Obama’s planned “non-security discretionary spending freeze” sure sounds like a stupid gimmick to me. The politics of it may work, but I agree with Steve Benen that:
So, if the proposal isn’t really going to change much, why is this disappointing? Because it fully embraces the conservative narrative, instead of using the power of the bully pulpit to explain why conservatives have it wrong.
I’m afraid we may be entering the school uniforms/”welfare reform” phase of the Obama presidency. Maybe this was inevitable, given the (inexplicable) power of conservative narratives. And maybe this is just another form of eleven-dimensional chess.
But it bums me out.
Joshua Norton
11 dimensional chess is just another game. And people are getting tired of it.
arguingwithsignposts
Totally OT, but I just called my rep.’s office (DC) and talked to their aide for health care and registered that I support some kind of health care reform, whatever the rep. can get behind – bans on recissions, pre-existing conditions, etc. He’s a cretinous rethug who voted against SCHIP, but TimF shamed me into contacting him. I mentioned that millions of Americans will face bankruptcy thanks to health care costs if some kind of solution isn’t found. The aide (a she) sounded nice, and was helpful, but I couldn’t help but feel it was shouting down the well.
James
The politics wont work:
Nate Silver:
First reactions aren’t always the best ones, but my first reaction to tonight’s news is that it’s a mistake on par with John McCain’s “suspending my campaign” gaffe.
Mark Thoma:
Instead we get cheap political tricks that are likely to backfire. How will this look, for example, if there’s a double dip recession, or if unemployment follows the dismal path that the administration itself has forecast?
This seems to be a case of the former Clinton people in the administration (or wannabees) trying to relive their glory days instead of realizing that those days are gone, the world is different now and it calls for different solutions.
I wasn’t in favor of having so many Clinton administration people in this administration, and nothing so far has caused me to change that assessment. They’re nothing but trouble.
Paul Krugman:
itâs a betrayal of everything Obamaâs supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view â and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, âI feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.â
Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks donât count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.
Napoleon
Change we can believe in. We vote for the Dem who then adopts the loosing Reps policies. What could go wrong.
It is only inevitable in the sense that the Dems are completely spineless when it comes to pushing their position.
valdivia
Sorry if I repeat something I said in that long thread yesterday–this has been brewing for months, Orzag said they were preparing 3 Budgets and 2 contained cuts and freezes. This idea regarding the deficit has been in the works for a long long time. It is unfortunate that is coming out now because it seems everyone has decided this is gimmick, something to do with Brown winning last week, trying to tack to the center because of poll numbers. Can someone tell me how Obama went back in time to achieve this or foresaw that he would need this THIS WEEK just in time to salvage his presidency? I think it is fair to disagree with the idea, to hate the lingo but to make this a strategery decision that has to do with the politics of the last few weeks is total bs, it is inferring causality of something that is simply happening at the same time but is NOT cause and effect.
Embracing that narrative, which everyone seems to be doing in spite of the timing impossibility, is once again embracing the fucking Republican frame. So can we please have a different sort of discussion about this based on how this came about in reality, and when we actually know the effing details?
geg6
I hate this shit. It has the smell of FAIL all over it. This kind of shit never goes well for Dems and if this is Obama’s response to what has happened over the last year, then he is just begging to be a one-termer who never accomplishes anything. I can’t believe this is the same guy who ran such an incredible campaign for two years against some of the most entrenched and powerful politicians of our times. Jekyll and Hyde.
Legalize
On the other hand, this COULD be just a gimmick to give cover to the conservadems, so they can say, “see we cut spending,” while voting for HCR.
But I doubt it.
mr. whipple
Maybe this was inevitable, given the (inexplicable) lack of power of the House and Senate to accomplish jack shit.
shortstop
It’s not eleven-dimensional chess. It appears to be animal panic. And conservative economic narratives are The Undead and no one has a clear head shot, but jesus cristur, couldn’t Obama and the caucus have least tried to get out the message that micro- and macroeconomics aren’t the same?
How the hell do you ever reverse course now after painting yourself into this corner?John McCain must be wetting his Depends in glee.
brendancalling
when faced with a choice of a republican or a democrat that acts like a republican, voters will choose the real republican every time.
It’s a pity the democratic party hasn’t learned that.
shortstop
Okay, we know, but how does Orszag working on this for months not make it a gimmick? And what does releasing it in the current atmosphere say about their understanding of how it will be perceived?
mattH
For all that there were complaints about “progressives” not knowing exactly what the concept of an Overton Window is, at least they seem to have heard of it, whereas the Democrats up there don’t even seem to have a clue.
Redshift
Yeah. It reminds me of nothing so much as the Democratic responses to the blatantly false Republican attacks like “death panels” and funding for undocumented immigrants, which were so often of the form “that’s not true! — but we’ll write a provision that prohibits it anyway.”
So now we get “our spending isn’t excessive and the vast majority of the deficits conservatives are braying about were created by Bush — but we’ll adopt policies opposing excessive spending anyway.” Why can’t Democratic officials ever learn the lesson that when your opponent is willing to openly lie about what you’re doing, going out of your way to prove it’s extra-special false doesn’t stop them from lying, it just rewards it?
“Proving” they’re lying only works if we had a media that cared to point out the lies, and if we had that, we wouldn’t have any need to prove them wrong through policy.
John S.
What bums me out are all the usual suspects waving their hands in the air and screaming that Obama is Herbert Hoover and worse than Bush. None of the criticism is fact-based, because it’s all 100% speculation given that there are no actual details yet about the proposal. Everyone is claiming this is a knee-jerk reaction to Scott Brown, despite the fact the NYT reported that Peter Orszag’s team has been working on it for months.
