to do that.
I don’t think you’re taking that into account, and you are particularly not taking that into account regarding those held in Afghanistan.
Obama and Holder don’t have that luxury. They have to get it right.
matt
I’d move to canada, but they won’t let us live there without $200,000 in the bank.
The best we can do now is simply make sure that no 1 party gets control of the legislative and executive branch…no progress is better than this crap! Thus no votes or cash for dems, let the rethugs have the house and senate…its not like dems did anything for us.
Little Dreamer
@Don SinFalta:
Strangely, your forward looks very much like what we just came through in the last several years. Are you sure you don’t have your backward and forward buttons reversed?
JMY
@paolipress:
Bush-Lite? Here we go with this mess.
John Cole
Boy, I sure was calling Kos out here.
Some delicate flowers in the audience today.
Although I do sense a marketing opportunity with “minions of morons.”
Elie
@Adrienne:
You would rather no bill? Really?
My goodness, pretty egocentric and high handed? You are willing to not get folks some real help they need just satisfy your ego?
Please explain how giving much needed coverage to millions of people who do not now have it, who have been bankrupted by not having it, who have been financially insecure because of lack of coverage — how that “works” for you?
Ok — the little people will just have to keep suffering until we reach the level of ideological purity that will allow us to bestow coverage, but not until then?
Just crap.
Cat
@strawmanmunny:
Yes, because its only about holding and exercising power, never about acting morally and following through on promises.
Emma
Those of you who want to punish Obama for not being the Magic Man you voted for — please, please go off and vote for the next Republican candidate, or better yet, the next Green spoiler. Please. And when the nuts who control the Republican party shut down all the stuff they want to — Medicare, Social Security, any sort of help to marginalized groups, outlaw gay civil unions, force prayer in schools — because if you don’t know they will try for it the moment they get their Senate back you’re stupider than you sound — then please, please come back to me and whine.
I haven’t gone postal on anyone for a while, but I can guarantee it for you.
Noonan
@John Cole: Pretty sure the Bush Administration already has that trademarked.
ChicagoTom
I call BS.
The GOP wasn’t punished because of their party discipline nor were people driven away from the GOP because of their rigidity.
They were punished because they were incompetent and because the public soured on the war (and Bush) and the economy started to tank — and the GOP happened to be in control.
Tom Delay didn’t lose because his nickname was “The Hammer”…he lost because he was exposed as a criminal.
mcc
The problem here is that Jane and Kos are working on the assumption that the public, or democrats at large, care more about their particular single ideological/policy item battle (the public option) than they care about reforming health care. From the perspective of most of the people who will be getting that fundraising ask, this whole health care battle was about addressing the problem of the 50 million ish people in this country without health insurance. For Kos, the battle was apparently just about defeating the insurance companies. If the goal is to improve access to health insurance, then Obama has a big victory to report this morning, as they’re about to pass a bill that will over 10 years bring health insurance to the vast majority that currently lacks it and put an array of new tools in place for addressing the problems with health insurance in America. If the battle was about sticking it to the insurance companies, or if the battle was exclusively and solely about “the public option”, well, the battle was lost. But defeating the insurance companies, of course, was just Kos’s goal, it wasn’t Obama’s goal, or a goal that the electorate at large would consider to preempt the larger problem of access to health care. Kos expects Obama, expects everyone, to react as if it were.
And as someone who personally wants the public option passed more than I want anything else in the current health care bill, that makes Kos useless to me here. Kos has started believing his own bullshit, started believing that his own blog actually represents the political landscape. He’s lost the distinction between “I believe this personally” and “this is actually a convincing argument”. And unless he snaps out of it, he’s going to be completely useless in terms of actually getting the public option passed. You can’t change reality while living in a world of fantasy, and if he runs around next November saying “but the Democrats passed the biggest health reform legislation in 40 years! it was a huge betrayal!” he’s just going to get laughed at the instant he runs into someone who isn’t a blogger.
Joshua Norton
“minions of morons.”
For some reason the word “minions” always makes me think of onion rings. Damn. Now I’m hungry.
Barry
Martin
“I agree with John.
Kos is throwing pitches at the batter, and Obama just wants to win the damn game. ”
That’s quesionable, if winning the dame game means getting some real reforms.
“It’s not Obama’s job to get the Senate in line. That’s Reid’s job. ”
It’s the president’s job to lean on the Senate, and to get the public to lean on the Senate. The Senate non-leader was elected by the majority, probably under the condition of not actually, you know, leading.
strawmanmunny
@John Cole:
I’ll buy one of those tshirts. “John Cole and his minions of morons”
Sounds like a good Hair Metal Band.
jl
@cleek: That is true, but if that is the case, Obama should have been making the case against the current political climate to the public, in order to obtain a better Congress after the next elections.
He hasn’t. He has been making politically useless, even damaging concessions to bad faith artists, that substantively hurt the country.
His efforts at rallying the country to vote for better people and better policies have been rare, and feeble.
Obama has not done a good job at rallying the country, I think that is apparent now.
Look at TR, Roosevelt, Truman, and note the difference.
We need quite a few ‘Turnip Day’ speeches, and Obama has shown he is incapable of giving one so far.
Polls show the majority of the country realize the GOP is acting in bad faith. Obama is beginning to look like either a sap or a fool or hypocrite to many people in this country.
Obama’s post-partisan, new-vision stuff has become a tired gimmick. If he does not modify this failing, flailing useless gimmick, he is either a great politician at running and a limited mediocre one at governing (like a recent president we all know), or was insincere during his campaign. I do not see any other alternative.
Max
I appreciate that the Democratic party is a large swath and that it incorporates all points on the spectrum.
It’s unfortunate that those on the far left of the spectrum have such disdain for those of us that aren’t disappointed in Obama, are moderate, and/or support many of the decisions being made by this administration.
I respect those that are able to have a reasonable discussion about their position, but the hysterics lead me to believe that these aren’t serious people.
Elections are won in the middle. I will never vote for President Kuchinich. Seems to me, we should find a way to work together, especially since the GOP has decided it’s no longer willing to participate in governence.
eemom
I’ll say this again: do any of you “kill the bill” folks here NOT have health insurance yourselves?
Because if you do, you really need to shut the fuck up.
Ruckus
@HumboldtBlue:
This.
I’m not saying nothing is different. Maybe what we see is the best that can be done. We have made major changes in less than a year of Obama. I just see many areas that I thought would be more change or better change have not been.
I feel that the only way to control cost and get good health care at this time in this country is single payer. But that is not going to happen. So what’s next? Everything else I see will leave the vultures in the health insurance biz in the middle, still sucking the money out of us and leaving us holding the bag. The question that I think is important is – Is Obama the cause? We seem to be blaming him for everything. What more can he really do?
I am frustrated and tired. I am one of those with no health care (other than the Bush ER plan). I can’t afford it, I have pre-existing conditions and I don’t qualify for Medicare. Yet. I need this to happen and I don’t see it working. That frustrates me even as I try to be positive and see that at least it’s being discussed. Even as the amoral opposition with way too much power pouts, shouts and throws tantrums like a spoiled 6 yr old brat.
Elie
@John Cole:
Ha,ha,ha
I guess I am a minion moron — small mm — cause I do not fall down in gratitude to Markos
Cannot and do not like the folks jumping on here from the big orange with calling folks names…
Yall have a right to your opinion — that is all you have a right to. We all basically want the same things. Act like it and don’t come over here with your labels and purity trolling. Not interested. I dont think most of you know or care about really doing the work necessary to support the change we all want. Your demands are well, YOUR demands — If you want to make policy real, get off your butts and hit the hustings in those red or pink districts where the centrists are elected. Change the folks they represent and you will get what you demand from above. No other way.
kay
@Zifnab:
It’s a great point. I also love “given us the most trouble”.
They’re taking years off my life.
matt
Fine let the system fall apart all by itself over the next couple years…nobody gives a fuck about the insurance companies so let them put themselves out of business over the next decade and some govt run system will take its place.
I’d rather continue with having no health care than be forced into this mess.
Will
Not sure what Kos, or, for that matter, all of the other progressives angry with this potential deal actually think Obama could be doing differently. He can’t make assholes into lemonade, if you catch my drift.
When nothing passes without 60 votes and 5 of your 60 are the biggest egomaniacs on the planet, you pretty much have to find a way to make them happy. It sucks. Welcome to the same shitty world we’ve always lived in.
What does Kos actually think Obama or Reid could do differently to turn these assholes into lemonade? And does Kos actually think it would be better to enter the midterms, or for that matter, 2012, with NOTHING?
Or maybe he’s just posturing, just because he thinks that his role here. I don’t know…
Little Dreamer
@ChicagoTom:
Despite what you may choose to believe, the base is not your echo chamber, it’s a group of various ideas, beliefs and labels, not entirely progressive or liberal by any means.
We’re a BIG TENT, remember? As opposed to that group over there ::points right:: who throw supposedly likeminded individuals out of the party because they aren’t demonstrably as hateful as the hive, you know, the same ones who highlight that they have a couple of African American individuals around that they can show off to exhibit the fact that they’re all inclusive.
harlana pepper
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: You’re acting like people who campaigned for and donated money to Obama have no right to complain. Well, insurance lobbyists have sure as fuck done plenty of complaining, in the back rooms, and pretty much got what they wanted – I don’t see you calling them watbs.
jl
“From the perspective of most of the people who will be getting that fundraising ask, this whole health care battle was about addressing the problem of the 50 million ish people in this country without health insurance.”
I think it was also about not getting ripped of by an insurance company or healthplan, and guaranteeing reliable future coveage for those already covered, but liable to loss of insurance because they got sick or lost their job.
The way things are going, none of those three will be achieved.
The WH seems to think that a symbolic victory will mean something. But it won’t because people will still have to pay too much for health care, and will still have to deal with unfair and rigged premiums designed to maximize individual company profits for no socially useful reason at all.
They may even have to deal with a slow and limited phase out of recsissions and exclusions for pre-existing conditions.
People will have to deal with this in their everyday life. You cannot fool them on this.
Cat
@Libby: Let the…
The way the Senate and House work you are much better off having a few rogue blue dogs as long as it gets your caucus the majority so you party can get control of the administrative aspects of congress which are just as important.
Ruckus
@Edward G. Talbot:
Very nice summery of the situation. It’s what I would say if I could write without my current ranting jag.
Da Bomb
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: All of your statements are full of WIN.
kay
@Makewi:
Oh, baloney. The stimulus is now widely considered to have worked, as much as it could have, given the concessions we had to make. You and Sarah Palin are still clinging to this nonsense?
Remember: conservatives offered nothing. Not one thing.
Sarah Palin was surprisingly devoid of ideas. Now that there’s room to breathe, and no chance for error, conservatives are going to offer “ideas”?
Too late. We asked. You thought it was a better idea to hold press conferences.
ChicagoTom
Ok Mr Cole .My apologies sorry, i misspoke….you didn’t call him out, but quite a few your minions did.
You just “don’t understand” why Kos isn’t happy with a half-assed compromise that has the Insurance companies sending out memos of victory isn’t good enough for real liberals (rather than John Cole anti-republicans) to say thanks for the crrumbs and STFU.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Chicago Tom
You seem to be missing a group: Lifelong Democrats. Hell, the 92% of black folk that vote Democratic every election easily outnumber all of Left Blogistan.
goblue72
Cutting through all the Scarlet O’Hara histrionics, I can see where the Kossacks and others are coming from. At the 1,000 feet level, the core of HCR is a federal mandate that if you don’t currently have insurance from your employer, then you have to go out and buy some. (AKA the Massachusetts Plan)
Our Congresscritters are basically handing the already bloated, greedy, parasitic private insurance companies a big giant Christmas present.
So if we are all going to be enslaved to the insurance mafia, it all comes down to what we get in exchange for our indentured servitude. If after 12 years of servitude, we all get to be freemen in the colonies of the New World, maybe its a price worth paying for.
But so far, it doesn’t seem that way to Kossacks and I can’t really blame them. Yes, it looks like we will get community rating, they can’t deny based on pre-existing conditions, etc. But based on the experiences of states that already have laws like that in place (see New York, see Massachusetts), that will just drive up premiums. Those 12 years of servitude just start looking like twice that.
The grease to make it go down is how the subsidies are structured. And the way things are shaping up, the bought and paid for Senate is doing its best to make those subsidies maximize corporate profits while minimizing who can benefit. The private insurance racket WANTS the taxpayers to pick up the tab for the most high risk pool, leaving them with the cream – young workers who are actuarially the lowest risk and who will now be forced to buy insurance on the private market – a private market that will now be charging higher premiums due to community rating and universal access.
Increasing the threshold to qualify for MedicAid is great, but the Senate is doing its best to keep that threshold as low as possible – right now they are talking about 133% of poverty level – which is basically like working at McD’s poor as opposed to welfare poor. A far cry from the previously proposed 200% of poverty level – which would have made a real dent in providing health care to working families.
The public option – a ROBUST public option – was supposed to be the grease. If the private insurance is being handed handcuffed servants due to a universal mandate, then the least we could all expect is there would be an option to buy that forced insurance from our own government, the existence of said robust option keeping the private racketeers in check.
Instead, what we are looking at is being forced to buy insurance from Aetna/Blue Cross/Satan at paying through the nose rates, unless you are McD’s poor or almost retirement age/self-employed with cancer.
I guess I’m kinda pissed too, now that I write it all out.
jl
Not sure ‘B-J minions or morons’ makes much sense, but I like it.
When will the t-shirts be ready?
cleek
wait till 2011 ? yeah, that would go over well with the MyPonyNow! brigades.
maybe not. but i don’t think it’s from a lack of trying: he and the Congressional Dems have been out there for most of the year, giving speeches, and holding town halls and trying to make their case. they haven’t been able to stop the barrage of lies and distortions that the GOP has let loose. but, again, i don’t think it’s from a lack of trying.
his September speech gave his HCR plans a 14 point bounce. sounds like the work of a capable speech-giver to me. his June speech was well-received, as well.
strawmanmunny
@Cat:
lol.
Look, I live in Kentucky. I can tell you that here most of my ideas, and by extension liberal ideas, would get you a one way ticket to the crazy house.
The bottom line is that half of the country doesn’t agree that torture is wrong. The bottom line is half of the country doesn’t believe gay people deserve marriage rights. Half of the country thinks that socialism is bad while they draw medicare benefits. The bottom line is half the country thinks the world is flat(well, maybe not half but it seems that way). It’s not pretty but that is the country that Obama is trying to lead. And unfortunately, some of these “Democratic” Senators agree with that half of the country.
I’m not in liberal heavens that some people are so I can only go by what I run into day to day. But, the fact that ANY health care policy gets done is amazing to me.
Now we can all talk about morals, promises and stuff but I wouldn’t when it concerns the American Government…hell for that matter, much of the American people. We live in the world we have not the one we wish it to be. And, for me, in that world, I take what I can get and keep fighting. Any movement forward is one day that we aren’t moving backward, which is what we would be doing if McCain/Republican was in office.
I voted for Obama not because I would get a magical pony but because I admired his approach to problems. I have not been disappointed. To think he was going to ride in on his white horse and just fix everything in 11 months wasn’t my thoughts.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@harlana pepper:
Aw, fuck you. I gave over $4k to the Obama campaign, between primary and general campaign funds.
I don’t need any advice on how contributors should feel. The whiners are whiners, period. And they are full of shit.
Most of them haven’t the slightest clue, for example, what the most recent maneuvers on healthcare reform really mean or what it will translate to when the final bill comes out of conference. Not a clue, and as near as I can tell, that goes for Markos too. If he has a clue, he is keeping it to himself.
As for the lobbyists, they have been doing their jobs for over half a century now, and successfully. Did you really think they would roll over and die because we won an election?
Elie
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
This
BombIranForChrist
I am not as far to the left as Kos, and I left his screechy website a long time ago, but I do understand his frustration.
Of the big issues (for me), if Obama had shown more spine on Iraq, Afghanistan, the Financial Crisis, and the Healthcare debate … on just ONE of these issues … I would be fine. But he seems a bit like a cowed dog. It’s a sad statement when the president of the united states seems less relevant on matters of policy than f’ing Lieberman.
Weak sauce, man. Weak sauce.
ChicagoTom
Apparently it’s only a big tent when we want to abondan what the Democratic party is supposed to stand for. When it’s complaints from the left, the tent gets smaller and the liberals are expected to STFU.
We can be a big tent while still supporting our core platform.
We can be a big tent while not giving the people that barely fit into our tent veto power
The tent doesn’t need to be so big a tent that we are going to support people who are hostile to our agenda like Joe Lieberman. There is another tent for those people. Let them go there or they can hold their nose and compromise if they want to be in our test…or they can caucus with themseleves and form their own third party.
JMY
From that post on Booman’s blog, Sen. Rockerfeller, Sanders, Rep. Weiner, and our beloved Howard Dean, seems to like this deal. So Kos should yell at them for that as well if he wants to complain about the president since I guess they are more liberal than Obama.
So from this thread I have learned that:
A). Obama isn’t a leader and doesn’t inspire the people.
B). He’s just like Bush.
Okay Kos, don’t support Dems in 2010 or Obama in 2012, lets just let Repubs back in control and watch as they destroy everything we have accomplished or are trying to. You think they are bad as the minority, just wait til they are back in the majority. That will show those Democrats we are serious! Lets give the US back to those who destroyed it.
ISLM
@goblue72
What is a ROBUST public option? I know it must be imporant because you have used ALL CAPS.
Makewi
@kay:
If by widely accepted, you mean all the liberals you ask, well then sure its a huge success. I think you should go down to the unemployment offices and tell them how lucky they are.
I do notice with great interest how you care more about what Sarah Palin thinks about it then in where all that fraud money went. I guess your ok with corruption and stealing. Noted.
General Winfield Stuck
@ChicagoTom:
Oh, I see, out of most of the registered democrats who vote democrat mostly and voted for Obama, all of them, or nearly all according to your definition, are lined up with Kos, and the braintrust there. And if not, Obama dem voters are not considered the “base”
You are an idiot. What Kos, and Jane and their stupid minions are are a fraction of the base, and further defined as part of an activist base clammering that they are “progressives” but don’t accept progress and are not that, being left side ideologues instead. Ideologue activists that now are ideologue activists acting like because they voted for Obama, he must be like them and do their bidding on cue, or he is a sellout. When he has never claimed to be your definition of a “progressive”.
He is not, and is actually and really a “progressive” making progress. You and the other fool tribesman at the libtard dogma fever swamps do not have the power and numbers you think you have. You have big mouths and make all kinds of holler and empty threats, but in the end, are little fishes who have gone quite insane.
Kos, used to be a big believer in getting moderate and conservative dems elected in conservative districts and states. I guess he was not smart enough or honest enough to realize they would be supporting and voting not to his command, nor liking.
Like I said yesterday, Obama needs to get himself some new nutroots.
Da Bomb
@Shawn in ShowMe: THIS. AMEN.
As I just said above, he’s poll numbers with African-Americans and Latinos are high. Very high.
Max
@General Winfield Stuck: Thank you.
Little Dreamer
@ChicagoTom:
Hardly, we’ll still welcome you as comrades in the next election, despite your emotional responses on HCR. Yell, rant and scream all you want, just don’t tell me that if I don’t rant, yell and scream too, that I’m not lined up with the base.
Elie
@ChicagoTom:
Don’t you understand basic civics in our non Parliamentary system? If Lieberman is elected by a constituency that wants him, what the fuck can you do except go and work to change the awareness of the constituency that supports him. Yelling and screaming about how awful he is up there, how “hostile” he is to our agenda aint gonna do it once he is elected. Do you actually want to create a third party out of the conservative Democrats by kicking them out of your purist tent? Do you think that we would elect more or fewer Democrats that way or that our chances of progressive change would be increased using that approach? Really?
Elie
@General Winfield Stuck:
Absolutely, General — could not agree more!
John S.
The Kos Kidz and the Teabaggers all sure seem to be hankering for a hunk of parliamentary style democracy!
We can just splinter the two major parties into:
1. Progressives – i.e. the lefty purists
2. Democrats – i.e. the pragmatists on the Left
3. Centrists – i.e. David Broder
4. Republicans – i.e. the pragmatists on the Right
5. Conservatives – i.e. the current GOP teabaggers
Because having to broker deals betwixt all these disparate groups would REALLY improve the way things work in Washington! Although I do suppose it would make it easier to achieve ideological purity and truth in campaigning…
And wouldn’t we just all love to see who a coalition consisting of 1, 2 and 3 would make Prime Minister? We all know that a coalition consisting of 3, 4 and 5 would either make Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck PM.
Mo's Bike Shop
The email itself is a big part of the context here. It came from the DNC. You got it if you were a contributor. It’s full of empty rhetorical bullet points. (’50-state strategy’? WTF? ‘We won’t back down’ Ummmm)
And to the extent it says anything substantive, it’s lying.
If you check the comments at GOS, you’ll see that the donation request was keyed to individuals’ previous contributions.
It’s not just that the new guys at the DNC see their base as an ATM with a battered spouse syndrome. It’s that they’re not even smart enough to hide their attitude.
Lisa K.
If I didn’t know better, I would swear Jim DeMint said this.
Little Dreamer
@General Winfield Stuck:
God, it’s so weird having you arguing my point these days. Thanks, I think!
Little Dreamer
@Lisa K.:
Really. True that!
John S.
The Kos Kidz and the Teabaggers all sure seem to be hankering for a hunk of parliamentary style democracy!
We can just splinter the two major parties into:
1. Progressives – i.e. the lefty purists
2. Democrats – i.e. the pragmatists on the Left
3. Centrists – i.e. David Broder
4. Republicans – i.e. the pragmatists on the Right
5. Conservatives – i.e. the current GOP teabaggers
Because having to broker deals betwixt all these disparate groups would REALLY improve the way things work in Washington! Although I do suppose it would make it easier to achieve ideological purity and truth in campaigning…
And wouldn’t we just all love to see who a coalition consisting of 1, 2 and 3 would make Prime Minister? We all know that a coalition consisting of 3, 4 and 5 would either make Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck PM.
kay
@Makewi:
No. It’s “widely accepted”, Makewi, by economists. It’s explored in today’s report from the oversight board Congress appointed, while conservatives were standing around bitching.