There is no functional difference between the teabaggers and the firebaggers. Both stick to emotionally based arguments, avoid facts like the plague and cater their argument to the preconceived notion that Obama is the second coming of Hitler. Both camps seem to think the longer and louder they scream for blood, the more likely someone will listen to them. At least when Bush was in office, he only got this behavior from his detractors – Obama gets it from his “supporters”, too.
I’m happy to wait until the details emerge before jumping on the poutrage bandwagon. I know my gut tells me that this is a bad idea and will spell disaster, but since I’m not a conservative, I prefer to let my head do the thinking.
Why oh why
Obviously a lot of people should apologize to John McCain, because that spending freeze was his idea; and they called him “stupid” and “economically illiterate”!
Next: Obama making jokes about bear DNA studies (“I don’t know if it was a paternity test”) during the State of the Union speech.
Mattsky
Obama hammered McCain for suggesting the same thing.
Redshift
Oh, and the thing that’s most depressing is that apparently no one at the White House has ever read this.
valdivia
@shortstop:
because the Budget has to be released this week or next? what they should have held the fucking budget so that people would not go running around like idiots reading shit into it?
Also: we have no idea yet what this is like and how it fits into the rest of the budget so we cannot prejudge that this is a gimmick. The gimmick might be calling it a freeze when in reality it is nothing like it. Again we do not know.
Osprey
“See, we care about the deficit!” While they turn around and continue to piss money down the ‘Homeland SomethinglikeSecuritybutnotreally’ hole.
Because, hey, airplanes flying into each other and crashing because of a lack of air traffic controllers or overworked ones (and for those who don’t know it’s pretty stressful) is not nearly as scary as a booga-booga Moozlin living in a cave on the other side of the fucking planet.
GregB
The ultimate win-win scenario for the GOP.
President Obama will embrace their failing policies and yet the GOP will be able to blame Obama and his soshulism for the failures of their policies.
-G
Comrade Jake
Benen also has a post up of a video between Maddow and Jared Bernstein that sheds additional light on all of this.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@John S.: “Iâm happy to wait until the details emerge before jumping on the poutrage bandwagon.”
Yup and I am tuning this shit out. Manic-Progressivism is spreading and I ain’t going to participate in passing it around. Fucking pansies feeding ratfuckers.
I’ve got better things to do. Later.
valdivia
@John S.:
this. exactly.
@Mattsky:
once again you are saying this is a copy of McCains plan when in reality Obama is suggesting exactly what he did in the debates. I love the way people just read whatever the fuck they want into stuff.
I am done arguing on this today I see it is–Obama is Teh Fail day. Off to be busy with something more productive.
Brien Jackson
Ya know, I try really, really hard to stay away from “STFU” territory, but a lot of netrooters really can STFU at this point. They’ve been screaming “get populist!” for how long? Well, there’s lots of polls that show that the unwashed masses have nebulous concerns about “government spending” and “the deficit.” Is it stupid? Of course it’s stupid. But that’s what populism gets you! You can’t demand more populism and complain that you don’t like the cheap stunt the politician in question pulls because, surprise, you happen to be in the minority of self-fancied populists.
I find the notion pretty noxious, and the framing is annoying, but it looks like a cheap political stunt that won’t have much in the way of any policy impact.
John S.
Ah, and here go all the good little lemmings running over the “just like McCain” cliff.
Nevermind that McCain proposed freezing EVERYTHING except defense, while at this stage Obama has already taken a lot of other social programs and stimulus spending off the chopping block…they’re exactly the same!
Some of you are fucking ridiculous.
El Tiburon
Well, as long as we don’t make too much of a fuss.
I hope Hamsher and her little Hamsherites keep quiet. We don’t want to demoralize the troops.
We need to continue to carry the water.
Wait, did I just quote Rush Limbaugh?
Dork
Fucking YIKES. Freezing money on children (that’s how it will be played), blue-collar americans (farming), and national parks, while pork-spending the fuck outta the military and nat-sec apparati.
Please tell me this is a joke.
SenyorDave
If it is the first step in having a serious discussion about the deficit, I don’t consider it a cheap political trick. If it is an end to itself, it’s crap.
There is nothing wrong with running a deficit in tough times as long as it is counterbalanced by surpluses when times are good. We have a huge structural deficit in this country, and if Obama doesn’t use at least part of the SOTU to discuss that fact, then to me his presidency has become a joke, and he will be marginally better than Bush.
shortstop
No, they shouldn’t have held the fucking budget, valdivia. I’m annoyed and I’m flailing a little bit because I’m so fed up with recent messaging failures. Look, regardless of how long they’ve been working on this — and it’s not news to me that it’s been several months — it’s going to have exceptionally poor political effects.
John S.
@Brien Jackson and @valdivia:
Ok, so there are still a few people willing to keep a cool head about this and wait to see what devils are in the details.
Glad I’m not the only one.
shortstop
Is anybody here actually saying that this is “just like McCain”? Or are we correctly pointing out that that’s how it will look/be ridiculously easily spun to voters?
Edited: Okay, Mattsky appears to be saying it. No one else.
qwerty42
I think it is preposterous. But you have folks wanting “jobs, jobs, jobs” and “middle class relief” and “deficit reduction” and seemingly unaware there is any contradiction. The mantra that “the stimulus did nothing” seems widespread; John McCain, with characteristic inability to understand finance, economics or even checkbook balancing, effectively suggests the US default on its bonds (thanks Wonkette). Meanwhile the Democrats look all the more absurd as they cannot figure out what to do.
Some questions, which seem interrelated:
–If Coakley was so bad a campaigner (she might have been a great senator, but seemed to have no appetite for, you know, asking people to vote for her. AGs are not typically beloved figures anyway, but …), how did she win the primary?
— Are all campaigns in the Bay State as clueless? Did no one on her staff notice her falling numbers? Geeze, I thought they knew retail politics there.
— And to cap off the whole sorry mess: no one in Washington thought about what would follow a loss? In practice, Larrison says Browns voters were split about 50-50 on it.
Robertdsc-iphone
How about this:
Obama reiterates the desire to pass the Senate HCR through the House, then the fixes through reconciliation. Per the OMB report, the bill will lower the deficit, the end of the Bush tax cuts will lower the deficit, the freeze will lower the deficit, and the return of the Iraq forces will require less spending for DOD. Win across the board.
aimai
Man, talk about the hive mind. I just ended a comment over at SteveM’s place with “School uniforms” and then wondered if anyone would get it. Should have started the morning with Balloon Juice, I guess.
aimai
AkaDad
We don’t even know what Obama’s plan is yet, so the smart move is to trash it and Obama.
I’m gonna stop talking now, so I don’t say something I’ll regret later.
Brien Jackson
@John S.:
Of course. We don’t spend a lot of money on “non-defense discretionary spending” in the grand scheme of things, but we spend enough on enough line items that it’s a given that there’s money going to more or less useless programs that are perfectly worthy of being cut. Given a proposal to boost spending in some places and offset that by cutting other areas, of course I’m going to wait and see exactly what the detailed proposal is. I mean geezus, the netroots really is trying to rival the wingnutsphere for sheer righteous stupid aren’t they?
Anyway, this is what you get when you pine for populism in a policy illiterate populace. Live by it, die by it. At least he isn’t following Vandenheuval’s plea to channel William Jennings Bryan.
Da Bomb
@valdivia: Didn’t Obama campaign on going through the budget line by line and cutting out waste?
HCR, Social Security, Jobs Reform, are all excuded.
There will be increases in child care and student loans. That’s good.
That’s all of the information that’s out there. That’s it.
This hyperventilating over budget cuts is so premature. But that’s how this political era has been, constantly hyperventilating prematurely over leaked information.
My complaint is that “spending freeze” was not the best name for it.
m3872
Huh?
The largest most powerful news organization in the WORLD (News Corp) spends $Bs a day pushing the conservative message.
The editorial pages of their newspapers & WaPo push conservative agendas every day.
The Chamber of Commerce pushes conservative ideals every day.
How can you not see how obvious it is that right-wing ideologies naturally control the news cycles?
Da Bomb
@John S.: No you are not.
I always wait for the plan to be completely unveiled first before I turn up the massive freakout button to “11”.
Tomlinson
You mean, he actually fights for what he promised?
That’s what I’m looking for in the SOTU. I don’t expect to hear it, and I am even less sanguine about any of it actually coming through, but that’s what I’m looking for.
And if it isn’t something about like what you’ve laid out, the question becomes, why should I support democrats rather than working to make the republican party sane?
And the answer is, there is no reason.
Max
@valdivia: I’m with you. It appears a day off the blogs is just what is ordered.
Maybe tomorrow, after the SOTU, it will be productive to return.
Rick Taylor
I posted this over at Booman:
I haven’t always been happy with Obama. I thought it was a mistake to escalate our mission in Afghanistan. I’ve been frustrated he hasn’t taken more of a public hand with the details of health care reform. I’ve been troubled that we’re still keeping people we’ve tortured in prison without trial.
But one thing I’ve appreciated is through it all, when I’ve agreed with him, when I’ve disagreed with him, he has always acted like an adult, and he as always treated us like adults. When he escalated the war, he at least didn’t try to pretend it was a noble enterprise, but talked entirely in terms of our goals. He’s been up front that the budget crises we face has no quick fixes.
So I’m deeply disappointed. Making meaningless cuts to show he’s serious about the budget is the sort of nonsense I’ve grown accustomed to hearing from Republicans and blue dogs. The only defense I’ve heard is that these cuts are meaningless and will have no effect, which is not a defense at all. Plus I don’t buy they’re meaningless. Even if they have no effect, this will shift the conversation as to what we can do and what we can’t do; for example, it sounds like a second fiscal stimulus is completely off the table, regardless of what actually happens in the economy.
So I’m waiting to hear what he says. His speeches are always excellent, and I’m sure he’ll say something that makes me feel a little better. Something that convinces me he understands the bigger picture, and at the same time makes me wonder if he does understand it, why is he doing this. But actions speak louder than words. Maybe somehow this will be done in the context of something larger that makes sense. So far I’m not hopeful, but I’d be more than happy to be proven wrong and to eat crow.
geg6
@John S.:
Well, speaking for myself only, I am calling this a bullshit move, as I called it a bullshit move months ago when I first heard Orzag float it. And never brought up John McCain. But knowing a bit of history about spending freezes and the Dems that capitulated to such stupidity, especially in horrible economic situations similar to today, I have no problem in saying this is completely stupid and just more capitulation to the right. Because that is always how it has happened. Please feel free to show me how a Dem ever won on such a move and how any types of spending freezes on these discretionary items that disproportionately affect middle class and blue collar families has been successful for Dems. People like you are saying that criticizing moves like this is buying into GOP rhetoric. But how is it that accepting GOP budget rhetoric and action (even if it is some sort of bait and switch) is somehow more supportive of Democratic goals?
I find that a very curious framing of the issue.
Morbo
I hate you right now.
shortstop
That’s some seriously elaborate gimmickry, then: publicly appear to completely buy into and reinforce the winger narrative–and take all the long-term political damage that comes with that–while advancing your own agenda behind the scenes without fanfare. Seems needlessly convoluted to me, but I’m not much of a chess player.
Da Bomb
@John S.: THIS.