You know what, Makewi? We’ve turned the corner on the economy. I know you’ll deny it, and whine incessantly that it would have come sooner with another tax cut, but that ain’t what happened.
Conservatives did not one thing to contribute to pulling back from the precipice. They didn’t even do the job they were hired to do.
They stood around bitching. They went on book tours. They penned racist signs.
Don’t come around now second-guessing the actions that were taken. YOUR accrued shit hit the fan and you ran away.
General Winfield Stuck
@Little Dreamer:
I have been arguing the same points from day one here, without much change.
jl
As for giving up and doing nothing, that is exactly the wrong thing to do. Criticism is not the same thing as advocating passivity.
I never said that I would do nothing the next election. I said I would give money for Congressional races and I would vote.
But the average voter is not like that. They will sit home.
It is a political leaders job to keep his base support active and enthusiastic, and to sway those who are on the margin of support.
Polls clearly show all but the wingnuts demorlized. If Obama is a good leader, he should realize he needs to do something about it, and start doing it now. I do not see anything.
Obama never gave anything close to a rousing speech. And even if he did, he did not follow up.
I realize that it is bad if the GOP gains seats, and disaster if they regain control. That is exactly why I am making a fuss. The money and votes of people here will mean nothing if the leadership is not notified that they are doing a piss poor job at leading. There are too many who will do the wrong thing and sit out the next election.
Jack
Yes, things are better, and if they stayed the way they are now, I’d be relatively ok with it. The problem lies in that the Obama administration is ok with the status quo and has no interest in redressing the fundamental imbalances effected by the Far-right faction of the power elite. With Obama in the oval office, we’re holding steady far to the right where Cheney and his gang drove us; we’re not moving things back to a center in which a decent balance was effected from 1932-1980. We’re simply marking time until the GOP takes over again, and it will. Then we will jolt further to the right again.
Elie
@John S.:
Actually, a parliamentary system can be a disaster. The Israeli government is completely in the thrall of their most conservative crazies who prevent the more sane middle from ever getting enough “critical mass” to make policy decisions unskewed by the crazies.
I think Parliamentary systems may work better in more homogenous cultures. One as diverse and loony as ours would just break us down even further…
Lisa K.
@Little Dreamer:
There are really two choices in the matter. Being a “big tent” party, which the Democrats advertise themselves as, means a lot of different factions coalesced around a prevailing worldview and a lot of bickering and compromising along the way.
Or, we as a party could start requiring 10-point purity tests and periodic purges and become the GOP. Ideologically united, but heading towards irrelevance.
The country as a whole is never going to be as liberal as Markos and Jane think it should be. That is just a reality, and has to be dealt and negotiated with. Period. Otherwise, we become just like Republicans.
goblue72
@ISLM: I’d use a fricking underline instead of ALL CAPS if I wasn’t feeling lazy and looking up how to code an underline. Sheesh.
As for a robust PO versus the watered down weak sauce that was being bandied about:
robust PO: allow anyone who isn’t currently insured to buy directly into a new public insurance program that covers essentially the same things MediCare does at similar reimbursement rates to providers. Set baseline premiums as needed to cover this risk pool, so the program is self-funded. Then establish affordability criteria (X% of gross income, for example) such that anyone who’s premium to buy into that program exceeds the affordabilty % of their income gets subsidized the difference.
watered-down weak sauce PO: hold off on starting the program unless some “triggers” are met, allow states to “opt-out”, set the eligibility criteria to buy into the PO so narrow that only the most costly, high risk, can’t get insurance nowheres, nohows folks can buy in, leaving the bulk of the un-insured being forced to buy insurance due to universal mandate, but having no choice but to buy it from the private market
liberal
@General Winfield Stuck:
Depends on the issue. It’s reasonable to argue he’s making progress on health care reform. It’s utterly unreasonable to argue he’s making progress vis-a-vis Wall St, or Afghanistan.
Power, certainly none. But IIRC the liberal position on Afghanistan—get the hell out—certainly has the numbers. And, as long as we’re on “numbers” and not power, the liberal position on single payer certainly has the numbers.
ChicagoTom
You can do more than that. You can quarantine him and limit his ability to do damage.
Lieberman is an independant. He can caucus with us if he likes, or he can caucus with the GOP or he can caucus. He isn’t a Dem and should have little to no influence and shouldn’t have any chairmanships or even committee assignments and he definitely shouldn’t have veto power over the Dem agenda. he is the independant elected senator from CT. He is entitled to his senate seat, but that’s it. There was no reason he should be treated as an important (esp. after supporting McCain in ’08)
Yes. I would much rather that handful of conserva-dems in their own little party where they would have little influence over the Democratic agenda and where they would yield very little power.
I would also like to see more third parties in general because the 2 party system we have now isn’t working all that great.
Edward G. Talbot
@Ruckus.
Thank,you sir!
Nothing wrong with ranting, though :)
Elie
@Lisa K.:
Totally agree, Lisa K.
sigh
Where the hell are we with this? This is the craziest period I have ever lived through with the left showing their behinds in this way.. I would have never thunk it before — never.
ChicagoTom
And yet the majority of polls show that the “libtard” position (wanting a public option) has majority support.
But go ahead and alienate the left wing of the party. We’ll see what happens in 2010 and beyond.
If you think Clintonian-style centrist triangulation is a winning strategy you are in for a rude awakening.
John S.
@Elie:
My comment was completely tongue-in-cheek.
I am well aware of what a fucking disaster a parliamentary democracy would be in this country. I just find it highly amusing that all the ideological purists – whether left or right – seem to be advocating for it, whether they realize it or not…
WE NEED MORE FACTIONS!
Yossarian
Has anyone bothered to inform the insurance companies that this is a giant win for them and that they should be happy? Because last I saw, companies like United were urging their employees to attend Tea Party events designed to block health care reform.
One anonymous employee sends an e-mail to Politico celebrating the death of the public option and now this whole thing is a giveaway to Big Insurance?
kay
@Makewi:
Fiscal conservatives are supporting Medicare Advantage? The biggest taxpayer rip-off I have ever encountered? All day yesterday I listened to the frauds on the Right defending this program that takes a 15% increase on Medicare and hands it to insurance companies. Democrats were desperately trying to cut this ridiculous beast, and drooling morons like McCain were blocking it.
Medicare Advantage. Dreamed up and put in place by the Great Minds of Conservatism. “It will drive down costs!” My. Ass. It’s a straight out gift from taxpayers to insurance donors and everyone knows it.
Why don’t you just knock young people down and hand their wallet to insurance companies? They’re the ones who are getting robbed by Karl Rove’s Medicare Advantage.
Makewi
@kay:
That was probably cathartic. Bitching about the other people always being the problem is like medicine for ego protection.
Now how about those fake congressional districts, that the fault of the conservatives too?
liberal
@Elie:
That’s just silly. You’re conflating Lieberman and conservative Democrats.
How many conservative Dems in the Senate campaigned for McCain?
The fact that the Dems didn’t cut his balls off after that act of treason is sickening.
Darkrose
@Cat: When Obama was talking about closing Gitmo, I remember the GOP running TV spots saying that “Obama is putting terrorists in your neighborhood OMG!” I remember some Democrats going along with it. How is it Obama’s fault that Gitmo’s still open, when Congress made it clear they wouldn’t go along?
Little Dreamer
@John S.:
WE NEED MORE FRACTIONS!
Fixed! Hehehe.
Elie
@ChicagoTom:
So, in your idea of how this would work, we would magically end up with a farther left dominated Democratic party so you could afford to flick off the conservative blue dogs, right? And how do we get to that world of fantasy because that is what that is.
We are currently in a center right nation, not center left. If you do not work to change it in to center left — again, at the grass roots constituency level and not up high in your demand land, we will be stuck center right. If you kick out the blue dogs the right wing will take over all the policy decisions. Is that what you want, really? We had that, remember?
I just dont get you folks. I think you are Republican trolls in drag or something…
John S.
The same thing that happens when you alienate all the other people who vote for your party and don’t identify themselves as a “strong Democrat”.
You win fuck all.
For related reading, see: Hoffman, Doug.
Thoroughly Pizzled
What I don’t understand is when Bill Clinton and especially Rahm Emanuel became the most evil things our political system has ever produced. This is an honest question: Why is Rahm Emanuel blamed for everything in the liberal blogosphere?
NobodySpecial
How about something simple?
How about the option for me, and people like me, not twentysomethings in college, not 55+, who work at shitty jobs and not make much money, have a shot at a plan that isn’t going to be something as horrid as a $10k deductible, which is practically worthless for a poor person – and oh yeah, you’d better buy it, or you’ll get a fine that you can’t pay either.
This bill from the Senate doesn’t have one.
So excuse us if we don’t go all woo-woo because the haves feel like they did something for the havenots, even though it’s an illusion.
GeneJockey
@Cat:
Cat, it seems to me that the problem of the detainees is very much one of being unable to UNshit the bed Bush made, and the Obama has had to lie in.
I’m very upset with the situation, because Bush’s flouting of the rule of law has placed us in this situation, where we are holding very bad people who would represent a continuing danger to us if released, but we can’t now try them because all the evidence is inadmissable.
So, do we let those people go? And if we did, would it be worth the loss of the White House in 2012 to, for example, Palin or Giuliani, who would likely do WORSE even than Bush?
Elie
@John S.:
got it. (I actually did get it but took the opportunity to expand on why we dont want it)
Thanks
Makewi
@kay:
Yeah, that problem with old people being unable to actually afford their prescriptions would have been solved better by holding rich people upside down until the money for drugs fell out of their pockets. Hey wait, why don’t we simply demand that the drug companies charge less?
Why do you hate the poor old people kay? Don’t you know that lives were being lost without that program?
cleek
but they would not yield less power.
the Snowes, Nelsons and Liebermen will be as powerful regardless of their party because they are the people who can be convinced to break left or right depending on the specifics of the legislation at hand. they are strong because they can give either side the numbers needed to get past the various procedural hurdles. call them whatever you like, but the people in the middle of the spectrum will matter so long as neither party has the numbers to get past 60 votes solely with the ideologically pure.
Little Dreamer
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
Because he’s a JOO.
SATSQ, next?
Ajay
@Noonan:
>As for reconciliation, I’ve always thought that was a liberal pipe dream.
What does this have to do with Liberalism? You have an opposition which does nothing but obstruct. This is what you do to get things done in atmosphere like this; liberal or not.
>Passing tax cuts through reconciliation is innocuous. >Nobody gives a shit if their taxes get lowered. But >passing health care through reconciliation would terrify half the country,
You think people are going to give a hoot about if its done thru reconciliation or not. 99% of them wont even know what that is. All that matters to them is the benefit that they get to see.
> embolden the right and turn every lobbyist and monied >special interest into a raving lunatic.
I dont think they can do any worse. It will be good if they can as more and more will see them as lunatics.
Yossarian
“This is an honest question: Why is Rahm Emanuel blamed for everything in the liberal blogosphere?”
Because he and Howard Dean once got into a shouting match over the 50 State Strategy. The same Howard Dean, God of All Progressives, who is now being utterly ignored by the Hamshers and Kos’ of the world when he says he likes this health care compromise.
No, I don’t get it either.
jl
“Now how about those fake congressional districts, that the fault of the conservatives too?”
No, that nonsense gimmick is the fault of Mr. Post-partisan. A few typos and clerical errors and the wingnuts have a bogus reason for more bad faith attacks.
Obama should have just designed a really effective stimulus policy, and let the fake good government bad faith artists howl.
And effective stimulus would have worked, ordinary voters would have known it worked, and rewarded good policy with votes during the next election.
My approach to the ‘fake Congressional districts’-gate would have been to never even suggest such an assinine waste of money as a real time reporting system, and I would have told people who cry babied about corruption to STFU until they actually went out and found some, without using doctored tapes and interviews.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@General Winfield Stuck:
I agree.
soonergrunt
@kay:
There. FIFY.
Justin
KOS is thinking about short yardage situations, Obama is thinking about the deep game and setting up his running backs for the touchdown. Meanwhile Hamsher is behind the backstop yelling at the ump to get his head out of his ass and call strikes, while taking her eye off the ball and losing site of the fact that Obama is managing his team effectively for the playoffs and drafting a 5 tool shortstop to shore up his infield for next season. Obama is scoring goals and making touchdowns while skating around the KOS’s and Hamshers of the world who can’t seem to get over the fact that the ice hasn’t been Zambonied while Obama carries the Ryder’s Cup around the clubhouse, while simultaneously playing 10th dimensional chess against 20 people at once.
I am sick and tired of these snipers yelling, “Balk!” at every supposed misstep by team Obama, only to later see that his grand strategy conceded the small tactical losses in order to win the war. Talk about cutting your nose to spite the face, these Kossacks can have the tea baggers while the adults take care of business and win the Big Game.
liberal
@Max:
I don’t have any disdain, especially since I never thought Obama was all that liberal to begin with (disclosure: gave quite a bit of $$ in the primary and general, and that was after looking up his Am for Dem Action score). But I do have puzzlement if someone doesn’t express either disappointment or outrage over Obama’s continuing of the big giveaway to Wall St, and his strange decision to get more involved in Afghanistan.
Lisa K.
@Elie:
It is complete and utter bullshit. I understand holding the president’s feet to the fire on important issues, but to conflate him with the Torturer-in-Chief and serial law breaker who preceded him is simply beyond the pale, and nearly Hannity-esque in it’s absurdity.
Yossarian
If they go into reconciliation, the Senate Parliamentarian likely as not hacks the living shit out of this bill, and some of the most important pieces of it never get passed.
You don’t like the bill now? Wait until it goes through the Byrd rule and gets turned into a whittled-down nub of a thing. Some victory.
Little Dreamer
@NobodySpecial:
Excuse me, but you’re out of line. You’re supposed to be working, not have enough money to buy big box computer items and discover the internet, and certainly your brain is overactive, because you aren’t supposed to be interested in politics.
Clearly, you’re only asking an intelligent question because you haven’t succumbed to overwork or fallen to the substandard intelligence that was supposed to be created by our public school system. The slave is breaking the chains of bondage!
Da Bomb
@General Winfield Stuck: As always,I agree General.
NobodySpecial
@Lisa K.:
Is it breaking the law if Obama’s lawyers are in court arguing the same thing?
General Winfield Stuck
@ChicagoTom:
So when will Kos start front paging Sarah Palin diaries. Be sure to let us know.
liberal
@Elie:
It’s not so obvious. Single payer polls extremely well, for example.
ChicagoTom
No we aren’t. Just because you’ve bought the BS being sold, that doesn’t make it so.
Most Americans if asked support liberal ideas/ideals.
The problem is that our “liberal” party isn’t really pushing a liberal agenda because that would hurt their campaign coffers and piss off the monied interests.
And I’m, supposed to sit here and pretend like that’s somehow an acceptable situation?
yes of course. Anyone who doesn’t accept centrism for the same of centrism is a troll.
Anyone who doesn’t just roll over and say “well we’re lucky we got anything at all” is just a fucking troll.
Instead of so called democrats asking why the small percentage of conservative dems are allowed to exert so much control over the party and it’s agenda, we get “democrats” chiding other democrats when they don’t accept shit sandwiches.
Instead of asking questions like “why did Bacucus start negotiation from a position that was already compromised” or “Why were single payer advocates not invited to attend the Baucus bill meetings” or “Why are we accepting a secret deal with Pharma to preserve their profits when they are a large part of the problem”…we get people saying “we should be cheering because after a year of struggle we got a bill that is a good building block for real reform in the next 5-10 years maybe”.
No thanks. I’d rather agitate to make my party better rather than to sit around and lie to myself about how they are doing the best they can when they clearly aren’t.
At some point, if you compromise your principles enough (or dilute your brand enough) the brand becomes worthless.
Shade Tail
Well, sure, Mr. Cole, and I agree. But you and I are easily in the top 5% of Americans when it comes to political engagement. The vast majority of the country simply do not pay as much attention as we do. They’re going to depend largely on how things are now, not on comparing that to how they used to be. And right now we have very high unemployment and no health care reform. That, as Kos says, is going to demoralize democratic voters; in fact, it already has.
What has Kos upset isn’t that he personally is being disappointed, it is that the democratic party isn’t trying to energize its base. Huge numbers of democrats, something like 50% of them, are saying that they either definitely won’t vote in 2010, or might not. And rather than try to energize them by actually pushing through the agenda they were elected for, the democrats are either allowing themselves to be stopped, or they are actively joining in the obstruction.
This isn’t rocket science. The democrats are taking their base for granted and assuming, incorrectly, that they can count on us to come out and vote for them regardless. Virginia’s 2009 governor’s election showed quite decisively what happens when the democrat in the race acts that arrogant towards the democratic base. Kos’ anger is over the facts that: 1) the democrats still haven’t learned that lesson; 2) unless they learn it fast, it is going to cost them big in 2010.
NobodySpecial
@Little Dreamer:
Yeah, my fault. I stole the computer from a church and leach internet from my rich neighbor down the block with a fuck of a lot of cords spliced together. Hopefully that puts me back in my place.
itsbenj
Oh please!
Way to have practically NO expectations, dude! This attitude is why we’re ending up with such inadequate legislation! Damn the personality cult around this guy is strong. 10% unemployment? Hey, he’ll get around to it. He can speak in complete sentences. Yay!
“Not half bad” is not nearly as good as millions and millions were hoping for. Yeah, sure, like any other politician, Obama way over-promised on the campaign trail. But his “tactics”, if you can even call it that, have been pretty pathetic and he seems to have no clout even within his own party. The leadership we were looking for seems largely absent. It’s a real problem.
jwb
@Justin: Four too many sports metaphors for me, but I appreciate the sentiment.
liberal
@Justin:
Uh, how is giving away massive amounts of money to Wall St, and sending tens of thousands more American soldiers to the pointless conflict in Afghanistan, “winning the war”?
danimal
The Democratic circular firing squad reappears.
Look, there are always going to be disappointments and anyone that thought strongly progressive health care changes were going to pass this Congress in a pristine form has been smoking the good stuff for too long. Usually, in politics, the best you can do is move the chains down the field.
If we get an improved health care system with some of the glaring holes filled and other holes taped together with duct tape and thread, then we keep moving forward and fill those holes next year. For goodness sake, this legislation has been stalled for decades, we can withstand showboating prima donna senators for a couple more weeks in order to help the millions of citizens that stand to benefit. Don’t give up so easy, folks. It’s not perfect, but it is achievable.
ChicagoTom
Yes, Kos is the problem.
Like I said…the party has a big tent except when it comes to liberals.
General Winfield Stuck proves my point for me. The disdain he has for people that want the liberal party to act like a liberal party is quite telling.
Apparently in some peoples world view the political spectrum only runs from extremely rabid right-wing to center right to center. Liberals are whiny retards who need to STFU and go along with whatever the handful of conservatives want.
That’s not a party I and most liberals want to be a part of.
jl
Sorry, I no longer buy the ‘deep-game’ and ‘n-dimensional chess’ argument any more. I did at one time but no longer.
Unless there is something about inscrutable long run brilliant strategy that includes losing a mess of seats in Congress in the midterms.
If Obama cannot get his base and sympathetic swing voters out next election, he is just a weak and limited leader. Period.
The evidence of trouble is clear for the next election. What is Obama doing about it? Nothing that I can see.
Darkrose
@liberal:
How was his decision on Afghanistan “strange”, when he made it crystal clear during the campaign that his biggest problem with the war in Iraq was that it diverted resources and attention from Afghanistan? I don’t agree with his decision, but I can’t be disappointed when he’s doing exactly what he said he would do.
itsbenj
Wow, these comments are full of dumb.
Lisa K.
@Shade Tail:
I think it is something of a fallacy that there was a big Democratic mandate. Democrats were not voted in overwhelming margins because the fruitcakes who voted for Bush the last two elections suddenly turned bright blue liberals. Democrats were voted in mostly because they weren’t Republicans. A big portion of those who poll independent now used to be Republican before the party went insane. It is not surprising that they are not especially on board with a lot of stuff they are seeing from the administration.
lol
The netroots is overwhelming white, male, college-educated and well-off; it’s demographically opposite to the actual Democratic base on almost every count.
When you’re really not at risk for true disaster, it’s a lot easier to scream for all or nothing. Check out the comments at DailyKos: A lot of “this doesn’t do anything for ME” going on.
The Netroots is strategically and tactically stupid. They didn’t learn anything from the Dean disaster in 2004 and the 2006 elections fooled them into thinking they had it figured out. The primaries and general election in 2008 pretty much disabused anyone of the notion that the bloggers are relevant in any particular fashion. Going all in on the “ROBUST PUBLIC OPTION” was just a continuance of it.
ruemara
@Elie:
For example, on a local level recently, we had some good progressives voted out of office in an off year election with low turn out. Come to find out, a key progressive constituency could have provided enough votes to get them in, but they voted on partner equality legislation only and did not vote for any of the progressive candidates. THAT is failed outreach and failed realization of connected dots. Hopefully, the democrats learn from that and the next election, those folks are engaged and brought into the process. Unfotunately, we have some conservative council people until that time. Fail!
This is why the left tends to lose. Because we don’t see the forest, just the tree, because we make the cause the celebrity and don’t see it as an element of governing. We show up to vote for saving trees and fail to vote for candidates that won’t see that tree as firewood or furniture. You think teabaggers and conservatives have that problem? They’re already using the tea party model to rally against climate change. They are all big picture douches. Hamsher and Kos are tied to a “public option” no matter how shitty it could be, because it’s close to “single payer”. I want “health insurance reform with a start on health care reform” because I could care less what they call it, I just want it done and done right. Call it a shit sandwich but it better not be shit. The weak PO that that nimrod Reid had in Senate was a sack of crap. This new one might just work to get us started towards real, enduring health insurance reform. If I get one more fund request from Hamsher, I’m gonna tell her to stuff it.
JMY
@Yossarian:
Why Howard Dean isn’t getting flack from the likes of Kos and others like Kos is mind-boggling given the fact that many wanted him to be Sec. of HHS. Yeah, yeah I know he is not the president, but he does have influence, and if he supports this way to health-care reform, then where is the “Howard Dean betrayed us” bandwagon? Won’t happen.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Why do all the good ideas come at the very end of the game?
I am going out to knock down some young people ….
Justin
@liberal
Clearly you are not a golfer.
ChicagoTom
Exactly.
If the dems and the minions around here think that a winning strategy is to ignore/alienate the base and go after centrists and ex-republicans, than the Dems are going to lose control very very fast.
We saw how well that strategy worked in the Virginia governors election where the Dem turnout was pathetically low because Deeds was busy moving to the right and not trying to energize his base.
The GOP base is energized right now. They see themselves winning the fight on HCR and they see their politicians doing what the base wants…opposing reform.
And most polling shows that the GOP are going to make some gains in 2010.
NR
You know, back when we had the debate over waterboarding a few years ago, the wingnut argument was that what we were doing wasn’t as bad as what terrorists do to their prisoners, so that made it okay. To that, some very intelligent people replied, the question isn’t are we as bad as the terrorists, it’s are we different enough?
Obviously, Obama is not as bad as Bush. But that’s not the question. The question is, is he different enough?
PanAmerican
Kos didn’t do much of anything. He let one of Jane’s minions (slinkerwink) carry the public option water on his site. Once the deal was cut he was free to vote his district.
Just politics.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
No, what’s telling is that you don’t get that the party is a complex coalition. There is a wide range of views and opinions and agendas.
Stuck has it right.
Jacob Davies
“there is no chance in hell I am going to be demoralized come November 2010”
The problem is that whether or not you personally are demoralized in November 2010, you need about 50 million other people to also not be demoralized, and if even 10 million of them are, you’re really screwed.
The extent to which 50 million people feel demoralized is not something that’s going to be determined by something either you or Kos says. It’s going to be determined by how effective Obama has been on certain issues of great importance to people, largely employment & the economy, wars, healthcare, and social justice. What matters is not the extent that you’re satisfied by the compromises that Obama has come to on those issues, but the extent that those 50 million people are satisfied. And what Kos is pointing out is that many of them currently aren’t satisfied, and won’t show up in 2010. Which is a bit of a problem if, like me, you want to have Democrats continuing to run government.
Cat
@kay:
The economy blogs I read fall into two camps. They think we’ve stopped the decline and are cautiously optimistic that way are in the trough and we should see some improvement soon or they think *one* months/quarters numbers could be the sign of the trough or just a statistical blip. The ‘turn the corner meme’ is the conventional wisdom inside the beltway narrative.
Elie
@ChicagoTom:
Please understand, I am not a centrist and don’t want a center right nation. I am leftist but also a pragmatist who deals in reality.
We are not where we want to be. True.
I do not reject what you say that we have not been able to take leftist policies to where we want, that we have not been able to raise the awareness and affiliation of most main stream Americans with the goals of the left and identify the Democrats with those goals.
Where we fully disagree however is that you seem to think we can demand that change from above. I believe that awareness and change has to be established from below at the base. That is takes work, not just banging keyboards and sending contributions alone. People have to link together outcomes, their relation to the good outcomes and their own self interest. Most folks in the US are still caught up in the notion that the corporist ideal is in their own self interest and they do not have the confidence to stake a new path.
I am on your side as an ideal. I am not on your side tactically and no, I don’t want to be yelled at by some guy posing as the purity police about how only he knows or cares about progressive principles.
I see way too many of you thinking in mirror image to the hard right purity police. All that will do is distract us from the job of ahem, making progress, working towards what we want — which is not to label and beat up the best administration in a long time with demands based in an ideal that is not yet reacheable…Y’all have no respect for that and you will not get my support for your screaming
danimal
@liberal: I agree with you about Wall Street. Half of the anger we see here would disappate if Obama had gotten ahead of the mob in reforming Wall St. I don’t get it, because both the politics and the policy seem to make financial reform a no-brainer. Gathering the pitchforks should have been a higher priority.
On Afghanistan, Obama has been pretty consistent for several years. He clearly campaigned on disengaging in Iraq in order to engage in Afghanistan. Not sure I agree entirely, but that’s been his policy since the campaign.
Little Dreamer
@ChicagoTom:
Really? I’m more liberal than I am centrist, and I don’t feel slighted in the least. Just because I’m willing to watch and wait and realize that Obama can’t just snap his fingers and order up a liberal agenda so I don’t feel the need to rant and scream doesn’t mean I don’t lean liberal, and also am member of this big tent thing he have going here.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, it happened over a long period of time, in bits and pieces by people who didn’t see the whole picture, and quite often two or more people had separate visions of the structures being built on each location. If you want it all and want it now (Daddy!), perhaps you need to go join a circus, it’s more of a reality than your vision.
Ann Rynd
@Little Dreamer: A Joo who only thinks about how he and his brother can make more money and who has no morals except when it comes to money and who played the negro into letting him run his office and oversee his bookkeeping so he could take over the money for himself and his brother. Obvious.
lol
@ChicagoTom:
Polls also show most people don’t know what the public option even is.
@Yossarian:
Another fine point that the idiots at DailyKos don’t grasp – reconciliation isn’t a magical wand that passes whatever you want with 50 votes. Bush used it for fairly straightforward tax cuts and not much else.
cleek
the party out of power is always energized. it’s so much more fun to attack than it is to defend. you can find a reason to attack everything, it’s often hard to defend anything.
the president’s party almost always loses seats in mid-term elections.
Shade Tail
@Lisa K.:
You apparently missed the fact that I was specifically writing about the democratic base, not the voting public as a whole. And either way, this is a fact:
The democrats campaigned on very specific ideas, most particularly health care reform and economic recovery, and got elected.
And a year after election day, what do people see? They see high unemployment and other continuing economic problems, while the democrats (who promised to address them) are stuck in a tug-of-war with themselves and are unable to deliver.
Like it or not, a large block of the democratic base have looked at that and decided there’s no point in voting for the democrats again; another large block is leaning that way. They’re not going to suddenly switch to the GOP, but they will stay home and not vote at all. Mid-term elections always see lower voter turn-out anyway, and more than one poll has shown that the democratic base is particularly demoralized.
Maude
@kay: In the past two week, 4 more detainees were released. One to Hungary, one to France and two to Italy.
These commenters that write that nonsense don’t know the facts.
Gitmo is quietly being resolved. Bush really screwed up and we know that it’s a legal nightmare.
The radio right is whining about the NYC trial. They whine about everything, the liars.
Lisa K.
@Little Dreamer:
Make that two of us.
Tsulagi
Good to see teabaggers and rump roasts can agree liberals are evildoers. Bipartisan baby steps. Cue Beck to deliver the tears.
Ssssshhh…don’t speak too loud. Commander EE is already alerting the RSSF troops the evildoers in the Senate still intend to kill black babies and sterilize Sarah Palin through their minions…
General Winfield Stuck
@ChicagoTom:
Dude, you are the one that showed up here all full of piss and vinegar with “John Fucking Cole and his minions of morons are going to call out Markos?”. So please don’t get all sensitive when receiving some tough love as a response, and words, in return.
I never said Kos was “the” problem, so don’t put words in my mouth, please. But your demonstration of haughty supremacy here today isn’t exactly constructive criticism now is it.
As Cole pointed out as have others, no one is completely satisfied with everything Obama is doing and has done to this point. But making claims of sellout and calling us idiots actually proves my point. Saying you are disappointed and why is not shunned here, usually. But going apeshit full Obama is a failure, usually is shunned, or at least snarked.
It is all liberal mud we wrestle in.
Yossarian
@JMY:
Oh, I couldn’t agree more. The irony is that I was never a huge Dean fan, and when he made that dumbassed comment about reform not being “real reform” unless a public option was included when his own damned presidential campaign never proposed a public option I utterly lost respect for him. But the Kossacks love the guy, so I thought his encouraging words on the new compromise would at least change a few minds. But that doesn’t seem to be happening.
Ultimately, for a lot of the left health care reform does not include a thing called a “public option.” Instead, a public option includes a thing called “health care reform.” It’s completely back-asswards.
And for the anti-mandate people– please explain to me how we get to universality, or anything CLOSE to universality, without a mandate. Obama’s dumbest decision in the primary was to attack Hillary for having a mandate, and his smartest decision as president (at least on this issue) was to realize he was wrong and universality doesn’t happen without a mandate.
ChicagoTom
How is that going to happen when the base is attacked by people that are supposed to be on our side for demanding more than the crumbs we are given?
I am on your side as an ideal. I am not on your side tactically and no, I don’t want to be yelled at by some guy posing as the purity police about how only he knows or cares about progressive principles.
One woman’s “purity police” is another mans “punishing bad behavior”.
If dems aren’t going to support a liberal agenda or work against factions hostile to that agenda I am not going to support Dems.
Liberals have been taken for granted for too long. And as long as liberals support Dems regardless of how they act that will continue.
I see way too many of you thinking in mirror image to the hard right purity police. All that will do is distract us from the job of ahem, making progress, working towards what we want—which is not to label and beat up the best administration in a long time with demands based in an ideal that is not yet reacheable…Y’all have no respect for that and you will not get my support for your screaming
And I see way too many of you refusing to do anything to make democrats act better.
Look at Arlen Specter. When he realized that he lost his base and couldn’t win a GOP primary he jumped to the Dems. Then Admiral Sestak decided to challenge him in the primary, and lo-and behold Specter has become a pretty strong advocate for the public option. That’s how it should be. Politicians should never be allowed to take their base for granted.
lol
@PanAmerican:
I keep wonder how relevant Jane Hamsher would be in the blogosphere if she didn’t have her boyfriend throwing money around it.
John S.
Wow, a whole YEAR?!
It took 8 years to build up enough speed to run this country into a fucking ditch, and good. If only voters had the patience for getting us OUT of that ditch that they seemed to have while were getting INTO the ditch.
I guess we’ll all just curse Obama’s name and blame the Democrats for not showering us with the ponies we were all expecting. That will surely help.
Lisa K.
@Shade Tail:
And again: Got elected because they were not George Bush.
I think you are wrong myself, but of course that is only MO. Democrats, in general, approve of the president at over 80%. Independents-you know, the ones that the press is always talking about as the tedious swing voters-not so much.
I don’t see “the base” as purely the Kos and FDL contingent. Yes, they might be pissed because all of a sudden blue candy isn’t falling out of the sky. But IF the economy has actually improved somewhat and IF companies are hiring again in October of 2010, this whole conversation is going to be for naught. That is what people are going to vote on this time around.
Cat
@Yossarian:
It would never occur to Big Insurance/Pharma to STFU and act all unhappy about getting what they want to quell public outrage, amirite?
What does your common sense say about everyone 55+in a gov’t run program while everyone under 55 has to buy private insurance.
If you were running a for profit insurance company which group would you rather have? The under 55 or the over 55?
I think people are right to be skeptical that the proposed plan could turn into a giant giveaway because the promise of reform later, when its more politically feasible, is never delivered.
R-Jud
@John S.:
About 40 years, I’d say. From about 1968 onward. Like that guy in the Hemingway novel says, it happened two ways: gradually, and then suddenly.
One year of Liberal Black Jesus in office isn’t going to change that. One year of Barack Obama sure won’t, either.
Little Dreamer
@Lisa K.:
You know what’s funny Lisa? Recently I went to the DMV to change over my driver’s license (being that I came from FL to AZ meant I could legally drive on a FL license for the last almost 3 years, but my FL license was about to expire) and I decided at that time to rejoin the Democratic party through motor voter registration (I changed over to an Independent after Nancy Pelosi became speaker because I hated the way that whole thing went down – the “pro-feminist” spectacle of it all – and I’m female).
So, for all the talk here about Democrats being so spectacularly demoralized, I find it absolutely hilarious that I chose this time to come back into the fold myself.
John S.
But they do. And anyone that believes Specter’s u-turn is anything other than his survival instinct is a giant fucking moron. Arlen doesn’t support the public option because of the pressure from Sestak, he supports it because he wants to stay in office and survive a Democratic primary.
If he gets re-elected, he will spend the next 5 years ignoring the people that elected him…until it’s time to get elected again.
That’s just how politicians roll.
Shade Tail
@John S.:
If ‘ifs’ and ‘ands’ were pots and pans, the universe would be a kitchen. You have to deal with the voters the way they are, not the way you want them to be.
Polls have shown that they didn’t expect fast miracle fixes. But they did expect a democratic party that didn’t play silly-ass games like this. Sneering at them for not being “patient” basically ignores reality.
Lisa K.
@Little Dreamer:
You mutant traitor to the left wing cause, you…
kindness
Here’s where I agree with Markos & with you John:
Getting a healthcare bill is paramount. (you)
Getting a healthcare bill that actually pushes premiums lower, (can) covers most Americans, and eliminates pre-existing conditions will help grow the Progressive Movement and it’s Democratic Party Supporters. (Kos)
My fear right now is that this bill is toothless, won’t cover most people and forces people to buy a health care policy. Forcing a healthy (& especially young) populace to buy a policy where they don’t get any benefit from this bill will push many healthy ( & young) voters to vote republican. It will kick us progressives in the ass unless it can be easily demonstrated to be better for EVERYBODY, not just those who are over 55.
Cat
@Darkrose:
Gitmo is not just about the prison, but the policys of how people got there, why they stayed there, what happened to them while they are there, and what happens to them next.
Just turning the lights out at Gitmo and moving the detainees elsewhere is just part of the Gitmo issue that Obama is responsible for as head of the Executive.
maus
Let’s rest on our laurels and waste the intertia we’ve built up to embrace the status quo that’s been so built up over the last 8 years instead of thinking of the future.
Let’s also give in to the teabaggers who are recasting a center-slightly right president as a communist and accept his centrism as progressive.
NobodySpecial
You know, for all those people counseling patience, I can only suggest maybe a quick reading of ‘Letter From The Birmingham Jail”.
John S.
@R-Jud:
I can totally agree with that.
The United States is pretty fucking huge, so it takes a lot to get it moving. The acceleration may have begun 40 years ago, but we really saw the speed pick up in the last decade once we had some of that inertia behind us.
The same people that are mad about Obama not fixing everything already probably curse the engineers who drive trains for not stopping for every cow that wanders onto the tracks.
It takes a LOT to slow down a speeding train, and even more to get it to change the direction it’s moving in.
ChicagoTom
I’m not sensitive at all. Your so called “tough love” is nothing but a bunch of name calling. You haven’t once responded to substantive points other than to claim that liberals aren’t as important as they think they are. Like I said before, let’s see how far the Dems get by alienating liberals.
I’m not going to sit here and let dickheads like you call out the people who have been fighting to get democrats elected, not for the sake of having dems in office, but because we want to make the country better.
You and your ilk may be content with merely not having the other party in power, but that’s not why we donated our money and our time etc. to getting democrats elected. We did so in order to see change…real change…dramatic change.
Not incremental marginal change that may or may not lead to more change down the road.
Pot meet kettle.
Your words:
You and the other fool tribesman at the libtard dogma fever swamps do not have the power and numbers you think you have. You have big mouths and make all kinds of holler and empty threats, but in the end, are little fishes who have gone quite insane.
You are an idiot. What Kos, and Jane and their stupid minions are are a fraction of the base, and further defined as part of an activist base clammering that they are “progressives” but don’t accept progress and are not that
When it comes to “haughty supremacy” — well you seem to be an expert.
And yes I’ve been very constructive. I don’t see what’s wrong with agitating for not accepting shit sandwiches and not being content with the fact that “at least bush and the GOP isn’t in control” and “we are marginally better than the other part”. I want the bar set higher with real goals to shoot for, not so low just so you can claim you’ve surpassed expectations.
Cat
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
Because nobody wants to blame Obama for the things Rahm does even though Obama picked Rahm. Obama is helpless to stop President Rahm from breaking all of the liberals hearts.
Elie
@ChicagoTom:
Tom, I am done talking with you. I don’t know if you don’t read well and therefore don’t/can’t understand my point or what. You keep talking about the old, top down “make the democrats act better” as in yell at the ones in office. I will agree that works sometimes if you are yelling at the guy or gal you put into office. It does not work, cannot work if you are yelling at some other guy who you cannot or did not elect and have no means to instill fear into them that you could take em out of office. Get that?
I keep saying, endlessly, boringly, grassroots, grassroots, grassroots. Why,why,why? Cause that is where the fix to this ultimately resides. Not at Kos, not at Hamsher, not here on B-J either — unless we go out and do the leg work to get it done. Ya know, the showing up at the freakin boring Democratic organizational meetings out in buttfuck wherever to convince folks to run good candidates. To support locals in standing up for themselves in public hearings supporting mental health care, access to good clinics and fighting all the assholes running on the right against our good progressives. It means supporting by going to endless hearings on the things you want and to lobby your congresspersons and other elected officicials over and over by letter writing, calling and showing up at their town halls to read them the riot act when necessary. Its also giving them money but threatenning to withold it too but you have to give it to withhold it…
Its fucking hard ongoing work. My thinking is that successfully doing HCR is working towards that progressive majority in the future!
So stop with the stupid, please. Read my/our comments and be intellectually honest enough to acknowledge facts from your spin.
soonergrunt
@ChicagoTom:
THIS.
It’s not Obama that disappointed or upset me here, although he pretty plainly could’ve done more to move the window. It’s Reid and the rest of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate. It’s the party for not actually enforcing party discipline. This is a signature Democratic principle, and to have Democrats pissing all over it, even when polling in their own states like Arkansas and Nebraska supports it means that they are off the reservation and the party isn’t doing anything about it.
So no money to the DSCC, which will only go to those who hurt us. No money to any Senator who gave money to the DSCC last election cycle. My donations will only go to the primary opponents of these people, and to the Democrats running against Republican Senators. It aint much. A thousand bucks total, give or take. Probably won’t even be missed in this day and age. But I will not participate in evil.
Shade Tail
@Lisa K.:
That is not why the democratic base voted for them. Are you incapable of understanding that? Or are you still missing the fact that I am talking about just them and not all voters?
You think that, do you? The problem is, there are numbers about that, and data don’t really care about what people think. See here, and scroll about 2/3s of the way down.
Way to replace my argument with an over-simplified strawman and argue against that instead. I think I’ll ignore you now.
Da Bomb
@NobodySpecial: Please do not interject MLK into this argument.
cleek
“ObamaCare does nothing for YOU!” is going to be a favorite GOP attack, in 2010.
sure, it will mean that they will be exposed as hypocrites for their 12 months of screaming about how “ObamaCare” was going to be so far-reaching and radical that it will destroy the country, but hypocrisy is a very common minor sin, these days.
JMY
@Yossarian:
I was never a huge Dean supporter either, even though I believe he would have been a good president and good Sec. of HHS. But Kos probably won’t say a damn thing about Dean supporting this compromise, when he was a huge supporter of Dean and the 50-State strategy, which gave us centrist-Democrats. So what did he expect?
Yossarian
@Cat:
“It would never occur to Big Insurance/Pharma to STFU and act all unhappy about getting what they want to quell public outrage, amirite?”
Wait, so now it’s the insurance companies that are playing eleven-dimensional chess? And you should make up your mind– either they are honestly supporting health care reform (the Politico e-mail) or they are secretly supporting it. They can’t be doing both.
As for my common sense, it tells me that the ultimate emotional state of insurance company CEOs is not even slightly germane to my feelings on health care reform. If this bill ends up helping people, who the fuck cares if the insurance companies are residual beneficiaries? Now, of course we can argue over whether it’s helping people, but I think the evidence is pretty overwhelmingly on my side that it would. If the CEO of Kaiser Permanente wants to do a happy dance, that’s fine with me, because my nearly-bankrupt cousin with a severely hemophiliac seven-year old son will be doing one too if this bill passes.
harlana pepper
Angus God: who’s whining now? people who have done their part have a right to bitch and push for the best, if you’re happy with the fruits of your activism, fine, not everyone is, so fuck you too
Adrienne
@Elie: First, this bill is not “giving” coverage to anyone. It’s not as if this bill is going to wave a magic wand and BOOM, people are covered.
Second, my ego has nothing to do with this. My mother actually DIED for lack of healthcare and I myself have laid in a hospital bed in intense pain and could have died while they verified my insurance coverage, so don’t give me that shit. I have skin in the game.
Third, because of these things, I’m not inclined to take *anything* regardless of how bad it is, just to be able to say we did *something* any more than I am inclined to take dog shit, slap a bow on it and call it a Christmas present – which is basically what we’re being asked to do.
Let’s go over what this bill does, shall we?
This bill is FORCING people to BUY coverage (some subsidized, some not) from the same insurance companies who are currently raping us but:
– WITHOUT creating any meaningful competition to such insurance companies. There is a “trigger” but I’m sure that the standards they must meet in order to NOT trigger will be sufficiently watered down such that the insurance companies will be able to barely meet it and avoid triggering while still maintaining their record profits.
– WITHOUT placing any meaningful regulations on the insurance companies. They still have anti-trust exemption, meaning they can basically do whatever the hell they want.
– ALLOWING insurance companies to dump their most expensive demo into “buy in” medicare.
– WITHOUT any meaningful cost controls.
– WITHOUT any dealing with the implications of the accelerating breakdown of the employer-based health care system.
Yes, it lets people 55-64 buy into Medicare, but I don’t think helping that demo is enough to warrant screwing over the rest of us.
John S.
Really? Then what fucking realm of fantasy did those people suddenly move into now that they’re furious everything hasn’t been fixed in a year?
If people understood how the Democratic party operates and how their coalition is built, they wouldn’t be so surprised by “silly-ass games like this”.
Anyone who is surprised by what is happening AND thought something more would happen by this point in time given the circumstances is ignoring reality.
And I will sneer at people who live in fantasyland all I damn well please, because usually there isn’t much else you can do with them.
Cat
@GeneJockey:
If keeping power is worth more to you then following the rule of law how are you better then Bush?
NobodySpecial
@Da Bomb:
Why not? Universal Health Care has been on Democrats’ radar now for 60 years. AFAIC, King’s statement on ‘Wait’ applies just as well there as with any other issue of fairness.
Martin
@Kristine:
It’s gone perfectly well. Thanks to 60 in the Senate (good or bad as they may be) we’re only negotiating with Democrats and not Republicans.
Anyone who think this process would have gone more smoothly with having to get Republicans on board is insane. We wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are today even if we hadn’t gotten Franken. Yeah, Lieberman is a douche, but he’ll cave because Reid has a lot more to negotiate than he would with a Republican. Lieberman doesn’t want a Democratic opponent. He knows he’s fucked if a Dem runs there. He’s going to hold out until he gets his (perceived) free re-election.