Wholeheartedly.
blahblahblah
“Conservative Narratives” aren’t powerful. They have a freak’n media monopoly. Of course they can force whatever bullshit stories they want. Citizens have to dig from international sources to find any factual news whatsoever. Most people are too busy working and raising their kids to bother. So the monopolists get to shovel their shit down the public’s throats to form consensus based around lies.
Rather Soviet like.
K. Grant
@John S.: Unfortunately, it seems that even here at BJ the panic has gripped far too many. I would hate to think that, for the good of keeping my blood pressure in check, that this site will also find its way to the ‘past tense’ list.
More and more often I think that the biggest problem in Washington (besides the Democrats needing to discover a bit more spine, and the Republicans deciding to act like adults) is the 24 hour news cycle. I have stopped watching any of the cable news shows, I have begun to revert back to reading only the newspapers, and I refuse to comment on anything on my blog until I have had a few days to actually think about it. We are reacting to everything, not responding. This isn’t good. We need space to breathe, think, ponder, and work through our ideas and the rest before we make decisions. Twitter is a nightmare of uncritical spouting and venting.
If one of my kids gets wound up by something and starts babbling incoherently at machine gun pace, unless they are bleeding out their eyes or evidence is clear that a limb is falling off, I tell them to stop, breathe deeply, think about what they want to say and then start over at the beginning – calmly, rationally.
C’mon folks. Breathe. Think. Now start over.
Scott
I’m just getting tired of getting stabbed in the face.
ricky
Obama, like the MSM, the right, and the left, all seem to be overreacting to a couple of events which are blown out of proportion. I can’t just blame Obama since everyone has been scratching at their wadded bunch of panties with increasing ferocity.
Silver has a pretty rationale discussion of this:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/white-houses-brain-freeze.html
tomvox1
I guess they are going to be taking Norah O’Donnell’s advice on policy initiatives after all.
Did you ever get the sinking feeling you may have seriously misjudged someone? D’oh!
The Grand Panjandrum
I’ll wait until all the details are made public to make a judgment, but as Kthug notes that if, and it is a very big if, Obama ties the spending freeze to a meaningful employment tax credit it could be a net positive that actually does something for the economy. So far, we have no such indication.
Brien Jackson
@shortstop:
Oh please. Say what you will about this vague, generic, nonsense, but if you’re actually going to claim the marginal American voter doesn’t like it, then you’re just not dealing with reality. But at least we got it settled that, to a certain segment of the netroots or whatever you want to call them, “populist” really meant “exactly what I want, damn you!”
shortstop
GregB
Let’s not forget this is the same American public that bought the notion that Saddam Hussein and his staggered and rotting little country of 25 million was a threat to the continental United States.
I’d say that conservative narratives have traction.
-G
geg6
@The Grand Panjandrum:
Well, that would be something a bit different, IMHO. And might be okay. But since no one in this administration seems to think Kthug has anything intelligent to say about anything, I’m not real optimistic that this is the path they intend to tread. I’ll be much happier if it is, though.
Rick Taylor
This is good to hear though:
__
__
Still, the only defense I’ve seen of this is that it’s political pandering that will do no harm.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Jesus Christ, the sky is falling again.
How about we not worry about the fucking narrative for once? Fuck the narrative, fuck the optics, fuck the whole fucked-up pop-culture inside-baseball political bullshit that infests this and every other goddamned blog on the planet (well, except for maybe Nate), and talk about whether or not the freeze is a good or bad idea on its own merits, regardless of whether it fits into a “conservative” narrative or not.
Jesus Doug, you and Cole have started turning into the same kind of drama queens you pick on Sully for being. I mean, come on: the “school uniform/welfare reform phase of the Obama presidency”? What the fuck, man?
ricky
@K. Grant:
A very good comment. How many days passed efore you posted it? Pardon the snark. My first sentiment captures my true reaction.
shortstop
Of course they like it. Does that magically translate into independent votes? Maybe. Does it prevent the Obama administration and Democratic Congress from ever doing anything economically grown up again? Definitely. What are the long-term ramifications of that if the economy worsens?
To a certain segment, it probably does. As it happens, I’m not one of the people who’ve been screaming for Obama to “be more populist.” Ever.
See y’all later.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
This. Fucking A-men. Thank you.
Ajay
May be its me, but I dont think Obama is doing anything substantial. He is nowhere near the disaster Bush was but he is doing absolutely nothing to help what is needed. Lack of leadership in HCR, continued funding for wars, supporting Wall Street are few of the major issues that he has been wrong on.
I would probably still vote for him, only because Repubs are just pure morons but Obama is doing nothing to feel good about him. I do wonder if Hillary would have been better.
Keith G
Sorry to a lot of people whose stuff I look forward to reading, but why did it take13 comments of silliness to get to a simple rational statement. I guess we are gun shy.
@John S.:
Now the POTUS may actually be putting forward the suckiest idea since the dawn of time, but just for the hell of it, I going to wait for the details of this and his “revised” programs before I consider him a cowardly Quisling.
valdivia
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
amen. amen. amen.
jrg
“conservatives” did not care when Clinton ran a surplus – they were on about Lewinsky.
“conservatives” did not care when Cheney declared “deficits don’t matter”, they were on about 9/11.
“conservatives” will not care that BHO cut discretionary spending.
How long will it take to realize that “conservatives” do not act in good faith? They don’t give a fuck about spending, they just hate hippies, vegetarians, and anyone that drives a Volvo. With lilly-livered bullshit like this, I’m starting to understand why.
Lolis
Didn’t Obama do some of this stuff in his first few weeks? I vaguely remember him asking his Cabinet members to identify waste to be cut from their agencies.
I agree with some here that this is not good news for Democrats. I really wish Obama would do something to motivate his base because I think people really need it. I did hear Obama was going to mention DADT in his speech tonight, so I’m curious about that.