John S.
Really? Then what fucking realm of fantasy did those people suddenly move into now that they’re furious everything hasn’t been fixed in a year?
If people understood how the Democratic party operates and how their coalition is built, they wouldn’t be so surprised by “silly-ass games like this”. Anyone who is surprised by what is happening AND thought something more would happen by this point in time given the circumstances is ignoring reality.
And I will sneer at people who live in fantasyland all I damn well please, because usually there isn’t much else you can do with them.
See also: Teabaggers, Sarah Palin
Lisa K.
@JMY:
Thank you.
That’s just it. People can piss on Ben Nelson all they want-and believe me, I have done my share of it-but in Nebraska, it is either Nelson or an ( R ). Same with Arkansas.
You have to dance with those that brung you, at least for now.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Sorry, no sale. I don’t agree that the “liberal position” is get the hell out. Nor even that any group of liberals would be able to agree on what that even means.
NobodySpecial
@soonergrunt:
Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.
I’ve sent back every single mailing from the DSCC with no money, but a note: My money is in the same place my health care is.
maus
They’ll complain that it’s a waste of money, which it will be, because the current incarnation(s) seem to be a gift to the insurance/hospital industry.
The GOP will win on that unless Reid and the rest of the dems grow a spine.
Wile E. Quixote
@Justin
Justin, take your stupid sports metaphors, fold them until they are all sharp edges and pointy corners and shove them up your ass. Seriously, Justin, when you spout ridiculous nonsense like this you’re being every bit as stupid as John Hinderaker was when he was telling everyone what a genius George W. Bush was. What touchdowns and goals has President Obama scored? He’s handed out billions to Wall Street, is getting us further involved in Afghanistan and has shown absolutely no leadership on HCR. Sure, he’s done a few fairly minor things, such as the transparency initiatives, and prohibiting lobbyists from serving on government advisory committees, but, to use another one of those stupid fucking sports metaphors that so many fucking retards here are enamored of, that’s the equivalent of changing the color of the team’s uniform, or the flavor of Gatorade in the cooler.
Barack Obama is lucky that Lyndon Baines Johnson didn’t approach civil rights with the same dilatory and half assed approach he’s shown to HCR, reforming Wall Street or getting us out of the Middle East clusterfuck, if he had Barack Obama wouldn’t be President Obama, in fact he probably wouldn’t be eligible to vote.
Shade Tail
@John S.:
OK, you clearly didn’t read a single word I wrote before you replied to it. Thanks for clearing that up.
Yeah, sure. Letting the unpopular minority GOP run rough-shod over the agenda they were promised and voted for is absolutely what they should have expected. No surprise there.
Sentient Puddle
@ChicagoTom:
If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier.
Barbara
I removed DK from my favorites list because I got so tired of the tenor of the debate. Kos is usually a tactician, but then, occasionally, throws a tantrum like this.
A lot of the “experts” on health care at DK don’t even really understand how the industry works and have become fixated on a simple stupid version of good and evil without understanding what it is that they would be getting (e.g. “public option”). They are now more about their own wishes and desires and validating themselves as the new “base” who must be listened to than they are about the issue of health care.
I usually come away believing that they just wanted to substitute one make believe cartoon character for another.
maus
It’s the liberal position, not the Dem position.
Da Bomb
@NobodySpecial: Whatever…
liberal
@Darkrose:
Strange, because every rational observer agrees it’s pointless.
Just because Obama said something during the campaign doesn’t mean he has to follow it.
Bush didn’t follow up on his claimed disdain for nation building, did he?
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@harlana pepper:
People have a right to bitch, but stating that they contributed x dollars and therefore … blah blah blah, bullshit.
Their dollars bought them nothing but an election outcome, not policies, and not actions, or timetables. Fuck them.
Shade Tail
@Lisa K.:
That is not why the democratic base voted for them. Perhaps you still miss the fact that I am talking about just them and not all voters?
You think that, do you? The problem is, there are numbers about that, and data don’t really care about what people think. See here, and scroll about 2/3s of the way down.
Way to replace my argument with an over-simplified strawman and argue against that instead. I think I’ll ignore you now.
liberal
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
You might not agree, in which case you’d be wrong.
Cat
@NobodySpecial:
A re-education councilor has been dispatched to your location, please wait at your current location citizen for your own safety.
cleek
yeah, well…
General Winfield Stuck
@ChicagoTom:
More like turnabout is fair play. A little of your own medicine. By all means, leave the dem party and start a new one, or whatever. You can be book end to the Tea Bagger Party and rumble in the streets. You are not as important as you think, and neither is Kos. So have at it, maybe Doug Hoffman will switch sides and give it a go for your new team. The rest of us will be true progressives and fight on that battlefield, the real one.
I tried to be conciliatory, at least a little. Go forth and wank some more.
scarshapedstar
Pre-reform:
I get socialized medicine in 2050.
Post-reform:
I get socialized medicine in 2040.
Well, that vote was sure worth it! I get to tell Blue Cross’s CEO to shove his bonus up his ass in only 31 years!
liberal
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
And when it comes time for the next election?
I’ll certainly give liberal Democrats money. In Obama’s case, when they solicit, I’ll tell them they can get it from Goldman Sachs.
ChicagoTom
I agree with you. Of course it’s his survival instinct. But that’s the whole point. Dems should feel that they need to act like Dems in order to survive. Every politician should feel the heat when they cross the base.
And Pressure from Sestak and surving a primary are one and the same. Those things go hand in hand.
I don’t care why he supports a public option, just that he does. And he does because he wants to survive a Dem primary AND because he has a primary opponent that is pushing him to the left.
That’s how the system is supposed to work. Politicians are supposed to be worried about pissing off their constituents.
How do you know that? Can you see the future?
Every single politician that gets elected has that same risk — that once elected they might not live up to their promises. So what’s your point, exactly?
At least specter is saying the right things (more than I can say for Nelson or Lieberman or Landrieu or Conrad) and he is out there publicly supporting the liberal position. I’m happy about that and I’m not going to attack him for what he may or may not do post election.
Da Bomb
@maus: There isn’t a final bill. So which reincarnation are you speaking of?
Shade Tail
@Lisa K.:
That is not why the democratic base voted for them. Perhaps you still miss the fact that I am talking about just them and not all voters?
You think that, do you? The problem is, there are numbers about that, and data don’t really care about what people think. See here, and scroll about 2/3s of the way down.
Way to replace my argument with a vastly over-simplified strawman and argue against that instead.
Yossarian
I’m a liberal, and I don’t support “get the hell out of Afghanistan.”
Do I have to turn in my card somewhere?
Da Bomb
@liberal: Bullshit.
harlana pepper
for the life of me, I cannot understand such intolerance by some here for progressives being less than satisfied with what has happened with this whole health care “debate” which did not even allow single-payer supporters to the table. constructive criticism and agitation is part of the process of winning REAL progress, rolling over is not – and it is especially not constructive to rip your leftists brothers and sisters b/c they don’t fall in line the way you want them to, that is the antithesis of their job
John S.
Allow me to sneer at you for living in fantasyland.
The AGENDA was not compromised by the Republicans – that’s just the crap the DNC sends out to morons like you when they’re trying to deflect the blame from where it belongs.
The glorious liberal agenda you seem to think everyone was elected to office to support was actually derailed by DEMOCRATS because the Democratic majority does not consist of politicians who march in lock-step with each other like Republicans do.
Anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex fully expected this and was braced for it. There’s a reason why the metaphor “herding cats” comes up so often. Not that you would have heard of any of this over there in fantasyland…
Wile E. Quixote
@John S.
Not me, especially if the cow is Michael Steele.
No, the people who are mad about Obama aren’t mad at him for not fixing everything, we’re just mad because he’s doesn’t seem to be trying to fix anything and when we bring this up we get told, “hey, at least he’s not as bad as the last guy who was driving the train, or the bozo that almost ended up with the engineer’s job and the bozo assistant he hired.”
Lisa K.
@Wile E. Quixote:
And *I’m* just so glad we are all on the same team…
liberal
@Wile E. Quixote:
FTW.
Though while the stuff about civil rights is totally spot-on, the Middle East clusterfuck reference is completely wrong—Obama is definitely following LBJ’s pattern on that one.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Chicago Tom
Of course the political spectrum includes the leftiest of left-wingers. But at the end of the day, 1) You are outnumbered by people who consider even modest HCR a major step forward 2) you’re fickle. One day Howard Dean is the Progressive Oracle and the next day you’re giving his healthcare endorsement the mute button and 3) you accuse everyone else of persecution when you’re the ones conducting purity tests.
You’re never going to be satisfied with the slow grind of political sausage making. We get it. Maybe one day the demographics of this country will change to the point where these ugly fits and starts will vanish from the American landscape. We’ll just re-elect Howard Zinn’s Brain ever four years and clone Senators from Paul Wellstone’s DNA. But until then you can do what’s necessary to exercise power, or not.
Martin
@Adrienne:
The insurance companies are not raping you on costs. Maybe on lack of coverage, but not on costs. The doctors, pharma, equipment providers, excess testing, etc. are where all the costs are. You can bang on insurers all day long and it won’t change how much that MRI costs.
You’ll never get meaningful competition to insurers. A public option wouldn’t either. It’s not the anti-trust exemption that protects them, it’s the balkanized state regs and the fact that care is geographically tied. If a California hospital is cheaper than a Florida one, it doesn’t help Florida residents and the insurance companies can’t do a thing about that, and the vast differences in insurance laws and regulations from state to state make it incredibly expensive for an insurer to jump the state line. If we yanked down the state insurance regulation, that’d do far more than any other effort to get competition. Without that, it’s a fools errand to even try.
Fixing rescission and who can be denied insurance is part of the reforms. You’re not reading far enough, or you’re listening to the wrong people.
Cost controls is precisely what the Senate is working on, yet the left keeps shitting on them because they aren’t expanding coverage rather than cutting costs. The only way to do both is single payer, and that’s just not in the cards. We either get a cheaper health care system that will be cheaper for people and companies (and the government) to buy into or we get the same expensive system with mandates for people to buy in that they can’t afford. Pick one. I know you don’t want to, but that’s the reality of the current situation. If you want employer-based insurance to come back, you have to fix costs first. That’s what the Senate is doing and from the sounds of it, they’re trading off *more* cost adjustments for the public option. It’s a good trade. We should be happy with that because it makes universal coverage or even single payer a possibility.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@liberal:
Bullshit. There is no viable “position” called Get The Hell Out. It doesn’t even translate into any definable set of actions, goals … doesn’t mesh with any other strategies.
It might be a wish, but it’s based magical thinking. There is no such option.
What you are saying is the same as saying that the “liberal position” is that we should have an extra $10k in our bank accounts. Who would say no to that? But it’s meaningless.
I’ve been a liberal longer than just about anyone here, and I am probably the most liberal (policy wise) person here, and I have no such position, nor do I know anyone who does.
What’s more, Obama did not campaign on anything even remotely like “get the hell out” of Afghanistan. Did all the liberals vote for him expecting that he would?
Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.
Little Dreamer
@Barbara:
I’ve got a low five digits UID myself and I haven’t signed into it in years. I got tired of the echo chamber there. I come here almost daily.
John S.
No, ChicagoTom — I can see the fucking PAST. There’s a reason why “Spectering” is a verb.
Well that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy… A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.
NobodySpecial
@Yossarian:
Just leave it with me. The re-education counselor’s coming for me, I’ll just give it to him.
liberal
@Da Bomb:
Do you mean that
(a) you’re embarassing yourself in a public forum by claiming there’s something to be accomplished by pissing more blood and money away in Afg, or (b) that Obama can never ever ever go back on a campaign promise.
Massive fail.
Yossarian
Sorry, harlana, no dice. Progressives don’t get to play the “don’t say mean things about me” card right after they’ve finished ripping other progressives up to and including the president for being “spineless,” “craven,” “sell-outs,” “corporate whores,” “snivelers,” “wishy-washy post-partisans,” “traitors,” “idiots,” or whatever other terminology Kos, Hamsher, and assorted commenters feel like throwing out because Issue X isn’t sufficiently untarnished by the messiness of political compromise.
Mike
Kids, kids, kids!
Lot’s of good points being made on this thread. (Not you BoB/Makewi)
IMO, we need both the bomb throwers and the moderates to move
the progressive movement forward. But human evolution is a long
and drawn out process. The day to day political battles move
with lightning speed compared to real change in the hearts and minds
of the people, which is where true progress ultimately lies.
The politicians are always years behind the curve. I believe we need to be
thinking beyond Obama, even beyond our own lifetimes. I’m 67 years old,
and in my lifetime I’ve seen 50 tons of political BS for every ounce of real
progress, but that progress has been made (slowly) nonetheless and is taken
for granted today.
I applaud you all, Kos and Cole and Sully and Jane and Greenwald and Aravosis and, frankly, anyone who can be conceivably placed somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum. You are all valuable and your input is needed in these troubled times.
scarshapedstar
BTW, Kos is absolutely right. There may be a metric ton of logical reasons why Obama isn’t so bad. This may be the very best he could have done.
But the Democrats will lose in 2010 and 2012 if this is all they have to offer. As soon as it passes, the media refrain will be “Socialized Medicine, Day 1: Are you covered?”
Yes, I know that’s unfair. WELCOME TO 1992, MOTHERFUCKERS! I do think the Democratic Party would be an infinitely stronger position if they’d listened to the base instead of the Beltway. Oh well, too bad, better luck next generation. I guess they can try to pass additional reforms after the first wave, that’s really their only hope, and I hope they realize this. If not, get ready for a rousing chorus of “Nobody could have anticipated…” and 8 years of Palin.
JMY
@ Lisa K.:
And we liberals can be critical of Obama all we want because it is necessary and warranted to keep our elected officials honest. BUT, stop being hypocrites. To me Kos only supported the 50-State strategy to get Republicans out of office and change red states into blue states in hopes that they would support liberal ideas, when he knew damn well that that wasn’t going to happen. How do you expect a Democrat from a conservative area to support certain liberal positions? Some politicians are always going to do what their constituencies want. Why do you think Lincoln doesn’t want to support HCR w/ a PO? If she does, it’s her ass in Arkansas and it’s already on the line. Granted these people may not know what is best for them. But the fact of the matter is I think it is hysterical for him to be complaining, when he had to know that this would happen having a party that included centrists. The 50-State strategy worked to get Dems elected, but that didn’t mean it would work to pass legislation.
Little Dreamer
@Shawn in ShowMe:
Bingo!
Cat
@danimal:
As a denizen of CT my wife called Obamas pro wall street positions due to his first stop in CT being greenwich/stamford area.
ChicagoTom
What turnabout do you speak of? You are the ones pissed because liberals aren’t worshiping this boondoggle compromise. And when liberals
Yes you were quite conciliatory after calling me an idiot and telling me how unimportant I am and how you don’t need people like me in the party. And now you want some kind of kudos because after you were a dick you took a less dickish tone? Go fuck yourself.
I wont leave the party…just stay home when the dem I can vote for doesn’t act right. I will still send money to liberal democrats, and to primary opponents of conservative ones.
And good luck winning elections by telling the base to fuck themselves and how they aren’t needed. That will go a long way in keeping the majorities.
liberal
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Are you really of such low intelligence as to have written something like that?
LOL!
I guess some people just have odd, nearly sexual pleasure in making fools of themselves in public forums.
Shade Tail
@John S.:
Sneer all you want. I’m laughing back in your face.
And I didn’t say that it was, oh juvenile sneerer. I specifically wrote that the democrats are letting the GOP run rough-shod over it, which means I’m blaming *them*, not the GOP.
Come back to the discussion when you learn how to read.
…expects promises made to be kept and reacts appropriately when that doesn’t happen. By not acting appropriately, you are making yourself part of the problem.
Come back to the discussion when you learn how to be part of the solution.
John S.
I don’t think you speak for all the people mad at Obama, because personally, I think you’re in the minority.
Look, I’m not thrilled with a lot of moves that Obama has made, and I’m not content to hang onto “well it could have been worse”. But seriously, what the fuck would you have Obama do? He is not the King, and he only has so much power given the structure of our government.
I think the sentiment that he isn’t doing anything comes from the concept that SOMEHOW Obama was supposed to be bizzaro-Bush. That somehow, he would ram through whatever the fuck he wants and ignore congress and break the law — but see, it would be okay because he’d be doing the RIGHT things!
That’s not how it works.
liberal
@scarshapedstar:
That’s not so obvious. The Republicans seem to be running off a cliff.
Hard to say, really.
Sentient Puddle
@ChicagoTom:
GREEN BALLOONS. GREEN FUCKING BALLOONS.
Da Bomb
@liberal: Actually, you have been spouting massive fail and strawmen, since you decided to spread you idiocy ad nasueam on this site.
So yeah, I am calling BULLSHIT!
Elie
@Adrienne:
I am not sure I understand your first comment. The bill, the one in negotiation, does provide for coverage to people. You are right, there is no magic boom, and people have coverage. It will have to be implemented over an x period of time to get the administrative and structural things in place to make sure that 35 million people can enter the system and get care. You on board with that process?/ Do you know we have to assure enough physicians and other care givers? That has to be ramped up — I know boring process but necessary. Oh, you didnt know that? Or is it you just didnt think about that practical problem?
I am sorry for your health care misfortunes and for those of your family. It is a mystery to me that you would therefore think allowing that to continue for others is desirable over a bill that would definitely provide for more people getting care.
It will take a while to iron out the details of implementing this complex change — something that few of the critics have been able to apparently understand. The bill, which will be more general in wording, will have to be implemented in the specifics through, ahem regulation…that is where the details will have to be worked out. Y’all know about how bill becomes law and then how law becomes regulation and then reality? No? Please read up. That is how the many laundry list details about regulating the insurance companies that you list will have to be addressed — not now in the wording of this bill. Truly, the detail in that regulation will be very very intense and it is not appropriate nor would it ever be in this bill. Read up. Learn. Like how would everyone be covered if there wasnt a mandate for everyone to be covered? Do you get that?
liberal
@John S.:
Uh, not have hired a Wall St whore like Geithner for Sec Treas?
harlana pepper
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: Lots of people also contributed time & sweat and invested a lot of passion and personal energy. I was not one of them since I did not support Obama in the primary and had no $ before and during the presidential race. That said, I have yet to ever rip on the man, he is the best we have for now and a huge improvement on what we had. The fact that some of his supporters are disenchanted, however, is perfectly understandable to me.
Blue Raven
And I keep suspecting the concern trolls haven’t yet noted that Barack Obama is not being played by Morgan Freeman.
mcc
Some responses.
So this scares the shit out of me, but I just don’t see complaints about it as credible coming from the netroots. The mandate has been in there since 2007, it was a fundamental point of disagreement during the presidential campaign. The institutional netroots, people like Kos, didn’t care. If anything the lefty blogosphere’s collective “front pagers” supported the mandate, Obama’s health care plan was derided as less liberal than Edwards’ or Clinton’s because it lacked a mandate at that time. As recently as May I saw A-list “progressive” bloggers praising the mandate. At that time, the mandate was seen as a good thing because it was seen as a way to force people to buy into the public option.
It was only once the public option started to seem in doubt that you started seeing people realize the mandate is sort of horrific– apparently forcing people to buy health insurance they can’t afford is evil if the money is going to a private corporation and good if the money is going to a government entity. (Personally I think the mandate cements the need for a public option, because the public option is a government guarantee there will be at least one acceptable health care plan to buy– a guarantee I think the government is morally obligated to make if it’s going to mandate health insurance be bought. But this way of looking it is predicated on the notion of the mandate being an inherently bad thing, it’s incompatible with believing the mandate becomes suddenly good once the public option is put back in. This isn’t the argument I see being made.)
If there was any way, any way to get the mandate out of the bill I’d drop everything and work on that. I’ve been flogging this for like two years. But I don’t see any movement at all being made to get the mandate out, and I don’t see how to credibly start one at this very late date. The mandate only seems to appear in the online debate insofar as it’s a way for people who didn’t get their pony to denounce the bill as a whole. Kos or whoever isn’t going to lead a campaign to kill the mandate, all he cares about is the public option and the mandate is only important as a talking point within the public option debate.
Or, in other words: Obama doesn’t care about fundamental imbalances, he’s busy trying to get people health care. Kos doesn’t care if people get health care, he’s trying to correct fundamental imbalances in our media system or something. Which of these two things is useful? Which one will actually someday lead to those fundamental imbalances being fixed? Cuz I don’t think ignoring real world problems and focusing on abstract internal Washington power politics is a good way to convince people to reelect enough of you to actually change things.
I think of these are failure modes– extremes to be avoided. I think the Republican party has chosen one undesirable extreme and the Democrats have chosen the other.
I think you can have a big tent party while still having some sort of redlines. I think you can include dissenting points of view respectfully without endorsing so many contradictory messages that the larger party stands for nothing at all. I think, for example, that there might be maybe two or three “Democrats” in the Senate who the Democrats would be objectively better off if they switched parties or were replaced with Republicans, because the cost of trying to include them in the coalition and having them hold back Democratic proposals at every turn is greater than the benefit of having three more seats on paper. I think it’s possible, even a good idea, to target these extreme-case DINOs for replacement or use threat of such to get them to vote a certain way on core issues, without going full-out Doug Hoffman and purging anyone with minor dissent and destroying useful party members to no benefit.
I don’t think I can say at this point that I see any movement toward trying to find such a reasonable medium. What I see is a DNC who is interested only in inflating as much as possible the count of people with (D)s next to their names, and a blogosphere making toothless threats about primaries and darkly promising that the Democrats will face severe repercussions for keeping their campaign promises instead of pandering to blogger whims.
General Winfield Stuck
@Mike:
In theory, I agree with this completely, but our Kos and Jane and Greenwald friends demand final end results of the ideal, and if they don’t get it NOW, they are going to take their ball and go home, by way of the tea bag method of electing purity candidates, or else.
I am fed up with their shit of all or nothing. The solution they propose has the practical effect of electing a steady stream of Palins, and I can’t or won’t accept that.
liberal
@Da Bomb:
Please cite examples.
Martin
That’s bullshit. You’re just pissed that he’s not fixing YOUR thing that you think can be done with a wave of the pen and a wink of the eye. Sorry, but getting China to move their currency isn’t going to happen that way, and it’s probably the single most important goal toward actually fixing our economy. But people would rather bitch about Wall Street bonuses that do fuck-all to put people back to work, or about passing this-or-that to show the GOP who really runs the show. It’s half laziness about the real issues of running the country and half caring more about getting the smack-down than actually fixing shit.
Elie
@Yossarian:
YAY!!!!
Cat
@John S.:
It did not, it took around 3 years at most. First year was unsustainable tax cuts and ignoring intelligence/anti-terrorism that might have prevented 9/11. The 2nd year was a war in Afghanistan that was half assed to begin with and so failed to meet its major objective. The 3rd year we had the run up to Iraq that futher degraded the Afghanistan mission. We were at headed at the ditch and nothing was stopping us.
NobodySpecial
@General Winfield Stuck:
No. They’re pissed because instead of starting off with the liberal ideal, they started off with the ideal ‘off the table’ and started with a half assed ‘public option’. Nobody’s gone home yet, and Hamsher’s group looks to be the only one pushing against a mandate for coverage.
You can have your own opinions, but you have to use the facts as they are, not the ones you wish they were.
ChicagoTom
I don’t even know what your point is?
If the past is any indication, Specter will back up his words with deeds, the same way he did when he left the Dem party and became a Republican many many years ago. He made the switch and became a moderate but right leaning GOPer. Nothing tells me he won’t be a moderate left leaning Democrat if he wins re-election.
I want politicians to do what they have to do to survive election/re-election. That means they’re responsive to their base and their constituents. That’s a good thing.
I’d rather have an Arlen Specter — who moves to the left/right based on his constituents preferences rather than someone like Blance Lincoln who will vote against her constituents wishes and interests.
Like Joe Lieberman?
Specter will be a better Democrat than Ben Nelson or Kent Conrad has ever been.
Max
@liberal:
He said during the whole 2 + year campaign he was going to do this. Not sure why you consider it strange.
Little Dreamer
@ChicagoTom:
Apparently you were under the impression that you were electing a liberal president in 2008 and are unhappy now that you realize he wasn’t as liberal as you thought?
Hello? He’s been talking about centrism and bipartisanship since the beginning, what planet have you been living on?
So, because he isn’t as liberal as you had expected, you’re going to withhold your vote in 2010 and 2012 so that you can assure the fRightwingers get back into power, and that’s supposed to help you (and us) HOW?
Idiot!
John S.
Oh, right…the Democrats are just enabling the Republicans. Except that still puts the blame on the GOP and merely makes the Democrats accomplices. I guess you can parse that away however you want and cluck your tongue about my reading comprehension.
Go back to the Kos Kidz where you all can solve the problems of the universe with your ideological purity.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@harlana pepper:
Whatever. Their contributions don’t entitle them to anything, number one. And B, the idea that there is some timeline out there that Obama has to observe to get anything done, pure nonsense. I am not impressed with any of the “disenchantment” arguments. I am mostly just disgusted by their stupidity and disconnect from reality.
And this thread is about Markos, who has done in my view a piss poor job of leading, informing and guiding his followers through in this process. And especially the latter WRT healthcare. He’s been nothing but play the role of a shrill harpy, sounding about as informed and reasonable as the Death Panel/SociaIism! shouters at the town hall, only that he happens to be on the other side from them. He’s been and remains useless on the subject. The DKos material on this subject amounts to daily waving of bloody shirts, and screaming about how bad Harry Reid is, which they were doing before Obama was elected. I have my own bloody shirt, right here, and I already heard how bad Harry Reid was two or three years ago. I could use a little sensible leadership and accurate information these days, and I am sure as hell not going to get any of that from Markos.
Little Dreamer
@Max:
Apparently lots of people heard the MUP say what they wanted to hear, instead of what he really said, see my post
abovebelow yours.NR
All the problems with Obama on specific issues can be traced back to his general way of operating, and this describes it very succinctly.
The way Obama operates is, he stakes out a position that is, at best, on the center-right of a particular issue, at which point Obama’s position is defined as the “progressive” position on that issue and no serious debate is permitted anywhere to his left. The Republicans scream “socialism” even as Obama negotiates with them and Conservadems. We have the center-right negotiating with the batshit insane right, and the result is that we end up with very conservative policy. This is exactly the same thing that happened during the Bush administration; the policy might not be quite as bad from a substantive point of view, but from a political standpoint, it’s much worse because it now carries the “progressive” label.
I’ve come to the conclusion that progressives need to, very loudly and very publicly, start putting some distance between us and the Obama administration (and the rest of the Democratic leadership). When this whole mess comes crashing down, we need to make sure that the blame falls where it belongs – on Rahm Emmanuel and the Conservadems. That’s the only chance we have of maybe salvaging something good out of this.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Oh, another great WP feature? Even after fixing the bone stupid moderation filter-plugger, the post remains in moderation. Good God, who wrote this collossally awful piece of shit?
Must be someone from DKos, trying to sabotage BJ.
Yossarian
Martin, by the way, makes the most important policy-related argument in the thread.
I don’t like insurance companies. No one likes insurance companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if insurance company executives don’t like themselves, somewhere deep down inside. But from a cost standpoint, they ARE NOT THE PROBLEM. The reason they are considered the problem is because A) most people have far more negative experiences dealing directly with them than they do with doctors, and B) it’s easier to run a campaign against them than it is the American Medical Association or the makers of medical devices.
Providers are the problem. Doctors make too much money, for-profit hospitals run too many tests, PhRMA runs too many TV ads creating too much demand for products of too little value…the list goes on. Believe it or not, insurance companies are somewhat at their mercy, too, because they have to pay for all of that bullshit, which is when premiums go up. Or they don’t pay for it, which is what makes people hate insurance companies. There’s stuff in the bill that tries to address this (the MedPAC commissions, delivery system reforms, etc.), but it’s getting whittled down by lobbyists while the left pays little to no attention and instead screams about the goddamned fucking public option like it’s a panacea that will cure all that ails an absolutely run-away health care system. Those issues drive up individual costs, and they drive up systemic costs, to the point where we will eventually go bankrupt as a nation if they are not dealt with. So I’d rather focus my energies on those issues and other issues such as making sure subsidies are sufficient so people can afford insurance (where is THAT as a progressive priority? Jesus Christ), instead of worrying myself to death over a pissant public option that will only affect a sliver of the population to begin with but makes the people over at FireDogLake scream bloody murder.
John S.
I detest that particular decision, but I don’t think that makes Obama worse than Bush.
Mike
General Winfield Stuck:
Yes, I agree, the all or nothing schtick gets old, but a lot of this
controversy is “inside baseball” stuff IMO.
General Winfield Stuck
@ChicagoTom:
By Gawd, I think you are getting the hang of this place.
Do what you like.
Cole’s threadpost was about as civil as dissent could be on disagreeing with Kos’s raging hissy fit. You responded to it with your own raging hissy fit. And still continue it, but now are playing the Malkin like Victim card after people call you on your horseshit with some of YOUR own medicine. Get over yourself already.
cleek
the Base doesn’t have 60 Senators.
QED
ChicagoTom
Your analysis isn’t exactly correct.
The mandate is palatable as long as there was some way to keep costs down and subsidies existed to help people who can’t afford insurace.
It’s also kind of has to be there if pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied. Or else some people will forgo insurance until they get sick.
But the mandate without something that puts downward pressure on premiums is not palatable because that amounts to a give-away to the insurance companies. Without that downward pressure, a mandate does nothing generate millions more customers for the insurance companies.
I can live with a mandate to buy insurance if there are cost controls, but not if I have to buy insurance and the insurance companies get to charge what I want.
NR
@NobodySpecial:
Yup. We gave up single-payer instantly, at the start of the process, we gave up a strong public option almost as fast, and now we’re in the process of “compromising” away even the weak public option we’ve been left with.
The Dems should have just pushed Medicare for all. But their corporate owners don’t want that, so here we are.
Olly McPherson
There’s a debate to be had about disappointment with Obama, but just looking at the title…really, you don’t get this at all? It’s incomprehensible to you why Kos might hold the attitude he does? Because a lot of people here seem to share it.
harlana pepper
@Mike: What you said
JMY
So, Sen. Menendez doesn’t support the re-importation of drugs, basically supporting Pharma. I guess he’s in their pockets like Obama, right?
Da Bomb
@liberal: I don’t have time to outline all of your idiocy, especially since you have decided to go all Kinsey and make comments about people having some sort of sexual pleasure or as you say..
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Fucking moron. Describe the “get the hell out” scenario, what it looks like, what the details are, how long it takes, what risks are incurred, and what the expected results are.
Explain how the risks are ameliorated, how the strategy is congruent with any stated goals or objectives for this country as defined by any viable candidate for national office in the last two national elections (somebody who took more than 50 delegates to a national convention, let’s say). Show me the direct or indirect mandate for such a scenario, implicit or explicit in any recent election at the national level.
Other than a phrase you pulled out of your ass, what is the “get the hell out” position, exactly?
Max
@Little Dreamer: Jinx. You owe me a coke.
John S.
You do that. And then let me know what you all decide to call yourselves as a party, oh Teabaggers of the left.
I predict that you all will win as many elections as they do.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
By the way, fellow Juicers, have you noticed? We are kicking some serious GOS butt around here today.
Good job, keep up the good work!
General Winfield Stuck
@NobodySpecial:
Who says you have to start out demanding the ideal in order to get there. That is one way, but not demanding it to start out with, is not a good way to do politics within the framework of our polarized politics. If we had started out with the ideal of single payer, it would have caused a revolt by the public, who overwhelmingly like their coverage, at least on paper. And that is all they know, because most have policies that sound good, but have never had to use it. It is all they know from personal experience, and are around 80 percent of Americans.
And to start out telling them they will have to give that up all at once on some new and unknown adventure of single payer would not have washed, and the resulting shitstorm would have shitcanned the whole thing. Just like in 94. Try and think past you ideological nose once in a while, and out of the left wing echo chamber.
JMY
@NR:
If we would have started with single-payer, you know where we would be? Right were we are now. Single-payer would have been DOA. People complain about the public option not having the support in the Senate, what do you think would have been the support of single-payer in the Senate?
Cat
@Yossarian:
If keeping quiet on how they feel about the proposed senate bill is your idea of 11-dimensional chess I can see how you are easily confused by my statement.
How a major player in the HCR feels should be a major factor in how you feel about HCR. Don’t you care if you are going to have to fight this fight over and over or if everyone involved is going to get the message that US is going to get affordable universal medical coverage.
Your cousin’s plight is whats wrong with our current system. We need to keep people from having to choose which of their basic needs they are going to have to forgo in order to get medical treatment. My position will always be if you leave to much control of health insurance in the hands of private industry they will eventually wrest back what little oversight this bill with force on them and we’ll be back to where we are.
Elie
@NR:
You are an idiot.
How would you salvage anything of the mess you would create by destroying this administration and what it is trying to do? With what would you salvage and what would you salvage..
There is no logic in your comment — only self serving narcissistic leftist rhetoric as a fetish…
It was a waste of time to read your crap
Little Dreamer
@Max:
Will Pepsi do?
kay
@JMY:
I agree with that. There was another risk. Had the single payer battle ensued, the whole thing might have tanked.
It’s just so easy to sit on the sidelines and say you could have negotiated a better deal, and everyone repeats the single payer negotiation canard. There’s no way to know whether that was the right strategy.
Thirty Senators signed a letter committing to a public option. Thirty.
Wile E. Quixote
@Martin
Nice try changing the subject Martin, but Fred Armisen had it right in that SNL sketch he did back in October. And please, your argument about China is nothing more than a straw man designed to make you sound smarter than you really are. The fact that President Obama is not listening to Paul Volcker, and is instead listening to Tim “I’m just a big dummy who’s not smart enough to do my taxes or hire an accountant” Geithner vis a vis reforming the banking system says everything about his commitment to fixing the economy and Wall Street.
So please tell me Martin, what shit has President Obama actually fixed? We dumped billions into TARP and there’s been no commitment to the regulatory reform of Wall Street. The bonuses that you bring up, another straw man, are just a symptom of the structural problems inherent to the FIRE sector of the economy, structural problems that could still drag the economy into a depression. The Obama administration’s proposed solution to this is a Wall Street wet dream, set up the Fed as a super regulatory agency that’s even less accountable than it is right now and which will be even more subject to regulatory capture than the current regulatory agencies. We’re getting deeper into a quagmire in the Middle East, and for what? We’re not going to turn Afghanistan into a functioning country in 18 months, much less a democracy, but hey what’s 30 billion dollars and more American casualties compared to Obama’s need to look tough and appease the neo-cons?
Come on Martin, tell me what Obama has fixed, or even accomplished, and do so in terms that aren’t “Well, at least he’s not as much of a fuckup as George W. Bush”. I mean if that’s the only criteria that we’re judging him by then there are probably about 100 million people in this country that could be said to be as qualified for the office of the presidency as he is.
I’m sick and tired of cultists and O-bots such as yourself, who, when confronted with people demanding accomplishments and accountability from a president they voted for, start telling us all what ungrateful and impatient peasants we all are, that we’re just too dumb to understand how Washington, D.C. works and that we should be grateful that Barack Obama isn’t a totally incompetent fuckup like George W. Bush, John McCain or Sarah Palin. Reading the nonsense you post is like reading a David Broder column where la Broder explains to us all that we just don’t understand what’s really important and how crucial it is to be bi-partisan. Sorry, Martin, I don’t buy that shit coming from a senile old hack like Broder and I’m not buying it from you either.
John S.
This entire thread really crystallizes the concept of the face looking in the mirror not recognizing its own reflection.
See the teabagger staring back at you in the mirror, ye ideologically pure progressives, or share in their fate!
kindness
Well, I have one redeeming potential pony left.
This bill is just the bill that passes the Senate. Since we’ve seen that there are enough complete asshole Democratic Senators (at least 5 of ’em) the bill that finally leaves the Senate will suck. It’s my hope that when the House goes to conference committee, reconciling it’s bill with the Senate’s bill, we will get a much better bill. One that includes a public option, one that doesn’t have the Catholic Church (or the Evangelical ) abortion language, one that will help reduce health care premiums for everybody.
The only way that bill passes is if Harry Reid uses reconciliation. The CBO has said that the current House bill will reduce costs so technically Harry will be able to get the conference committee bill through that way. I really hope Harry is being sly saying he won’t use reconciliation but does end up using it, because he’s going to have to no matter what in the end.
ChicagoTom
Not at all. I never thought Obama was a liberal.
I was under the impression that getting democratic control off Congress and the White house would lead to seeing the passage of a more liberal agenda. But apparently I’m a fool for thinking that one of the two parties represents the liberals in America.
So, because he isn’t as liberal as you had expected, you’re going to withhold your vote in 2010 and 2012 so that you can assure the fRightwingers get back into power, and that’s supposed to help you (and us) HOW?
Last I checked, Obama isn’t running for anything in 2010.
But low base turnout would help, in the long term, by punishing the Dems and sending the message that they have to actually represent their base and that they can’t take them for granted.
The Dems aren’t entitled to my support (or anyone else’s) they have to earn it. I am not gonna play defensive politics (support the Dems cuz the GOP is worse) — I want to vote FOR a party/candidate, not against their opposition. I don’t want to vote for the lesser of two evils. I want to vote for people whose politics line up with mine and who support the things I support. I’ve had enough of holding my nose and voting for the least bad option.
I’m not the idiot here. The idiot is the one who thinks I’m dumb for not rewarding the people who don’t actually represent me in order to deny victory to the other group who also doesn’t represent me. If neither party wants to actually push a liberal agenda, then neither party gets my vote.
I guess people here don’t get it. I’m a liberal, Im not a democrat. I only vote for (and send money to) democrats as long as they represent my liberal beliefs. If they aren’t going to do that, then why should I vote for them?
NobodySpecial
@General Winfield Stuck:
Well, you demand it knowing in advance that you very likely won’t get it. But then you’re negotiating from a point your side is comfortable with, instead of telling your side that they’re wrong and won’t be listened to. Most – I’m sorry, what’s your pet phrase? – ‘ideological noses’ got that point a long time ago, even wild eyed ex- Republicans like Markos. Kind of like going to buy a car, and when the dealer comes at you with list price, you counter with some ungodly figure that he’ll never deal with. Then the actual dealing starts. Instead, they entered the battle offering to pay $500 over blue book, and now they’re gonna pay a lot more than that.
Oh yeah, and folks like me still won’t be covered – but we’ll get to pay a dandy fine for the privilege. Thanks for nothing, ‘reasonable people’.
NR
@Elie:
I won’t be the one destroying this administration. This administration is doing a fine job of destroying itself, by (among many other things) doing things like escalating a pointless war and blocking any serious reform of the financial industry, thereby all but guaranteeing another collapse. And it’s become clear that progressives cannot stop them, just as we apparently cannot stop a health care reform bill that’s nothing but a massive, government-mandated bailout for the same private insurance companies that have screwed up our national health care.
All we progressives can do is make sure that we don’t get blamed when this whole mess falls apart.
John S.
See, it’s this kind of language that confirms my sneaking suspicion that people like you think that SOMEHOW Obama was supposed to be bizzaro-Bush. That somehow, he would ram through whatever the fuck he wants and ignore congress and break the law—but see, it would be okay because he’d be doing the RIGHT things!
Obama can set an agenda, he can try to set the tone of Washington and he can try to convince his party to go along with him. But as far as what Obama can actually DO — as outlined in the Constitution — well, I don’t think that the majority of issues you are griping about are within his power to fix.
He isn’t going to run a progressive unitary Executive branch. As far as Obama sees his own authority, it is fairly limited to enacting laws passed by congress and using the bully pulpit to help encourage those laws that he wants changed to get passed.
Again, he isn’t bizzaro-Bush.
kay
@ChicagoTom:
No one’s even done any rational analysis on the impact of the mandate. No one. It’s a big piece of legislation, and like all health care legislation, it covers people in bits and pieces.
THIS many added to Medicaid. THIS many covered under a parent’s policy, THIS many under 133% of poverty level, and on and on.
You can’t measure the claimed draconian effects of the mandate until you have some idea how many people are going to be affected by it.
There are mandates in place, now, at the state level. My state has two groups of people covered under a mandate. Once I subtract all of those covered under the various affliated provisions of the state mandate, the whole issue becomes not a big deal at all.
I think the whole “hated mandate” is yet another area that no one has really looked at, but everyone is claiming will be horrible and have huge negative impact.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Yossarian:
It’s so messed up, and in a way, even the doctors are hamstrung, since they’re graduating from med school with insane amounts of debt that take years and years to pay off. That’s why Obama’s efforts to reform student loans seem so important. One little-noticed area where I’m quite pleased.
cleek
@John S.: damn straight.
JMY
@kay:
And I support single-payer or the concept of it. But the most reasonable person would have conclude that trying to get single-payer through, even through committee, would have gotten us nowhere. We can’t even get Democratic Senators to agree on a public option, that would allowed private/public competition, that when you think about it, sounds like a good idea. But to think that starting with single-payer would have been good and brought us progress is ridiculous when we can’t get our own party to agree on the PO. Waste of time.
John S.
That’s the right attitude!
Unfortuantely, your interests are AT BEST only represented by one representative and two senators. The only way to have your interests be represented by several hundred representatives and senators is to be a corporation.
: )
Little Dreamer
@ChicagoTom:
Yeah, making it harder for him to achieve any progress at all in the last half of his term makes it so much better. Of course he’s not running in 2010, but those he needs to help him push through more Democratic legislation ARE.
You really DO seem to have a desire to help the fRightwingers without actually saying so.
mcc
Then why are we talking about the public option? This has never really been much of a cost containment bill. The public option has never really been very good as a cost containment item. In order for the public option to work as cost containment we need basically for the public option to undercut private insurers and put economic pressure on the private insurers to adjust their costs downward to compete. In order for that to be possible we need two things. First off, we need the “medicare+5” payment structures, where costs for medical procedures are tacked to medicare’s careful cost-assessing methods and wind up significantly lower than what private insurers pay out. And second off, preferably, we need the public option to be open to a wide enough pool of people to actually be something that the private insurers have to compete with it.
Even if we win on the public option, we will not have either of these things. “Medicare+5” could not even pass in the house, which is understood to be far more liberal than the Senate and doesn’t have its weird procedural issues; the house version, which represents the most liberal state the bill could possibly pass in, uses negotiated rates. This negotiated rates public option as it stands is projected by the CBO to cost slightly more than private insurance does. As for the other thing, the public option is and always has been planned to be sold only through the exchange; only the minority of insurance buyers who are eligible for the exchange could buy it. (The only thing that could possibly change this is the Wyden amendment, which has received relatively little attention.) It doesn’t seem possible for the public option to drive down costs when it costs more than the insurance it’s supposed to be driving down the price of and it’s only available to a niche of the market.
You seem to be suggesting the public option is primarily important as a cost containment measure. I disagree with that. If that’s true, then the public option was worthless to begin with, the fight on the public option was lost when medicare+5 died in the House, and nothing is lost if the Senate follows through on their compromise from last night to kill the “negotiated rates” public option.
Olly McPherson
Just to chime in, I mostly agree with you ChicagoTom. At the very least, I doubt I’ll ever make a financial contribution to a political campaign again.
kay
@JMY:
I don’t support single payer unless it comes with some way to control the costs of health care.
Medicare is a single payer program. Medicare covers too much, and it covers too generously. I have no earthly idea why young people are paying for old people’s Viagra. I have no earthly idea why we are spending the vast majority of Medicare on the last year of life.
We don’t do any preventative care, we don’t do any analysis of what works and what doesn’t work, we have 1/6th of the economy dedicated to paying for health care, and I don’t see how single payer solves that.
We pay more than anyone else on earth. Not for insurance, although we pay through the nose for that.
For health care.
NCReggie
@ Wile E. Quixote you do realize that it took Kennedy getting popped for the ’64 voting rights act to be enacted don’t you? That it also took a fucking social movement also right? So don’t fucking equate Barack’s handling of civil rights with health care reform cause we all know that it took a president to get it done right?