Maybe all this stuff coming out is a way to get people to watch his speech. I would if I didn’t have to work.
ricky
Is there a blog that has a glossary with a section just devoted to the memes used by people who call themselves
progressives to describe body parts which Democrats are missing?
bago
@Napoleon:
Lose = something that will have lost in the future.
loose = something that wasn’t tied down very well.
If you’re going to call someone a loser, or that their policies are losing, at least have the goddamn decency to spell it correctly.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Keith G:
Exactly; let’s all hear the details of the plan before condemning it. Maddow had Biden’s economic advisor on last night and was screaming “HOOVER” at him every other sentence, while he was trying to explain exactly what the plan was and was not. Obama wants to spend money more effectively? Spend money on programs that work, cut spending on programs that don’t? Halle-fucking-lujah, it’s about goddamned time, but for some reason that equals across-the-board-spending-freeze-that-OMFGHOOVERWTFBBQ!!!!
m3872
@Dork: No it’s not a joke … it’s just that you simply don’t get how budgets & politics work … But that’s Ok because clearly neither do Rachel Maddow or Jane Hamsher, so you’re in good company I suppose
John S.
Okay, I love you guys (and gals).
Reading around the blogosphere this morning, you would have thought that Obama just skull-fucked a kitten live on CNN while Rahm ran over a dog in the background.
In times like this, one desperately needs a bastion of sanity. Thanks for providing me with one, fellow Juicers.
Da Bomb
@Grumpy Code Monkey: Which is exactly what he campaigned on.
I just wonder if throughout the whole entire primary, if people had cottonballs in their ears yelling, “LALALALALA” while Obama was talking.
He said he was going to cut spending on programs that didn’t work. Go through the budget line by line and cut out wasteful crap.We still have to find out what those programs are and not speculate.
I agree with your sentiments.
m3872
@Grumpy Code Monkey: Maddow made herself look ridiculous. She was just venting that the politics made it seem like a cave to the Conservative notion that McCain put forth in the campaign.
After watching that segment I started to think that if Obama had called it something like a “smarter budget approach” instead of a “spending freeze”, Maddow would have not been so upset.
But the Left Wing is a bit sensitive these days …
K. Grant
@ricky: That is a part of the problem, we react, we don’t thoughtfully respond.
The talk radio hosts and cable news talking-head act and say provocative things because they know people are surfing to find something to listen to/watch – they know that if they don’t do something outrageous the dial will be turned and the advertising dollars will dry up. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are no different than Howard Stern, they simply take out the T and A and the potty humor and replace it with paranoid conspiracy twaddle about Democrats. That is their job, and that is how they make their money.
But that does not mean that that is how ‘we’ must think and respond. We have the luxury of time that radio and 24-hour news shows do not, I am simply suggesting we not discard that luxury so completely.
Blogs can be wonderful things, but they have done nothing for improving our attention spans, nor our ability to delay gratification.
Keith G
@shortstop:
Well I know you from older days when Drum was still at PA, and you are a wise and fun person to “comment” with. I widh you were around here more often. Its a fun, if at time a bit cranky, place.
Gregory
It isn’t inexplicable at all. For one thing, you have the Mighty Wurlitzer. For another — if it is another — you have a so-called “liberal media” that unquestioningly embraces conservative narratives. And, sadly, you have the fact that the Democrats generally suck at messaging.
Church Lady
@shortstop: I was going to call it “fleeing for his political life,” but I like your “animal panic” better.
Brien Jackson
@m3872:
You don’t get it dude, if Obama’s buget calls for cutting spending on farm subsidies and putting the extra money into increased funding for WIC, it will be the worst day in the history of the progressive movement and Obama will just prove he’s totally worse than Bush because STABINTHEBACKFTW!!!
Kryptik
@m3872:
Well, that’s kinda the whole goddamn problem.
Policy-wise, it’s not so bad. Likely not terribly effective in the long term, but nothing disastrous.
Politics-wise, it’s awful, because it’s another signal of buying into the right-wing frames and memes while any sort of left-wing ideas are laughed off as commie bullshit.
xian
this seems clever to me. not 11d chess but just chess, or maybe backgammon.
he can put together a budget that shifts priorities on the discretionary items.
the excluded areas include stimulus as needed.
defense reform is a separate agenda. i don’t think this reinforces any republican frames except for the obama is teh mccain faction.
on the other hand i think the manic-progressive freakout will give obama the optics he needs, so rave on. just don’t wet the bed.
Rick Taylor
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Brad de Long agrees with you.
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General Winfield Stuck
Clue
Ranting about dems should never consider doing or saying anything that the wingnuts would say or do IS in and of itself adopting right wing messaging. Drawing contrasts between the parties philosophies is one thing, knee jerk reactionary rejection, and especially without knowing the facts is also doing the right wing framing thing.
It is, in practical effect, adopting a base only 50 +1 strategy. Karl Rove is beaming at you.
But carry on dear progs.
Rick Taylor
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Cutting some programs and putting more in others sounds fine. I don’t know why you’d put it in the context of an overall “Freeze”; if we end up spending a little more or less it hardly matters. I don’t understand why the President would take a personal hand in pushing this, or put it in the State of the Union; it sounds like it should be part of the normal budgetary process. It will do nothing to address our long term budgetary problems.
Brian J
Well, if it gets us a liberal victory, perhaps it’s worth it. But we need to hear more about the exact proposal and what, if anything, we vet out of it.
Rick Taylor
@General Winfield Stuck
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I’m glad you’re still around despite your earlier posts.
Keith G
Now, I want to propose a thought experiment. First, no complaining about what has transpired pre this week. Yes, a huge miscalculation (or a few) have transpired. The field of play is as it is. No tears or rants can change it.
What next? A fight for programmatic survival is whatâs next. If there is any talent in the West Wing, they have snapped to what has gone wrong, but they do not get a do-over.