Little Dreamer
@ChicagoTom:
You might as well just quit paying attention to politics altogether, because apparently you’re not in it for the long run. You seem to think that if the MUP can’t deliver your personal supply of ultra-liberal legislation, it’s not worth it to do what we can to create anything that might not be up to your standard, but which could – over time – turn into such with help from people like you.
So you’re going to take the ball, go home, and sit on your ass in 2010 and 2012 while the crazy teabaggers elect their preferred candidates.
Who needs you?
Elie
@Little Dreamer:
Nice try, Little Dreamer.
These folks don’t care about those practicalities…They are in the magician’s school of policy development — wiggle nose if you are the right kind of liberal, and its done. Especially the stuff they want..
Really, I am beginning to think that this is truly purposeful to splinter the democratic party from accomplishing anything. The corporists only have to buy off a couple to get things going and voila, you can undermine the administration and prevent anything at all from getting done..
As for Kos, I dropped going onto that site two years ago and will not be back. Funny, it used to be my first stop. I wish Kos folks would just stay away from here. They seem singularly stupid and unable to understand anything but there own diatribes.
kay
@JMY:
The problem with Medicare extension is going to be PROVIDERS.
Not insurance companies. Doctors and hospitals. Because Medicare has cost controls (not enough) and the medical industry does not want to accept a cut.
Cat
@General Winfield Stuck:
Didn’t NY23 show us that you can elect a Dem in a 100 year old republican seat when they run a teabagger? Imagine what kind of liberal you could run against a teabagger in a swing district. When your opponents are making huge mistakes like this you capitalize on it, you don’t play it safe.
goblue72
@liberal: Heh. Good one.
And for the record, there is a viable Get the Hell Out position. Its called Get the Hell Out. Nixon did it in Vietnam – he might have felt the need to preface Get the Hell Out with a few of rounds of Bomb ‘Em Back to the Stone Age, but Get the Hell Out is where even Richard “I Ain’t Seen A Commie I Didn’t Wanna Bomb” Nixon wound up. Or was the photos of Americans evacuating by helicopter from the rooftop of the US Embassy in Saigon just a fevered dream?
And last time I checked, fleeing from Vietnam did not lead to a worldwide Communist takeover. As far as I can tell, it seems to have led to Vietnamese on every American street corner selling me tasty soup and spring rolls.
Maybe if we finally Get the Hell Out of Afghanistan (and Iraq!), I’ll see the quality of my local falafel sandwiches and baba ganoush improve.
Da Bomb
@NCReggie: And someone earlier tried to inject MLK’s letter from the Birmingham Jail into this discussion. It’s just craziness.
Little Dreamer
@Cat:
It took a moderate Republican candidate endorsing the Dem candidate to make that happen. What magic fairy dust are you mass-producing to see that that formula is used consistently?
Yossarian
“Your cousin’s plight is whats wrong with our current system. We need to keep people from having to choose which of their basic needs they are going to have to forgo in order to get medical treatment. My position will always be if you leave to much control of health insurance in the hands of private industry they will eventually wrest back what little oversight this bill with force on them and we’ll be back to where we are.”
But my cousin’s plight is one that can be fixed under the bills currently considered. His son’s health care costs are astronomical, and he’s blown through the price ceiling of every insurance program he’s ever signed up for because of it. The bills under consideration lift the lifetime caps AND ensure that his son will not be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition, so it’s full of win for him and his family.
This ultimately goes to one of the big problems I have with the liberal purists. I’m pro-single payer. My cousin is pro-single payer– in fact, he ran for local office on a single-payer platform (and lost in a conservative district). But these bills, as far away from his ideal as it is possible to get, would still represent a dramatic improvement in the quality of his life, and of that of his son and his family. Kos and other who abstract away from that real, tangible progress with airy concerns about which insurance companies may benefit and which liberals may look spineless and how it’s so important to punch Joe Lieberman right in his stupid jowly face are, to me, missing the core of democratic liberalism. It’s about helping people, as many as possible as much as possible. And when you don’t get all you want, you swallow hard, thank god you got some important stuff, and then renew the fight because there is more helping to be done. Clinton, as much as he frustrated me, got this at a gut level and in retrospect I think progressives were unfair to him. Obama gets it, too, and I thank the Lord for that.
Little Dreamer
@Elie:
When LGF turned left, I should have realized GOS would be turning right momentarily afterwards.
What a crazy world we live in.
gwangung
@Elie:
This is the Green Lantern view of diplomacy and politics. Just like the wingnuts.
“Cept they want to turn into Red lanterns and just rage on…
Elie
@Yossarian:
This
Nothing but this…
“It’s about helping people, as many as possible as much as possible.”
General Winfield Stuck
@NobodySpecial:
LOL, I figured you would come back with a similar analogy. And the used car one, was suspect numero uno. Of course, you are right, Health Care reform is just like buying a used car. What planet are you from?
And you don’t know yet whether what passes, and something will, that you won’t be covered. None of us do. There is more than one way to skin this beast.
ChicagoTom
Unfortuantely, your interests are AT BEST only represented by one representative and two senators. The only way to have your interests be represented by several hundred representatives and senators is to be a corporation.
Uh-huh…right. The progressive caucus has more members than the blue dogs — but don’t let facts get in the way of things.
Yeah, making it harder for him to achieve any progress at all in the last half of his term makes it so much better. Of course he’s not running in 2010, but those he needs to help him push through more Democratic legislation ARE.
And those running NEED people like me — the base — to show up in an off year election. And those people need to give us a reason to show other than “so the GOP doesn’t win”
Since Obama isn’t a liberal why should I care if he can pass his centrist agenda? If we aren’t going to have liberal agenda being pushed in Congress than we can at least have gridlock to stop the centrist bullshit.
You have it backwards…you aren’t in it for the long haul. When you say things like “you’re actions are going to hurt the Dems in 2010 and 2012” — you are looking short term.
I want to transform the Democratic party to actually represent liberal interests long term. And if that means losing a mid-term or two in order to get the message that you have to give liberals a reason to vote for you, so be it. That would be a good thing, long term, even if it is painful in the short term.
Citizen Alan
@Little Dreamer:
Yes, Little Dreamer, you’ve figured it out. My antipathy for Rahm Emmanuel has nothing to do with his association with the DLC, nor his flagrant attempts to undermine Howard Dean followed by his trying to steal most of the credit for the 50 State Strategy, nor his generally thuggish demeanor and his noted hostility towards most leading progressive politicians. Rather, it is entirely because he is Jewish.
Damn, and I’d hope I could divert suspicion for my closet antisemitism with that $200 check to Al Franken.
Little Dreamer
@ChicagoTom:
By helping the teabaggers over the next couple of elections? Right. Get back to me when achieving your goals is so much easier because Sarah Palin is your president.
I want it all and I want it NOW is NOT a policy.
ksmiami
Just my .02, but firstly, I used to read Kos a lot, but it has gotten so shrill and out there that I can’t stand the place… Anyway, Medicare is the way to single payer… The public option they were flinging about was REALLY weak and I don’t believe my way or the highway governance has ever proved successful politics in the long term. I mean, Bush had some short term success, but look at the real legacy – he lost congress, got a black man elected president, etc… In fact, Social security and medicare, arguably two of the most significant programs in the US, came about in fits and starts and were hardly perfect when the programs were initiated – Hell even the Civil Rights and voting acts would still require blood and tears to be implemented. We live in a large, complicated country and some things will be better achieved through incrementalism. If the new medical plan covers millions more people, then it is a step in the right direction and hopefully more and more people will demand that Medicare enrollment age limits keep moving down.
gwangung
@ChicagoTom: You keep saying you’re the base.
I think you’re quite egotistical, as well as being parochial in your outlook.
This works in urban areas, where you are the base. This works in the House. This does not work in more rural and more suburban areas, where this is less true. This also does not work in the Senate, which is, by design, less sensitive to numbers.
You seem manifestly unwilling to work with people who are not quite on your level, which is, unfortunately, not a winning strategy OR tactic in politics.
Martin
@Wile E. Quixote:
1) Initiated (and is still on schedule) for withdrawal from Iraq.
2) Called for the closing of Gitmo, which is still on track, if off schedule because Congress decided to act like little girls.
3) Got China to withdraw missiles from the Strait of Formosa to lower tensions with Taiwan.
4) Got China to talk to NK to get talks back underway.
5) Got China on board with Iran sanctions
6) Put forward the stimulus plan and has ensured that it is reasonably transparent.
7) About $20B of the stimulus dollars are dedicated to modernizing hospital records systems (downpayment on HCR)
8) Put forward and has now implemented key parts of the Open Government Initiative
9) Pushed back against Congress on key weapon program spendings in the defense budget.
10) $2500 tax credit toward higher-ed is helping individuals retrain for new jobs, and making college more affordable for low-income (it’s a credit, not a deduction).
11) He gave the auto industry a soft landing, heading off even more job losses, and loss of key industries.
12) Pushing for foreclosure modification to help homeowners, which hasn’t been as successful as expected, but they’re taking a 2nd shot at it now.
13) $2B for anti-gang and anti-gun efforts in inner cities.
14) Taking a leadership role on climate change. He can’t do much without Congress, but he’s committing the US to the cause which will help other nations stick the effort out.
15) Significantly extended federal protection for forests, rivers, etc. under the Omnibus Public Land Management Act.
16) Extended federal employee benefits to gay partners.
17) States now have permission from the EPA to regulate CO2 and to increase auto emission and economy regulations, and the EPA themselves are working on federal CO2 regulations.
I can go on if you’d like.
General Winfield Stuck
@Cat:
Please don’t even compare Obama to Bush’s huge clusterfuck of America and the GOP in general. But I know you will anyways. Obama has a fairly steady approval at around 50 percent, and would be higher by several points if it weren’t for disappointed folks on the left, like yourself.
I don’t think you understand what happened in NY 23. The reason the GOP lost a safe seat was because purity wingnuts insisted on a pure candidate and lost. And if the tea baggers had not invaded and stirred up shit and confusion with their bucks and noise, they would likely have kept that seat.
Your plan sounds a lot like GOP purists, only with a dem flavor.
Little Dreamer
@Citizen Alan:
Welcome to Balloon Juice, where snark is king.
If you think I was serious, you haven’t been formally introduced to this site yet. Take off your coat and stay awhile, you’ll see it’s not so bad here.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Citizen Alan:
I can get people disliking Rahm Emanuel. What I don’t get is why he’s always the first person cited for anything Obama has done that makes the liberal blogosphere upset. Everywhere I look, it’s “Rahm Emanuel must be pulling the strings” or “I knew Obama would fail as soon as he appointed Rahm Emanuel.” Never mind the truth of those allegations, why do the netroots harbor such loathing for the man? I mean, it’s not like he’s the most conservative Democrat out there.
EDIT: This doesn’t actually seem to qualify as a response to your comment, more as a response to things in general.
ChicagoTom
You say that like I don’t have the right to not vote for someone who doesn’t represent my beliefs.
Why would I vote for someone whose political beliefs/ideals/agenda don’t line up with mine?
I should be supporting people who don’t want what I want?
Is this how you imagine politics is supposed to work? I’m supposed to be scared into voting for X because Y is worse? Or am I supposed to be voting for X because i believe in X and agree with X?
I’m wrong for choosing neither when my options are Hard Right vs center Right (or even center) ?
Unless you punish bad democrats you will never get better ones.
John S.
Then you’re trying to make it something that it never was and never will be. Remind me, how many Democrats are members of the Progressive caucus? You may as well start forming your
thirdfourth party now if that is your goal.Personally, I’m all for it. You guys and the teabaggers will certainly make elections far more lively! But I suspect that after you siphon off the REAL conservatives and the REAL progressives, the generic Democrat or Republican will win the election.
But we shall see…
Yossarian
“I want to transform the Democratic party to actually represent liberal interests long term. And if that means losing a mid-term or two in order to get the message that you have to give liberals a reason to vote for you, so be it. That would be a good thing, long term, even if it is painful in the short term.”
Ah, yes, heighten those contradictions. That old lefty chestnut. I’d love to hear a single solitary example where it worked, however. Nader used a version of it in 2000 as a reason not to vote for Gore, and we got eight years of George W. Bush. Boy, he showed us! Progressive interests really won the day there! Just like they did in 1994, when the Democrats lost “a mid-term or two” and they really learned their lesson and we’re all now living in a liberal’s wet dream!
Newt Gingrich…George W. Bush…builders of a liberal Democratic party. Huzzah!
Justin
@Wile Quixote
“Justin, take your stupid sports metaphors, fold them until they are all sharp edges and pointy corners and shove them up your ass.”
Choose a response, jackass.
1. Clearly, you are not a golfer.
2. I read the first 30-40 comments, saw a bunch of sports metaphors, which always drive me crazy and strike me as the laziest bullshit masquerading as something important to say that suddenly puts it all in perspective, and thought I’d try to drive the idiocy over the edge. Never did I think in a million years would anyone take my obviously over the top and mixed sports metaphors seriously. I should have added about 5 nuances in there, but I figured if I tipped my hand anymore I’d flip over.
John S.
No General, it sounds EXACTLY like that. At least to me.
Mike
Yossarian:
YES. When one experiences long term major medical
problems like your cousin (and my wife) the reform package
with or without the public option is a godsend. You live in
dread of the insurance company finding some way to kick
your loved one to the curb, or that their lifetime benefit could
be exceeded. (easy to do with serious life threatening long term illnesses)
Single payer would be my first choice also, but I was happy about this
reform bill before I even heard about the public option.
Elie
@ChicagoTom:
.
And here is your question: Who would you be staying home from voting for in 2010? If you are in a red or pink district, I can see you think its worth allowing the very crazy Republicans to win (forgetting the sadness and horror of the last ten years, but so what, right)
What would you do in a district where you have an already liberal representative? Stay home there too?
Do you think you get to vote for whoever you want or don’t want across the country in 2010? Do you understand US civics? If you are in an already favorable district, it would seem to be stupid (heh) to not support the person running there to “punish” the Democrats. Is that what you are talking about? If you are in a pink or red district and want to send a message to a democrat hanging on by his fingernails, so what? Yeah, you showed ’em…
You can set the country up to suffer through another period (or worse since the have moved even further right) under some Che Guevara school of crap that somehow you will bring it all down, and tata we have a revolution and you get what you want that way?
Cat
@Little Dreamer:
huh? Are you saying that only New England has moderate republicans who when they get up close and personal with teabaggers see how useless and dangerous they are? Or that only New England has moderate republicans?
I’ll concede there are lots of states that don’t have moderate republicans, but to not run a nice non-threatening liberal or progressive in races where you have a tebagger and/or a moderate republican is a lost opportunity to show the voters how the dems are better for them and the country then the rabid facists the teabaggers are.
Martin
@ChicagoTom:
“Your beliefs”
Your beliefs are either far narrower than any human beings ought to be, or you just don’t give a fuck what they represent.
Bottom line, you sound like a single issue voter – one of assholes who pull the ‘No Abortion’ lever in the voting booth, not caring if the guy they’re voting for plans on repealing Civil Rights or some such.
Elie
@Justin:
Don’t pay attention to Wile.
He is in his own world and you may or may not be in it at any point in time.
Da Bomb
@Martin: Let me add to that courtsey of TPM:
•Three major health bills (SCHIP, tobacco regulation, and stimulus funds for Medicaid, COBRA subsidies, health information technology and the National Institutes of Health) enacted even before comprehensive reform
•Stimulus contained myriad other individual policy victories, not only preventing a far worse depression but also:
◦Delivered key new funds for education
◦Expanded state energy conservation programs and new transit programs
◦Added new smart grid investments
◦Funded high-speed Internet broadband programs
◦Extended unemployment insurance for up to 99 weeks for the unemployed and modernizing state UI programs to cover more of the unemployed
◦Made large new investments in the safety net, from food stamps (SNAP) to affordable housing to child care
•Clean cars victory to take gas mileage requirements to 35mpg
•Protection of 2 million acres of land against oil and gas drilling and other development
•Executive orders protecting labor rights, from project labor agreements to protecting rights of contractor employees on federal jobs
•Stopping pay discrimination through Lilly Ledbetter and Equal Pay laws
•Making it easier for airline and railway workers to unionize, while appointing NLRB and other labor officials who will strengthen freedom to form unions
•Reversing Bush ban on funding overseas family planning clinics
•Passing hate crimes protections for gays and lesbians
•Protecting stem cell research research
•Strengthening state authority and restricting federal preemption to protect state consumer, environmental and labor laws
•Financial reforms to protect homeowners and credit card holders
•Bailing out the auto industry and protecting unionized retirees and workers
Here’s the link, which was referenced to earlier.
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/11/30/progressives_and_obama_are_doing_better_than_we_th/index.php
Also Politi-Fact is a good source about tracking the President’s progress.
Elie
@Da Bomb:
Thanks to you and Martin…
Sad this needed to be done at all
General Winfield Stuck
@Martin:
I’ve been wanting to put together a list like this, but too lazy I guess. Thank you for doing it!
edit- and adding yours to the list Da Bomb. good work and thanks too.
ChicagoTom
And yet, a majority of Dems in the Senate support the more liberal position which would be a robust public option. And in general a majority of Dems in the senate support most of more liberal positions, but are thwarted/held hostage by the smaller number of DINOs. And that conservative democratic minority always gets concessions but never gives them.
That’s funny…considering it’s always the liberals who have to compromise.
I’m willing to give a little to get a little. I’m not willing to give and get nothing in return.
Like the stimulus….the negotiators gave in to a lot of GOP demands to get bipartisan support (and made a large chuck of it tax cuts because that’s what the GOP negotiators wanted) and then the whole GOP voted against it anyway. The GOP negotiated in bad faith, and they got to water down the stimulus AND get to go on record as opposing it en masse. It was genius politics on their part, and naiveté and stupidity on the Dems part.
There’s a word for people who get rolled by those negotiating in bad faith. They’re called “suckers”.
Fool me once, shame on me…
But hey — you don’t need liberals since we are such a small part of the Big Tent. So be it. Good luck trying to win elections without liberal support
Little Dreamer
@Cat:
I’m saying that expecting a moderate Republican to endorse a Dem over a teabagger candidate is folly. It’s an exception, not a rule.
John S.
@Martin, @Da Bomb:
Fuck you guys and your lists of “accomplishments”. I don’t see anything on there that pertains to me, therefore Obama hasn’t done shit, is an abject failure and is worse than Bush.
Martin
@General Winfield Stuck:
Shit, that was just off the top of my head. Da Bomb reminded me of a shitload of other stuff – some of it pretty huge – equal pay, hate crimes legislation, credit card reform, stem cell research. Some Congress deserves most of the credit for, but none of this would have happened with anyone from the GOP in the White House.
And it doesn’t touch on all of the soft power bits – speaking directly to people in the middle east and just generally calming everyone the fuck down by, you know, not being a dick 24/7.
Little Dreamer
@ChicagoTom:
If that were true, we’d be getting a more Robust public option out of committee, yet that doesn’t seem to be the case, does it? Just yesterday the media was reporting that the public option was probably dead (not a Robust public option, but ANY public option) – to which Harry Reid had to say that it wasn’t dead, yet media is still reporting that they are on a death watch. Are you expecting a Robust public option to be announced soon?
John S.
There’s the rub…nobody is trying to force YOU and all the other “liberals” out of the party. You are the one crowing about purity and insisting that somehow Democrats can win with ONLY progressive liberals.
Do you honestly think that elections can be won this way? That if you abandon anyone that is to the right of you (which I suspect is a LOT of people), that somehow electoral victory will follow?
It just doesn’t add up.
Yossarian
And yes, it got watered down significantly, but can we also give Obama credit for proposing what was probably the most liberal budget plan in American history?
Little Dreamer
@ChicagoTom:
Even George W. Bush knew that the first “fool me once” response was “shame on YOU”.
Cat
@Yossarian:
If the bill does all these things then it will be a good start and hopefully we’ll get a better system so when people like your cousin’s son gets out on their own their continuing health care costs won’t prevent them from enjoying their lives.
I’m not sure the current hybrid system the bill creates is the long term solution you or I want or even need, but I do agree it should solve a lot of short term issues. Its long term viability concerns me as increased costs for the 55+ plan could lead to cut backs for everyone in that plan and a different administration appointing Bush43 quality political hacks to oversee the private plans leads to failure of there as well.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Da Bomb:
I think too many people fail to give the stimulus package enough credit. It’s one of those bills where seeing little means that it was effective. Nassim Taleb had a good example: imagine that before 9/11, someone in Congress had sponsored a bill to improve airplane security, and it passed, preventing the attack. No one would have applauded the bill, because nothing would have happened. But nothing happening was the effect of the bill. We always celebrate people fixing broken things more than we celebrate people preventing things from getting broken.
Yes, I know the bill could and should have been much bigger, and I definitely support more legislation. But it’s hard to realize the true importance of preventive bills like the stimulus.
Little Dreamer
@John S.:
Doesn’t matter how many times it’s repeated, he’ll never believe it.
ChicagoTom
You couldn’t be more wrong.
I’m a liberal voter and I have a myriad of issues that are important to me. And on almost all of them, the current Dems are failing.
Would you like a list?
– FISA and general privacy/spying,
– Use of State Secrets to cover up wrong doing by gov’t
– Rule of Law (holding the Gonzos and the Yoos and people who engaged criminal behavior/torture accounable),
– Ending and investigating our use of torture, and rendition
– repeal PATRIOT,
– trying “enemy combatants” in something other than kangaroo courts to guarantee a guilty verdict”,
– Single Payer/Universal Health Care (or something that approximates it making it affordable for people to get health care, not just insurance),
– Regulating the shit out of Wall St. and not rewarding excessive risk taking and creating moral hazards
– Repeal DOMA and DADT
– Repealing our draconian drug laws and ending the so called “war on drugs” that has ruined countless lives.
On every one of these issues Obama and the Dems are failing spectacularly. So don’t fucking sit here and tell me that I sound like a single issue voter. I’m just not a fucking sheep who drank the Kool-Aid who bought into the cult of personality surrounding Obama. The same shit I was against when W was in office I am against now that BO is in office.
And if the Dems aren’t gonna be SIGNIFICANTLY better on these issues than they are gonna lose support from people like me.
Elie
@ChicagoTom:
Tom.
You should always vote your conscience and beliefs.
Yours are fixed and self centered.