They need to do things that help, but they definitely must do things that easily succeed. This basically centrist president is going to have to zig a bit to centre right in some areas because thatâs where the votes in Congress are. If he doesnât, itâs no longer just lame, itâs over.
And even thenâŠ.
Sentient Puddle
Y’know, it seems to me that this freak-out all very insidery for the time being. For one, I haven’t heard any Republicans offer up commentary on this (though I’m sure they have…the point more being that it’s the liberal voices screaming the most about this at the moment). For two, the screaming, for the most part, is more about the optics of the situation than the actual plan, which for the time being is ambiguous enough that it might behoove everyone to calm down, stop laying eggs for a second, and wait until the SOTU to get a little more details on just what the fuck this thing is.
Then you can resume screaming “HOOVERITE!”
Rick Taylor
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Just to add, so far I don’t see how you defend this except in terms of it changing the narrative.
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Gregory
@shortstop:
Not by a long shot.
mcd410x
@General Winfield Stuck: Who is doing this? And why does it anger you so? Don’t make it your thing. You be you. Have fun.
And, please, call em “Hamsherites” or something. I’ve been to FDL about ten times in my life. I’m progressive, and I’m not for doing anything with St. Grover. Or any of those asshats.
Comrade Dread
You simply cannot deal with budget deficits until you are willing to address the Pentagon and Medicare costs (and to a much lesser extend Social Security. Indeed, if you got the former two under control, you might even be able to let Social Security maintain its status quo.)
Throw in Farm Subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare and then I might take this seriously.
As it stands, this is the same gimmick I would expect from a “Fiscally Conservative” who wants to pay lip service to budget cuts without touching anything politically volatile.
(And for the love of God, please don’t interpret this as saying Obama = Bush. I am well aware that the nation traded up in 2008.)
Cain
@K. Grant: <blockquoteMore and more often I think that the biggest problem in Washington (besides the Democrats needing to discover a bit more spine, and the Republicans deciding to act like adults) is the 24 hour news cycle. I have stopped watching any of the cable news shows, I have begun to revert back to reading only the newspapers, and I refuse to comment on anything on my blog until I have had a few days to actually think about it. We are reacting to everything, not responding. This isnât good. We need space to breathe, think, ponder, and work through our ideas and the rest before we make decisions. Twitter is a nightmare of uncritical spouting and venting.
This. I don’t post a much, preferring rather to snark and joke. It’s not worth the emotional cost you guys are putting into it. That said, I have called up my reps. They need to get their ass kicked. But Let’s not get all outraged all the time.
cain
ps I’m voting today!
ricky
“Well, what’s it gonna be young fella? If’n I freeze, I can’t be down on the ground. And if’n I get down on the ground, I’m gonna be in motion.” Raising Arizona
Where’s the baby, Gale?
Cain
@Grumpy Code Monkey: <blockquoteJesus Doug, you and Cole have started turning into the same kind of drama queens you pick on Sully for being. I mean, come on: the âschool uniform/welfare reform phase of the Obama presidencyâ? What the fuck, man?
This. Thousand times this. I think we like getting outraged. *sigh *
curious
@John S.: lurker in agreement. everyone’ll go nuts for a week or two, long enough for the phrase “spending freeze” to make it into the ears of the mushy middle, thereby inoculating them somewhat against the eons-old republican attacks on liberal spending. all at the (reported) cost of 25b/year which we all rightly noted was pocket change when mccain’s campaign tried to balance the budget using 18b in cuts to pork-barrel spending.
General Winfield Stuck
@mcd410x: Your concern is noted. Thicker skin suggested/
Rick Taylor
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Bingo. And yes we have to hear the details, but on a blog called “Balloon Juice” (ie. hot air) I think it’s fair enough to vent first impressions.
ricky
I really like it when Obama talked to us like we were adults.
Back when we we acting like adults. Remember?
Sentient Puddle
@Rick Taylor:
Y’know, it is kind of funny that those on a blog with this name tend to vent less than those at Kos or FDL…
ricky
@GregB:
Letâs not forget this is the same American public that bought the notion that Saddam Hussein and his staggered and rotting little country of 25 million was a threat to the continental United States.
This bears repeating every 50 comments or so.
Bob (Not B.o.B.)
@Mattsky:
McCain’s did not exempt Medicaid, Medicare, Veteran’s programs or social security. Obama’s freeze does.
As far as not freezing the military….my thought is, it would not be impossible during a time of two wars and a starpped, over worked military. Until those wars are wound down, that would be impossible.
Erik Vanderhoff
Aren’t those “discretionary” programs precisely those that are either crucial to maintaining economic infrastructure (i.e. air traffic control) or economic stimulus during a recession? What’s the point of this? The GOPers will say “It’s not enough!” and be quite correct, and the Schizoid Libbers will, correctly, gnash and wail “Oh please, think of the children!”
Sometimes pissing off both sides is just pissing off both sides, not necessarily doing something right.
Little Dreamer
@Dork:
The military industrial complex is still alive and well, and apparently the only thing worth caring about anymore.
Give a hairy bipedal mammal a large brain and it will only use the knowledge gained to make war against anything and everything. I’m seriously becoming ashamed to belong to this species.
The DCrefugee
These outcomes — which basically continue the status quo and prevent anything but progress in its smallest increments — are what is desired by our elites. As a whole, these are smart people, even though they do things which appear often to be at odds with their expressed goals. Reduce all of these events [associated with HCR] — the delays, the bipartisanship, Lieberman/Nelson, etc. — to their simplest explanation, and we’re left with this:
This is the outcome sought by those in positions of power. It’s really that simple.
And, yes: We are that screwed.
DCr
Will
The politics of it suck.
It’s weak and obvious, to start. It plays directly into the conservative narrative, rather than doing anything to buck up the president’s base of supporters, who are thoroughly demoralized and will be even more so after this offering. Inevitably, Obama is going to want to break this promise in order to deal with some kind of spending necessity. At that point, he will either screw over the left even more by not spending what he needs, or more likely, just break this promise, thereby making this whole exercise completely and utterly pointless.
I can only imagine they think this might somehow calm down some of the teabaggers. That has got to be a record for stupidity.
Someone here said this might provide some cover for conservative Democrats. I suppose that’s possible, but I imagine wholly ineffective.
pcbedamned
@jrg:
EXACTLY!!! I was just over at Hot Air to see what they are saying, and of course they too are calling bull**it. It doesn’t matter a whit what the Dems do or say. And until your Dems realize this, you are all for a world of disappointment. One thing you can say for righties – they do what they say they are going to do whether you (the populace) like it or not. Dems say what you want to hear, and then follow the Repub line. Sorry, but the only good thing Obama has ever been good at is campaigning – he can read what other people have written for him really well. The puppet needs to lose his strings…
Little Dreamer
@Comrade Dread:
If I remember correctly, there wasn’t much room at the bottom to fall into. We almost HAD to trade up! How far we traded up is about to be determined.
*disclaimer: I supported Obama even though I knew he was running on a bipartisan platform, but, it seems lately he forgets all too often about the team that brung him.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Obama made it clear in his campaign rhetoric that the government needs to be responsible about spending and deficits. His proposed budget (during the campaign) was smaller than McCain’s according estimates from the CBO. That is one of the reasons I voted for him. If you didn’t know that the guy was NOT the flaming liberal that conservatives were painting him to be, then you really weren’t paying attention. The only person for whom you should be expressing outrage is yourself, because you didn’t bother to inform yourself.
Little Dreamer
@Will:
You can’t shut down stupid, we will always have them in our midst. I hope that’s not the plan, because it’s ill conceived.
Little Dreamer
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
I’ve been saying this for months, but, I’m beginning to feel like the date who got left at the dance.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
And by the way, he is doing this for the independents, not the Republicans. The independents brought him, too. If Obama had to only depend on Progressives, he would have had trouble winning the primary, much less the election.
Uriel
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Crazy talk. Sheer, unadulterated lunacy.
I can barely even figure out what those words are supposed to mean, strung together as they are in such a counter intuitive, nonsensical way.
Now excuse me, but me and my pearls are going to retire over to Huff Po, where we can bask in the electronic-despair of gigantic unflattering pictures of the president leering at me and headlines screaming that O-bey’s administration is now the spiritual successor of the John Birch Society.
You know, someplace where they’re actually doing serious and important things.
aimai
You know what? People here can stop calling for all of us to “wait a minute” and “act like adults” and “see what Obama’s really proposing” because all that is completely irrelevant. This is a massively political act: by definition its not a serious attempt to scale back the actual deficit because the goddamned wars and the entire defense budget were untouched. Its a bit of very public sleight of hand, a naked appeal to an illusory voter who cares about the deficit and thinks the taxpayers money is always wasted. Between the thought and the deed falls *no shadow* at all, there’s no moment in this discussion to wait, or to “see how this falls out” because the act *is* the deed. The public result *is the effect.* We’re part of the public. If Obama and his team can’t figure out how to sell a transparent political ploy successfully to us who is he selling it to?
This gets back to the phrase we’ve seen a few times “political malpractice.” If something’s good medicine for an illness you should take it, and maybe even if it tastes bad, or makes you gag, if you wait long enough it will do you some good. This little bit of deficit kabuki, to mix my metaphors, is a straight up *placebo*–if you can’t get the public (all the public) to swallow it its not even going to do you any psychic good.
I don’t see any harm in Obama making obvious, public, cuts in wasteful spending–but talking about “discretionary” spending as though that is by definition something that is bloated while leaving out the biggest, most bloated, discretionary spending that we’ve got–the entire military budget and its costly overruns–is just nakedly stupid. Using blanket terms like “freeze” instead of “saving taxpayer money” or “cautiously cutting” or “responsibly reviewing” is also just a crashing rhetorical mistake.
I’d like to point out this confusion of means, ends, and audiences doesn’t arise because the news was “leaked” but because the Administration was proud enough of this moronic initiative that they themselves released the news early to a sympathetic audience of journalists and bloggers. If they were dumb enough to do it so ham handedly that their own party/voters are up in arms and confused about what its going to do, who is going to get shafted, that is truly a case of political malpractice. What happened to people who could sell you the sizzle not the steak? Who could sell refrigerators to eskimos? Why do we appear to have an administration run by people who couldn’t sell a glass of water in the desert? Who consistently step on their own best lines and make our president look like a miniature bean counter instead of a commanding figure?
aimai
Little Dreamer
Right, because the independents are the ones who care so much more about defense spending than air traffic controllers and education and the like.
Huh?
Obama has been courting the right all along (and yes, those that fall in the middle were being massaged at the same time) – but the right is not following his lead, and it’s time he danced with the party that believed in him.
aimai
Little Dreamer and Sister… not to blogwhore–alright, to blogwhore, but go here to read “Reading the Romance” my account of the ways in which Obama and his voters are descending, among other things, into a parody of Big Love.
aimai
Kryptik
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
A lot of us weren’t expecting a flaming commie in Obama.
We were expecting someone with spine and enough gut to help get solid Dem legislation through. And while the horribly inept Congressional Dems are mostly to blame, hearing shit like this from the top, fully endorsing Republican rhetoric when it was nowhere near necessary feels like another attempt at hippie punching for the sake of ‘bipartisanship’ and ‘tacking center’. It’s just a ridiculously stupid rhetorical move for someone who’s supposed to know better.