That is all I read in your comments: What I think, what I want, me,me,me
Your other Kos friends would blow up any (heh) progress on anything, for some idealistic mumbo jumbo.
I want to make concrete things happen, at whatever rate I can.
Where is the strategy that has people suffer without healthcare to make some sort of point?
The Khmer Rouge did that pretty well in Combodia. Millions of people died to purify the party from the wrong types of people who were not pure in the right thought.
Now I am not saying that is what you or the others are advocating, of course. But only by degrees since you are willing to trade off the benefit of progressive improvement for achieving some sort of ideological fantasy world sometime in the future — and let those little people do what they can until then?
YOU, dont matter. I dont matter. Not individually – Only if we work together to help protect and enhance the wellbeing of all of us..It is the only reason that I am a liberal progressive. I always expect to keep working it forward and to struggle, but no cheap intellectual gimmicks. People suffering always matter and are not just a chip on the strategy board…
mcc
@kay:
There is actually a big table projecting exactly this information in each of the CBO analyses (for the House bill and the several Senate bills) if you feel like looking. I don’t clearly remember if they project how many people get hit by the mandate’s fines, their goals were to project who does and doesn’t get covered.
Citizen Alan
@Little Dreamer:
Sorry, LD, your snark was a little too subtle, or perhaps I’m a little too slow this late in the day.
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
Honestly, I think a lot of it is that Emmanuel has actively cultivated a Machiavellian persona in his media appearances. How much of it is real and how much is a private joke, I don’t know, but he once screamed “Don’t fuck up!” in Tony Blair’s face before a speech, to which both Blair and Bill Clinton merely laughed. That persona, combined with his generally centrist and (IMO) overly cautious approach to politics, leads progressives to suspect that behind the scenes he is pulling Obama towards the center. I don’t personally care for the man, but I also realize that Obama most likely picked him because of their shared political views.
Just a theory.
ChicagoTom
No, instead you are trying to convince me that supporting people who are hostile to my agenda is the proper course of action. And you are trying to convince me that the shit sandwich you are feeding me is really filet mingion and that I shouldn’t complain about it cuz it could have been a shit and puke sandwich if the GOP was making it.
No one said dems can only win with progressive liberals. But we already have a conservative party in America. We need a liberal one.
And if the dems are more concerned with being centrists who stand for nothing in particular than about standing for something other than compromise for the sake of compromise then to hell with them.
Elie
@ChicagoTom:
So what are you doing personally on those issues? What can you affect?
Its all well and good to advocate for stuff way up high where other people have the responsibility. What do you do in the circle you can affect?
Are you a member of the Democratic party?
Do you work to develop better and more representative approaches for local level campaigns?
How many hearings have you been for local issues where you can actually get close to the source of policy making and legislation?
It all starts local. Being from Chicago, you should know this already. Big policy way up top that you have no direct influence over besides screaming on a blog is a sure way to eternal frustration…
Yossarian
“If the bill does all these things then it will be a good start and hopefully we’ll get a better system so when people like your cousin’s son gets out on their own their continuing health care costs won’t prevent them from enjoying their lives. I’m not sure the current hybrid system the bill creates is the long term solution you or I want or even need, but I do agree it should solve a lot of short term issues.”
On this, you and I are in complete agreement. The difference is, I think this bill will do a lot to set up the structure for future reforms that CAN solve a lot of those long-term issues. See Ezra Klein for several arguments to this effect.
I take my home state of Massachusetts as an example. I know Massachusetts health care reform is viewed skeptically by a lot of people on the left, but it shouldn’t be. It’s successful by almost any metric, and it’s popular. It’s initial format when passed is not so different than what’s being discussed now, and it didn’t do all it needed to do in terms of addressing long-term systemic problems. But now they’re talking about ending the fee-for-service system in all state health care. That’s huge– it’s beyond huge, and it wouldn’t have happened or even been CONTEMPLATED if universality, the mandate, etc., hadn’t already been established.
Not just on health care, but on everything– I’m pretty deep into American political history, and I literally cannot think of a single major piece of progressive domestic legislation that sprang fully formed out of the U.S. Congress. Every major social program you care to name started off smaller, somewhat skeletal, and insufficient to progressive desires before getting bigger and more comprehensive over the years. And I am telling you, that is EXACTLY what the GOP is so terrified of, apart from letting Obama have an immediate political success.
Mnemosyne
@ChicagoTom:
That’s been the left-wing plan for elections since 1968. That’s 41 (forty-one) years ago. How much more of a long term do you need before your cunning plan starts working?
John S.
Wrong.
I’ll say this again S-L-O-W-L-Y and for the last time.
YOU should support people that represent your positions and who are not hostile to your agenda. But since the number of those people you support is limited to THREE members of Congress, it will require the support of many other people who you don’t support and never will, mostly due to the fact that the number of people you can directly impact in this regard is THREE.
Since you cannot control other people’s agendas any more than you can control how the hundreds of other members of Congress get into office, you will have to recognize the need to build a coalition. In order to get this collection of people with disparate interests to come together on most ANY issue, there will be a lot of compromises. I realize you think “your side” is the only one doing that, but this is not the case.
The proper course of action is to control those things that are under your control, and try to negotiate and work around those things that are not. Or you can take your ball and go home.
I think we all know which method you prefer.
Little Dreamer
@ChicagoTom:
If liberal voters only vote for liberal candidates and expect liberal policies, they will have no power at all. Liberal policies are NOT the norm. They never have been, and at the moment looking at the horizon they never will be. The greatest good can be done by keeping the right at bay, not by getting pissed because those in Washington aren’t liberal enough.
You are helping the fRightwingers by taking your ball and marching off the field.
Citizen Alan
@Yossarian:
The thing about Nader* that still pisses me off is that the whole “there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans” was such bullshit and it would have been trivially easy, IMO, for Gore to have highlighted the differences between the parties (especially in the aftermath of the impeachment). Instead, Gore seemingly set out to prove that Nader was right by appointing one of the worst Democratic specimens in the country as his running mate.
*Full disclosure: I voted for Nader in 2000. I was in an overwhelmingly red state and I simply could not bear the thought of voting for Joe Lieberman (who I knew then mainly as a tort reform advocate and an annoying moral scold). I honestly can’t say who I would have voted for without the benefit of hindsight. if I were in a state where I thought my vote would have mattered.
General Winfield Stuck
@ChicagoTom:
You came here with the shit sandwich analogy, when the sandwich is not near made yet. Seemingly, to talk you off a political ledge or something.
We already knew of your existence beforehand and your ideological mates have visited before seeking whatever it is they seek.
I never try to reform Divas, it never works and is a waste of time. Vote or not vote for whomever, your choice.
Elie
@Citizen Alan:
Hopefully Alan, you were not in Florida where that little ol 2% that went to Nader actually screwed the whole country for 8 years — or should I say Nadir like in opposite of zenith…
Mnemosyne
@John S.:
Frankly, that’s one of the problems with our two-party, winner-take-all system: Americans think that if their side won, all their problems should be over and they should get whatever they want. At least parliamentary systems are based on the idea that you will have to compromise and work with people who don’t agree with you if you want to do anything more than make pretty speeches.
The Sheriff Is A Ni-
So how many more Nixons, Reagans, and Bushes do we have to go through before we realize this ain’t exactly a liberal nation?
ChicagoTom
I said it before and I will say it again. The CPC (Congressional Progressive Caucus) is bigger than the blue dog coalition. So your whole premise (that there are no liberals in Congress is BS)
In order to get this collection of people with disparate interests to come together on most ANY issue, there will be a lot of compromisesI realize you think “your side” is the only one doing that, but this is not the case.
So than you can easily show me examples of where the conservatives have compromised.
Just because you say something doesn’t make it so. The liberals compromise and the conservative laugh at us for being suckers. The liberals are charlie brown and the conservatives are lucy with the football.
And then you are gonna attack me for saying “I don’t think I want to try and kick the ball any more”. No thanks.
And if liberal voters continue to support the least worst option we will never have a good option to vote for.
And to say liberalism isn’t the norm, I say bullshit.
Majorities tend to support liberal positions even if they dont self-identify as liberals.
Stop acting like conservatism is the natural order of things. It isn’t. Look at Europe — even their conservatives are much more liberal than many Democrats.
Liberal policies aren’t the norm in the US because fools continue to work from a position of fear and the conservatives are better at the game of politics. Liberals are always too busy playing defense instead of offense.
You have it backwards….conservatism’s natural position is one of opposition to too much progress. That’s the nature of conservatism — being reluctant to change and keeping it at bay.
But instead people like you come along and preach that liberalism should focus their energies on keeping the right at bay rather than focusing on making real progress and making peoples lives better.
Elie
@Mnemosyne:
I see your point but Parliamentary systems can be very fragmented and dominated by small factions that are needed to actually set up a government. It can be a road to even more stagnation than what we have — and Lord knows we have stagnation.
We can see how hard it is to turn this big screw to actually roll the stone around… all the gears are tight and some are actually fused together. And yet we have folks screaming about why it take so long to roll that stone and they want their grain ground fine, thank you..
Adrienne
@Martin:
I didn’t say they were raping us on costs. When I was talking about insurance companies, I specifically referred to insurance companies. But, let’s not pretend that insurance companies are not, in fact, raping us. The rise in premiums has far outpaced the actual rise in healthcare costs – hence the 430% growth in profits from 2000-2007. 430%.
Oh, I’ve read them, and I know that they are “in” the Senate bill. But, that alone does not make this bill worth passing. Hell, we could pass that as a separate law right now. I’m down. The insurance companies are still state-wide monopolies.
@Elie: I think I’m done talking to you. The sarcasm, name calling, and the jabs at my knowledge base and/or intellect are just a little bit much and I’m not in the mood for a pissing contest.
NR
For fuck’s sake. If the Republicans wanted to lower the age of consent to six years old, the Democrats would propose lowering it to seven and a half as a compromise.
And lots of people here would be telling us to vote for Democrats because we couldn’t afford to let the Republicans get in.
ChicagoTom
And yet some of the most lasting and good changes happened from radicals like FDR (who granted was flawed) who used the events of the time to make large changes not piddly little incremental changes.
Where’s our New Deal? If we can’t get New Deal type changes in an environment like this one (where people have become disillusioned with corporate greed — banks, insurance companies etc — and populist anger is all around) when will we ever get something even close to the changes of the New Deal?
General Winfield Stuck
And what does that big progressive sellout Howard Dean have to say about the proposed compromise bill getting scored at CBO.
Lordy, we are doomed. Howard has gone over to the dark side of the Balloon Juice minion morons.
In a boost for the Senate health care deal reached yesterday, Howard Dean said in an interview with me moments ago that the current compromise contains “real reform,” and said that as it stands now, progressives could support it. Dean also confirmed various details about the deal that he’d learned in direct converstaions with Senators involved in the dicussions — detail that news orgs had mostly attributed to anonymous sources. Dean’s general support for the bill could give it a boost among progressives who say it falls short of real reform.
ChicagoTom
And they’d be calling you a selfish WATB who wants to take his ball to go home if you didn’t support the “compromise”.
JMY
Again…Kos and other people who wanted Dean at HHS won’t say a damn thing.
Adrienne
@ChicagoTom:
THIS.
Please note, I’m not really upset with Obama. I don’t want nor have I ever expected puppies and rainbows. I understand that he is doing what he can against enormous pressure from all sides. Has he disappointed me? Yes. But he’s only one man. Who I really reserve my ire for is the chickenshit, holier than thou, self important, self righteous assholes in the legislature who after 8 years of laying down on the job have now caught a whiff of themselves and decided they liked the new scent and Harry Reid who couldn’t whip a small pony into shape. To hell with THEM.
The Sheriff Is A Ni-
@NR: Hysterics much?
ChicagoTom
From the link you posted:
In one provision that liberals will dislike, Dean said he’d been told that the Medicare buy-in for people 55-64 would not have subsidies, potentially making the buy in unaffordable for many intended recipients. Dean said that if this isn’t fixed in conference negotiations, it could be a deal-breaker.
“That’s a huge problem that may tip this into being not real reform,” Dean said.
Dean confirmed what I reported here yesterday: The Medicare buy-in will be available as early as 2010, a provision he hailed for substantive and political reasons. “They’re making government-run single payer available to people under 65,” he said. “That’s a step in the right direction.”
Dean added, however, that it was unclear as of yet whether the early buy-in applied to all those without insurance or just those at high-risk (I was told yesterday that the latter was true). He said that if it’s high-risk only, that could also be a provision that falls short of real reform, and noted that the early buy-in would have to be made available to everybody.
Asked to respond to progressives who decry the compromise for not making government-run insurance available to all age groups who need it, Dean said:
“The question is, Is there enough of a kernel of real reform in the bill to make it possible for progressives to vote for it? Given the details we know today, I think there is. The group at largest risk is being taken care of, those over 55. There really is reform. Is there enough reform? No. But significant reform matters.”
Just cuz you saw a headline that you liked doesn’t mean the headline is true. Sure Dean thinks there might be some real reform, but not enough. He likes the idea of opening up medicare, but it isn’t enough. All in all hardly a ringing endorsement .
Mnemosyne
@ChicagoTom:
Here’s an idea: if you don’t threaten to stay home on Election Day every time something isn’t to your liking, maybe Democrats would think you might actually vote for them and therefore do more stuff that you like so you’ll keep voting for them instead of having to run around digging up votes from more conservative people who will actually show up at the polls even if they’re not 100 percent thrilled. I don’t think I heard fundamentalists in 2004 talking about not voting for Bush because he hadn’t banned abortion yet. In fact, they turned out in record numbers. Huh.
Again, liberals have been trying your strategy of not voting for Democrats for 41 years now. Where’s the success? Or do we just have to hang on a little longer because one of these days the Democrats will come crawling back to us, you’ll see.
“Staying home on Election Day” is the lefty equivalent of tax cuts. No matter how many times it doesn’t work, people remain absolutely convinced that if they just stick to the strategy, their sheer force of will can make it work.
General Winfield Stuck
@ChicagoTom:
Maybe they don’t teach the meaning of quotation marks over at Kos.
So Dean has some concerns about the details that could be better. Here is an idea. Why don’t you take all the buttrage about how Obama and dems have let you down and directing it toward getting those improvements Dean mentioned for the bill where HE ACTUALLY SAID CONTAINED “REAL REFORMS”.
Maybe you could lead a posse of Kos Kids to the front for the battle. You are not accomplishing anything here, but giving yourself the vapors.
JMY
lol, Dean still said that the compromise contained real reform, basically supporting the compromise.
harlana pepper
Chicks dig MarKos, his little pencil neck is sexy. Deal with it, dudes
Martin
@Adrienne:
Profit margins for the collective insurance industry has never exceeded 8%. If they went from 2% to 8%, that’s your 430% growth, but 8% is not outrageous margins. Sure, it’s 8% more than it needs to be for consumers, but even if we tossed the entire for-profit insurance industry and went to a no-profit system, all you’ve saved is 8%. And last year their margins were only a bit over 2%.
Like I’ve said, it’s fun (and not undeserving) to beat up on the insurance companies, but it’s a shitload of effort to do so, and you won’t get much in return. It doesn’t really solve the problem that needs solving.
Sortof true in most states. Is there any realistic chance that Congress is willing to take on the 10th amendment challenge on state insurance regulation? We need to wait for single-payer to do that – a fully federalized plan. All Congress can do now is nibble around the edges.
But it’s not true in the broader sense. Most for-profit insurers will sell you plans in all 50 states, but they are really goddamn expensive because for the handful of policyholders they might have in North Dakota, they need to set up agreements with pretty much everyone in the state. The up-front costs to enter a market is very high because you can’t reuse much of anything from the last state you entered – you need to toss the actuaries and underwriters at everything, and make sure everything complies with state law.
Martin
@General Winfield Stuck:
Won’t help. The crusaders are too busy crusadin’.
General Winfield Stuck
@harlana pepper:
LOL
Mnemosyne
@Martin:
IIRC, a lot of that claim is due to accounting shenanigans by the insurance companies. When your CEO is getting over $20 million in compensation every year, your profit margin goes down. It’s pretty easy to plead poverty for your company when you’ve moved those profits into your own personal bank account.
Martin
@Mnemosyne:
$20M? Are you kidding me? Insurance profits last year were $13B. Ok, let’s make it $18B with the executive pay tossed in.
We’re going to burn the fucking house down over $13B? Yeah, I know it adds up, but the most recent Senate CBO score was $65B per year in savings once everything got dialed in, even with all of the ‘insurance company giveaways’ that everyone is so sure is in there.
Stop throwing at the batter and win the damn game already.
kevina
Wow. You know some progressives are, in very small doses, ADORABLE. And by adorable, I mean naive, ignorant of how politics works, and utterly utopian. That cuteness degenerates until you end up with post #399 by NR, one of the fucking dumbest things I’ve read on teh intertrons.
Really, not even 11 months in, and the whole enterprise is doomed? Oh well, if you say so, then I guess the next 37 months are meaningless, huh? ALL IS LOST!! Oh noes!
But he’s better than Chicago Tom, aka “Do whatever I want on every issue or FUCK YOU!” If you find a pol. who almost always agrees with you, then they’re either a) lying or b) utter tools who are dangerous demagogues. Even if you disagree w/ that, how arrogant to say “Do this, this, this, etc., OR ELSE.” Asshole.
I didn’t vote for Obama just to create a narrow-minded, “pure” left-wing version of the GOP.
Wile E. Quixote
@John S.
No, he’s not Bizarro-Bush, and he’s not Lyndon Baines Johnson either, well he, is, but not on the right issue. Look at the way Johnson worked to get the civil rights bills passed when he was president. Look at the speeches he made in the deep south condemning southern racism, look at his condemnation of the KKK, look at the way he worked the senate to get the civil rights bills passed, bills that he could have ignored. Johnson could have easily coasted to re-election in 1964 while completely ignoring the issue of civil rights. He could have told Martin Luther King and the other leaders of the civil rights movement that it wasn’t the time to press for a comprehensive civil rights bill, that the country was still too shocked by the Kennedy assassination to do so. But he didn’t. He laid it on the line for civil rights, and it cost him. I have yet to see that kind of leadership on any issue from President Obama, again, if Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to civil rights was as half-assed and dilatory as Barack Obama’s commitment to HCR, reforming Wall Street or rolling back the excesses of the Bush years Barack Obama would not be President Obama today, in fact Barack Obama wouldn’t even be able to vote. So yes, as you put it “…[President] Obama can set an agenda, he can try to set the tone of Washington and he can try to convince his party to go along with him.”, it’s just that compared to past liberal presidents, such as FDR or LBJ, he’s done a lousy job of doing so.
But what really cost Johnson, what killed his chances of re-election in 1968 wasn’t the Great Society, or civil rights, no, it was his escalation of the Vietnam war, starting with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 and continuing with the lies of the next four years. In this area President Obama is just like Lyndon Johnson, he’s devised a policy that pisses off his base, who want us out of Afghanistan now, and is designed to appease some mythical group of centrists, or the columnists at the Washington Post and other village media outlets. He’s not going to appease the right, who are every bit as batshit insane as they were 45 years ago, he could nuke every country in the Middle East sans Israel tomorrow and promise to do to Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews in Germany and the right wing would still hate him. It’s certainly not a policy that is going to turn Afghanistan into a functioning country, much less a stable democracy and despite all of the whining about how we need to stabilize Pakistan it’s doubtful as to what it can do to unfuck the situation the Pakistani ISI created by subsidizing the Taliban and other militant for so many years to use them as proxies in Afghanistan.
President Obama isn’t a Bizarro Bush, he seems to be more like the second coming of JFK, and I don’t mean that in a good way because as pretty as he was JFK didn’t get a Hell of a lot done. It was Johnson who did all of the heavy lifting on civil rights and the great society. JFK just gave us Bay of Pigs, Vietnam escalation and nearly gave us World War III because of the brinksmanship games he was playing with the Soviet Union.
Tom Hilton
@MNPundit:
Sort of, but mostly no. Obama isn’t embracing the left as the left, and as a result lefties are in a snit. What Obama is doing is actually far more important and potentially transformative: he is trying to shift the middle, by selling progressive values as American values. And that’s exactly the kind of effort that has to succeed (whether it’s his or someone else’s) for the left ever to be influential in this country.
Wile E. Quixote
Blockquote quirks:
Blockquoting works in Safari now (Thanks John! And thanks to the programmer who fixed this who’s name I can’t remember from John’s announcement) but there are some quirks. You can’t have lines that contain whitespace and if you have lines that start with whitespace it breaks the blockquote. Still, it’s nice to have blockquoting, and the edit feature back, and I’m sure it’s good news for John McCain too.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Polling shows that a majority of the American public support a public option but the Blue Dogs are obstructing it so let’s replace them with REAL progressives!
I hear all the time that polling shows that the public supports a public option but how are the polling numbers distributed on a per representative basis? That is where the push comes to shove. You can want to rid the party of the ‘impure Democrats’ and replace them with progressives but will those voters in that area want one or will efforts to dump the blue dogs result in Republican wins? If the voters of a given district do not want a progressive representative then they will stay home or vote for the other side. End of story.
If Kos was to have his way on this I can’t help but think that the result would be a reality that he probably wouldn’t like, an outcome similar to NY-23 but in reverse. Politics is at its heart local and if you meddle in their affairs then you better be prepared if and when they reject you, and you better be willing to accept the results.
I am going to look at the next election just like I did the last one, I am going to vote for less damage and so far I think Obama is delivering on that about as well as he can given the circumstances. I know the President is going to do what he thinks he has to and there is not much I can do to influence it, I have not made him my vessel of win or fail because I live in the real world.
The hue and cry that everyone who doesn’t hate or despise Obama is an “O-bot” is wishful, fevered thinking, a way for the unhinged naysayers to try and dismiss everyone who isn’t sniffing their shit and liking it as unworthy of holding an opinion. The endless drumbeat of “Obama is a failure” has gone on without hesitation ever since he won the primary. Knowing how much hate Obama has taken since winning I am more than willing to dismiss many of the bleating voices of the internet and in our ‘press’ as just the usual ratfucking I have come to expect.
Like it was said by Tweety on his show today and I don’t like much of what he does say, being progressive means taking things one step at a time. I agree, those who want it all at once are not progressives. Our government is a pendulum, not a race car, radical change is the exception and not the rule.
While we need the supporters of progressive values to raise hell for their causes I do wish they would lose the fainting couch and deal with things as they develop. This ‘I’m pissed because Obama didn’t personally deliver a pony for me so I’m going home forever’ is almost childish in its use, like the person has no grasp of the political reality and thus can’t deal with or work within it. Yes, progressives aren’t always right and this just shows it. Work for what you want and don’t give up, you might help to eventually get us to where you think we ought to be as a society.
Or give up and know defeat. Your choice.
Mnemosyne
@Martin:
Hey, I’m on your side. I’m just saying that insurance companies’ cries of poverty are bullshit and shouldn’t be a major part of the discussion.
NobodySpecial
Give it up, Wile.
They’re so convinced the ‘Kos Kids’ are out of touch purists with nary a gleam of politics in their eyes that they’ll never acknowledge your arguments, no matter how reasonable you get with them over Obama or anything else. Of course, they never acknowledge that politics here is entirely coincidental, and that whatever it’s origins, Cole’s blog has settled into an entirely bland stew of animals, cooking, booze, and the politics that does leak through here is definitely a ‘pox on both your houses’ kind of jaded cynicism.
Now all that said, I like this place. Stew is fine in moderate doses. But I’d be shocked if any of the major pissers and moaners about Kossacks or Hamsher or whoever else is in the camp they’re supposed to bitch about today actually do anything political outside this blog. They like to wear that DFH tag until they actually, you know, have to pretend to associate with them.
N.B. This does not describe many or most of the posters here, and I think the ones who it does are readily apparent.
Mnemosyne
@Wile E. Quixote:
And of course Johnson did all of that completely on his own. He certainly didn’t lean on the image of a martyred president to strong-arm and shame Congress into going along with it.
If we end up getting legislation passed the way Johnson did because some asshole gets off a lucky shot and President Biden is able to tearfully browbeat Congress into doing what he wants because it’s what Obama would have wanted if his head hadn’t been shattered into a thousand pieces by a hollow-point bullet, so help me God I will hunt you down and beat the crap out of you.
General Winfield Stuck
@NobodySpecial:
Impressive rant. I bet you like the taste of your own buggers.
gwangung
@General Winfield Stuck: Really? Thought it was painfully narrow (painful because it seemed capable of so much more).
General Winfield Stuck
@gwangung:
I like Stew.
NobodySpecial
@General Winfield Stuck:
I see. You thought that was a RANT. Sad.
General Winfield Stuck
@NobodySpecial:
Small rant from small mind.
Elie
@NobodySpecial:
After throwing it down like that, Mr Special, I hope that YOU are involved.
Are you, btw?
I am and that is the source of my complaint about Kos and Ms Hamsher…running a blog is not community organizing or grass roots mobilization. Its closer for some to marketing and advertising a brand..
What have you worked on to accomplish progressive goals where you live? Show me yours and I will show you mine…
Nick
@Zifnab: If kos wants a win, he should play Candy Lane…in politics, a win is when you lose the least.
Elie
@General Winfield Stuck:
heh,heh,heh —well put
scudbucket
@Mnemosyne:
And of course Johnson did all of that completely on his own. He certainly didn’t lean on the image of a martyred president to strong-arm and shame Congress into going along with it.
It is interesting that you would lean on erratic speculation, and Scenarios Of The Possible, to justify assertions that one might otherwise think were supported by facts.
NobodySpecial
@General Winfield Stuck:
I’m sorry you got nothing.
Nick
@ricky: Was that even a victory? I mean they BARELY beat Lieberman in fucking Connecticut and then couldn’t get Lamont more than 40% of the general election vote.
NobodySpecial
@Elie:
Fuck you. Prove my bonafides? I keep knocking doors and making calls in one of the reddest fucking strongholds in Illinois. Every fucking election to get rid of that prick Manzullo. Can’t get a decent candidate from the organizations, but still keep moving the feet to help fine folks being thrown to the wolves.
And, yeah, on this issue, I’ve made my calls, wrote my op-eds, done my due diligence on the petitions, argued it up one side and down another with the local crackers. Push that rock up the hill, only to be heckled by both sides because I actually believe that universal health care is a fine idea to fight for, rather than something to tut-tut about on a blog. But whatever, dude, wave your epeen around like it means something.
General Winfield Stuck
@NobodySpecial:
Your little rant was about the dumbest fucking thing I have read in a while, “Pox on both your houses” geesh,
And the HCR reform could have been like bartering for a used car, was a close second. Sack of Hammers grade stoopid.
NobodySpecial
@General Winfield Stuck:
I’m sorry you still got nothing.
Nick
@Libby:
that would basically mean in the way the districts are drawn, we’d NEVER EVER win a majority.
General Winfield Stuck
@NobodySpecial:
That’s what all the grasshoppers say. When they have nothing.
Would you like some BJ stew? not too much, but juuust enough.
NobodySpecial
No, people have to fight in 2010, because of redistricting. I imagine Illinois looking like Texas, and an army of the Illinois GOP’s finest invading the halls of Congress.
Ew.
NobodySpecial
@General Winfield Stuck:
Evidently you didn’t read my post too closely. I understand.
Elie
@NobodySpecial:
Hey, btw — YOU were the one saying you bet that we here on B-J didnt do much. Now you get hinkty with me for responding to your erroneous comment. I would say that is hypocritical.
I don’t have to call you names but I make no apologies for taking you up on your own point.
I also have done my share of doorbelling and phone banking. I have also successfully got through a storm water program to prevent the further deterioration of our Bay. It took three years and meeting with a lot of folks in our rural area who both resented our efforts and did not believe that water from their livestock’s shit does not run downhill. They relented over time, but there was no miracle. We just kept talking to them and meeting with the County council people to get the legislation (ordinance) passed.
Also worked to get many many local progressives in office and tried to work with the local state Democratic Party when they let me. They arent much for new people actually talking much. They could use a bit of new blood, better attitudes and modernization…
General Winfield Stuck
@NobodySpecial:
I think I read it close enough. Just razzing you for the damning with faint praise and cool weasel wording.
And many here were the original DFH”s. fwiw.
NobodySpecial
@Elie:
Actually, when it comes to namecalling, you getting on anyone takes several cakes, given your performance in this very thread. I’ll also note it’s very hard to build your ‘progressive grassroots’ when you keep tearing down the members you’ve got to work with to start building them. Why the deuce should people want to be part of your movement if the movement ends up with people you make fun of and belittle?
As far as those of us angry tonight, I can’t speak for anyone else. But my life expectancy is dropping day by day faster than normal, and I’ve just been told that after the work we did that my chances of ever seeing insurance in an Obama administration are exactly the same as they were in a W administration. To put it mildly, that pisses me off. I’m trying like the devil not to take it out on anyone, but having people bitch about ‘purity trolls’ and complaining about them EBIL PEEPILS on that self-righteous website isn’t helping.
Mnemosyne
@scudbucket:
I’m not sure what you mean. Are you saying that Kennedy was not assassinated, which was the only thing that put Johnson in a position of being able to get the Civil Rights Act passed after it had stalled out in Congress?
Johnson fought for the Civil Rights Act knowing full well that he was an accidental president. That’s quite different than being elected president in your own right. We have sometimes been lucky in our accidental presidents — Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman are a couple of other examples — but it’s a pretty rare position to be in, and even rarer that the accidental president is able to capitalize on it. Hell, Truman was FDR’s third VP, so we could easily have seen a President Wallace or President Garner instead.
Wilson Heath, Moron Minion 3rd Class
Did a thread happen while I was at work? Help me, FSM!
What I got from Markos’ complaint was not so much bitching at Obama but the DNC. The subtlety of the politics that Markos might have missed was that Obama’s imprimatur on the DNC beg might have been a sweetener for the obstructionist pieces of crap to buy in. It tastes like a turd sandwich to be asked by Obama to support people like Nelson, Conrad, Lincoln, and Bayh, but I figure us interested civilians have only been handed half of the sandwich. Obama’s got the other half on his plate. He’s got to keep working with this Congress until we give him better.
So I think we shouldn’t so much publicly bitch about the DNC solicitation as just getting on to working on the more-and-better strategy, including primary challenges for the dead wood. Yeah, if the alternative is an actual Teabagger, strategic concerns come in, but NY-23 is heartening.
(And yes, I fraking well want a better bill.)
NobodySpecial
@Mnemosyne:
Johnson also had a much stronger record on Civil Rights than did Kennedy. Sad but true. Johnson also had his time in the Senate to teach him how to muscle legislators.
General Winfield Stuck
@NobodySpecial:
I am sorry that you apparently have some health problems and can’t get insurance or care. At least, that is what it sounds like. But you have it wrong, imo, by first assuming this bill will not help you. as no one knows what it will contain. And I bet for low income folks, or those who can afford insurance but can’t for other reasons like pre-existing conditions will get covered. Picking a rigid course of one possible solution and going galt on support of dems trying to get something passed that could also get the job done is ill advised at this point.
The folks who took charge, or the gang of ten are the best champions for good reform we have had, like Schmuer, Harkin, and Rockefeller who said the bill put a smile on his face. Political realities are just that, and have to be dealt with through the system, which in the case of HCR is frought with difficulty that has made it impossible since FDR and Truman tried it. Obama has no magic wand.
Dean says it’s a good bill needing some tweaks, and with liberals now doing the writing of the thing, try to have faith, and fight to get those changes. A food fight with us will not achieve anything. this is our complaint with GOS and others. And the name calling goes both ways, as can be gleaned from this thread.
Sly
If anyone who walked into this thread looking to fill the role of Progressive Pollyanna on Obama not absolutely demanding Medicare-For-All or a PO tied to Medicare rates, I ask these simple questions:
Do you know how medical reimbursement works in the United States as it pertains to Medicare?
Do you know why Senators from rural states will NEVER sign on to any HCR plan that expands the number of people who will be reimbursing doctors or hospitals through those rates?
If you don’t, stop talking and learn how legislative compromises work. Understand how you don’t begin a compromise by insisting on a complete non-starter. You seriously think Obama or Senate Democrats stomping their feet about Medicare-For-All would have done anything? This isn’t haggling over a fucking used car. This is about trying to save lives.
“Oh but gee willickers, we might have to all go out and buy heavily subsidized insurance from one of several non-profits operating in a program that is regulated by a Federal Agency with bargaining experience! CORPORATE CRONYISM! OBAMA IS A SELLOUT! CTHULU FHTAGN!”
Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break.
Mnemosyne
@NobodySpecial:
No argument here. But the fact remains that Johnson was in a position to get the Civil Rights Act passed because some asshole with a rifle put a hole in Jack Kennedy’s head. If not for that, it would have either stalled out in Congress — again — or Kennedy would have gotten all the credit for what probably would have been a watered-down bill by the time it got to him.
If it sounds like I’m criticizing Johnson, I’m not. He was an incredibly shrewd political operator who knew how to move the levers of power to get what he wanted. (Hence his nickname, “Master of the Senate.”) When he was thrust into a position of power he never expected to be in, he jumped in headfirst. But saying that Obama should be able to act just like Johnson did is comparing apples to oranges.
The Sheriff Is A Ni-
@Mnemosyne: Not to mention that a good part of Johnson’s expense for getting the Civil Rights Act and The Great Society can be found on a shiny black wall on the Mall.
NobodySpecial
@General Winfield Stuck:
Sadly, from the looks of what is public, there will be a large hole. Between 27 and 55, those of us who make too much over the poverty line won’t get a subsidy – which will be a tax break, anyways. I can’t spend a refund next year on a premium today, no matter how awesome I am. Futhermore, I CAN get insurance now – if I wanted to avoid doing other little things, like eating. And there’s nothing in this bill so far that makes the insurance companies suddenly come to me with a decent plan I can afford.
Further, I’ve never advocated – and neither has Kos – disassociating ourselves from the Democratic Party. But we reserve the right not to send money to be used by the likes of Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson when all they’ve done on this subject is piss on our backs.
Mnemosyne
I have to say, it’s funny how the people who insist that they’re totally not voting in 2010 disappear as soon as I ask them why they think continuing to pursue the same failed strategy for 41 years is a good idea.
Nick
@Mnemosyne: Keeping in mind that what Johnson eventually got WAS a watered-down bill.
Nick
@Mnemosyne: Keeping in mind that what Johnson eventually got WAS a watered-down bill.
JMY
@NobodySpecial:
You are absolutely right. You don’t have to do that. However, Kos supported the 50-State strategy of Dean. And it got Democrats a majority in the Senate and an increase in the House. Part of the strategy involved supporting centrist or moderate Democrats – Blue Dog Democrats. There was an obvious risk in that many of the Democrats who were elected in conservative states were not always going to side with Dems on certain issues and this is one of them. This was one of the consequences of such a strategy, so when people like Markos are angry about Blue Dogs and their involvement in health-care and how it watered down the PO, I just have to laugh because Kos had to know that it could happen supporting Dems who are not liberal.
NobodySpecial
@JMY:
Lincoln was elected in 1998, Nelson in 2000. Slightly before the 50 state strategy.
Nick
@NobodySpecial: So? 17 of the 39 no votes in the House, just about half, were elected in 2006 or 2008, since the advent of the 50 State Strategy.
Mnemosyne
@Nick:
Yep. That’s why he had to go back and get the 1968 bill out of Congress. But for some reason the fact that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not, in fact, cover some very large areas of civil rights (like housing) and had to be revisited four years later with more legislation is never referred to as Johnson FAIL.
General Winfield Stuck
I just want to say one last thing on this thread, hopefully.
It is my own personal opinion and I do not claim it is correct or true, just my own perception of Kos or Markos.
He was one of the first people I started following on the blogs and tubes, well before the GOS became the giant it is today. He was then, and I still believe now a fairly pragmatic democrat with good common sense and sense of political realities and recognizing them in his world view. Certainly liberal, but sober minded as well
So when I hear him going native these days over deviations in the netroots narrative, I can’t help but wonder if some, or even a lot of it is to bring the red meat to his followers who are not as pragmatic. I just don’t see him having changed that much to a reactionary political soul, but I could be wrong, most certainly.
JMY
@NobodySpecial:
You are totally missing my point. The 50 State strategy was utilized in order to get Democrats strong support and elected in “Red States” – to win in states that usually go for Republicans. As a result, some Democrats in conservative states were able to win. For people to complain about Lincoln, Nelson, or any other conservative, centrist Democrat is fine, BUT understand that there was a risk with that strategy. You can’t expect elected officials to follow along on certain issues because they have a D in front of their name. These people are going to vote based on their constituency for the most part. I’m pretty sure that is part of what Kos and other liberal blogs are complaining about as well, but with Kos in particular, he was a supporter of that strategy knowing full well that this was one of the risks, so now he wants to complain?
Elie
@NobodySpecial:
That is just amazing that you would post that comment…
“I’ll also note it’s very hard to build your ‘progressive grassroots’ when you keep tearing down the members you’ve got to work with to start building them. Why the deuce should people want to be part of your movement if the movement ends up with people you make fun of and belittle?”
Irony abounds. Please read your own and the comments of your compatriots from the left previously…honestly…
I am sorry about your health care woes. Also, I am a nurse and seriously worry about the current health care system as well as planning for its improvement over the long haul…and its the long haul that you are understandably upset about — that the fix isnt absolute and certain across all areas dealing with your needs. I can appreciate that…
That said, the people on this blog may be, what you called us, “beef stew”, but we are solid and we like discussion and argument — even from those with whom we disagree strongly.
I would like to think that the left liberals actually understand reality and the process of change for doing something this big. I just dont see much evidence of it in the comments here today. I am not willing to bear exagerrated pronouncements or to indulge people who do not honesly follow an argument with responses pertinent to the points being made. Way too much of that today too.
Well, I wish you the best in your situation. I will continue to challenge your point of view when I think its warranted.
Buh bye
Alex S.
The number of comments on this thread almost beats the legendary Jane Hamsher thread. Where are you Jane? And also, noone does the circular firing squad as well as the Democrats.
Nick
@Mnemosyne: Because Johnson won a political victory and got to write the history.
So will Obama with healthcare, he knows that. In ten years, what are people going to think about liberals who complain “oh Obama didn’t get a good enough healthcare bill passed?”
The respone is going to be “But he got one passed that makes us a much better place than before him”
Either that or he moves to pass changes to the bill in the future a la Johnson and they are ignored.
Elie
@Wilson Heath, Moron Minion 3rd Class:
Ha,ha,ha,…Moron Minion 3rd class —
Little Dreamer
@ChicagoTom:
I didn’t say it was, so stop acting like I did. I said liberalism isn’t the norm, what is the norm is moderation (the middle, being of neither extreme).
Lincolnshire Poacher
Mr. Cole reminds me a lot of a relative of mine. He was a card carrying member of the GOP, received one of those “Lifetime Achievement Awards” too and when Bush 2 rolled around said “Hell no!” The first Bush was fine, Reagan was cool, etc, but not G W Bush. So like Mr. Cole he is waiting for the Republican Party to return to its ways and waiting, so to speak in Limboland. Not quite what they call Republicans nowadays but not Democrat either. At best both would fall right around Kent Conrad or Walt Minnick.
When people are “shocked” that Mr. Cole is “shocked” that Kos is “shocked,” well that is the real person. Balloon Juice may be a link from The Daily Kos but they certainly are not on the same page. Mr. Cole wants his party back and for the meantime is an independent observer, holding up the mirror so to speak on both sides.
brad
@nobodyspecial
Not sure about your personal health status and of course wish you the best. That said, you’re a bit off on the policy specifics:
– Last I checked, anyway, eligibility for subsidies was pretty far above poverty level, though no one knows what the exact thresholds/levels might end up looking like. But this point is far more important than whether or not there’s a public option–strong subsidies to private companies/nonprofits might subsidize some waste (very bad, of course!) but help many millions of people get covered; insufficient subsidies and a public option will create a public option that no one can afford, resulting in far fewer people getting covered. The point is that subsidy levels are key.
Actually, the bills include various underwriting restrictions, which means, in effect, that if you have some preexisting condition that increases your rates (but doesn’t make you uninsurable), you would wind up paying less. Basically, insurance companies agreed to curtail underwriting in exchange for mandates, etc.
Beyond that, in terms of affordability, the biggest challenge to affordability doesn’t stem from insurance profits but from unnecessary medical care and waste from hospitals and doctors, which is a problem regardless of whether humana or medicare is paying the hospital.
(Adding that, as a long, long time lurker at this site, my frustration with sites like daily kos, etc. is not that I disagree with them in principle–in my dictatorship, we’d have single payer health care–but that they aren’t bothering to learn the policy specifics of what they’re advocating and as a result, fetishize relatively minor things like the public option. I’m okay with the impractical idealism, even though I’m more of a pragmatic cynic.)
Steeplejack
Wow–574 comments. I think that is the most I have ever seen on a Balloon Juice thread. I guess I need to actually go read (some of) them.
Rossco
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
I quit DK a year ago. I just hate those “rescue rangers” and the mountains of useless diaries. It’s all so fucking precious. And Markos’ whiny temper tantrum just reminded me again why I hate DK.
Platonicspoof
I think it was at the GOS that I heard the shorter – we can push purity and our personal agendas at the local level and in the primaries, but in the general elections, voting for the lesser of two evils is far more moral than sitting at home. See Iraq.
/I read 250 of the comments, took a nap and dreamed that the comments’ text had changed to red.
What’s that mean?
soullite
John Cole is a very conservative Democrat. It’s not shocking that he’s not demoralized. Read his post, he set the bar so low that so long as Obama wasn’t a drooling retard, he’d be okay with him.
The problem with that is, most Democratic voters are a lot more progressive than he is. Virtually everyone who does GOTV work is a lot more progressive. Virtually every who answers the phones are a lot more progressive. John Cole is a guy on a blog, he can make arguments but he has no real ability to get others to the polls. Activists bring more than just their own votes to the table, they very often literally provide transportation and motivation to other people.
I can bring my own family. Alone, my vote is really worth 5 votes because I can convince 4 other people to vote who would otherwise just stay home. If I don’t do that, you don’t just lose me. You lose those 4 other individuals as well, because those folks only voted to humor me.
General Winfield Stuck
@soullite:
If you weren’t new here and a dumbass, you would know that Cole spent much time during the last election working phone banks. Your lesson for the day, senor wanker.
Liz
Just awesome.
Mnemosyne
@General Winfield Stuck:
soullite spends his life whining about how the Democrats aren’t pure enough for him and he’s totally not going to vote for them and then can’t figure out why they don’t beg him for his vote. He’s the purest of the purity trolls.
Most people learn around age 6 that when your only trick is to take your ball and go home, eventually the other kids are just going to find someone else with a ball. The ones who don’t figure it out seem to become lefty purists.
gex
I don’t disagree with John, but I can understand where Kos is coming from. In this country we seem to let the conservatives play the game any way they can to maximum effect, and we keep playing the chumps and play by the rules. Whether that be political tactics, procedure/process, or accepting that compromise is just part of democracy (while compromising with liars and charlatans, mind you), it gets tiring.
I suppose the system is actually broken if anyone is 100% happy with how things are going. And here’s to hoping that Obama can change things enough that he might actually be considered a disappointment of a president. Right now, he’s so far away from recent precedent, that John’s take is spot on. Some day, we shouldn’t have to cheer for grammatical sentences and avoiding being an asshole, though.
General Winfield Stuck
@Tom Hilton:
I want to say that this likely the smartest thing stated on this thread, and for that matter, many others. Sorry I didn’t say so yesterday.
matt
Fuck em all…the only thing this years debate has resulted in is me still unable to pay for insurance…but now I get penalized for that!
Centrists need to learn, the center is a republican stronghold…the media tells everybody that every day! McCain is a Centrist for god’s sake.
Let the whole system collapse and then build from scratch!
liberal
@Da Bomb:
That’s not an ad hominem attack, meaning I didn’t commit the ad hominem fallacy. So, you’re just making a fool of yourself also.
Da Bomb
@liberal: As always keep schreeching and making absolutely no sense.
Lisa K.
@Shade Tail:
LOL, the democratic base it and of itself couldn’t elect Charlie Brown captain of the baseball team. That is why your argument about the democratic base means nothing in terms of who wins.
Sorry. But keep frothing.