Comrade Dread
Three words: President. Sarah. Palin.
That’s the day I would move to Montana, invest in a bomb shelter, MREs, and rifles and wait patiently for the apocalypse.
Uriel
@aimai:
I think this was more the sort of thing they were going for. Not that it necessarily works out that way, mind you. But the political reality is there is a whole host of voters in that gulf between Mike Gravel and James M. Inhofe that seem to care about this stuff.
Kryptik
@Uriel:
There are ways to handle those issues and concerns without fully validating conservative and teabagger rhetoric by means of embracing their exact frames.
Little Dreamer
@aimai:
Well, so long as we don’t equate ourselves with Nikki, she scares hell out of me!
;)
celticdragonchick
@Why oh why:
Anybody want to speculate who is gonna get “Sista Soldiered”?
Little Dreamer
@Comrade Dread:
Nah! I’d head out of the country – but, I wasn’t really worried – somehow I knew God would never give us Sarah Palin, I mean, they say God never gives you more than you can handle and it was obvious she’d be a disaster!
;)
Kryptik
@celticdragonchick:
Good money’s on ACORN and MoveOn.
aimai
Uriel,
I don’t doubt that Obama’s team phrases it that way–that is, that they are appealing to “independent” voters but if that’s so its just because they are morons. I live in a sea of “independent” voters–its another word for republicans who are temporarily ashamed to vote republican. Those people absolutely don’t remember anything a Democrat does–its not in their DNA and its not in their sources of news. I guarantee you that five minutes after Obama’s SOTU address those people, if they did tune in, will have forgotten what he said. If they do remember it, it will because what he said has been parodied and pilloried beyond recognition by the sources of news they do get–such as Fox, or the Boston Herald or wherever else they get their news.
Independent voters are *low information voters*–we learn that anew at every major election cycle. What’s so stupid about trying to appeal to them *over the heads of your own high information/hard voters* is that you lose the knock on effect, the each one reach one, of a satisfied base. The democrats never seem to learn this lesson, though I think they understood it during the previous presidential election. A fired up and excited base of happy campers is worth way more to you than a lukewarm middle of the road voter who might swing the other way. For one thing, getting your own base excited by dramatic gestures and promises is *also a form of outreach.*
aimai
General Winfield Stuck
Modo is blushing.
General Winfield Stuck
@aimai: Jeebus aimae, why don’t you just come out and say Obama has to go. I could respect that, but these emasculating screes on the man is making my teeth hurt. Talk about right wing framing.
Hillary 012 – come on admit it?
Da Bomb
@General Winfield Stuck: The shrill is at a complete high, I hope it can’t get any higher.
Bottom is the only place to go from here.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I disagree completely. Independents, who put Obama into office just as much as progressives did, are deserting him in droves over concerns about the budget. They don’t believe that the healthcare reform would really result in cost savings over the next 20 years, because they think there would be too much political pressure to reverse the cost containment provisions. I am a luke warm supporter of the healthcare effort, but the budget issues really bother me so I have a lot of sympathy for that view. I did call my congressman to tell him to vote for the Senate bill, though.
I volunteered for Obama. I made phone calls. I knocked on doors. I am fiscally conservative and socially liberal, like a LOT of Obama supporters. I hate to break it to you, but it isn’t all about you. If he alienates enough people like me by only listening to people like you, he WILL be a one term president, provided Palin doesn’t run. Progressives DO NOT have the numbers to dominate the electoral process, even in a Democratic government.
Uriel
@Kryptik: Well, but thatâs the thing- It seems to me, at least, that this isnât a capitulation to tea bagger meme. Judging by the signs I saw them waving around, they want government spending SLASHED and departments ELIMINATED. Not a fairly limited freeze with the room to repurpose and re-jigger funding to account for negative impacts on necessary services. At best, itâs a rino or blue dog frame. But yeah, Obama could have done a bit of work on managing the optics and such before releasing thisâŠ
Kryptik
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
The budget itself was barely on the table until Republicans made it into a boogeyman on the heels of the horrible economy. They made it an issue, and it only got a foothold because of a lack of Dem pushback. Same with the worries over the health care reform. Most of those cost containment worries and such were usually concessions to the goddamn Republicans to try and court Grassley, Snowe, and Collins, and even then, the CBO scored it as saving money.
The budget and the deficit were never really core issues as far as the voting public went until Republicans cynically seized on it as a boogeyman, and Dems curled fetal.
Kryptik
@Uriel:
Yeah, it’s hardly Full Metal Teabagger, but it’s obvious that the rhetoric is a ceding to the Republicans and the teabaggers, a veer right just like Bayh and those other assholes in the Senate tut-tutting the DFHS among their colleagues wanted.
Da Bomb
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: You are correct. Independents did support him just as largely as democrats.
Rick Taylor
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This has been addressed but they’re not the same thing. An overall spending freeze that excludes the stimulus is different than an across the board freeze.
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I think it was a mistake for the administration to use the same terminology (the press and most voters are easily confused), but there’s no reason for us to add to the confusion.
CT
None of the proposed changes will take effect until 2011, and they’re backloaded-the proposed savings in 2011 is tiny, something like 10-15 billion, pretty much what he proposed for last year-11.5 billion. The proposed effects in 2012 and 2013 will be somewhat larger, but can certainly be adjusted based on economic conditions at the time.
I don’t see what the freak out is all about. We’ve been spending huge amounts of money over and above our regular budget deficit due to the recession. At some point, we have to throttle back, and this seems to be a very modest start to that. At this point in a recovery, any attempt should be modest. You could certainly argue that this is mostly symbolic, and frankly, if this allows Obama to get some ‘fiscally responsible’ cred with voters without risking the nascent recovery, I’m fine with that.
jenniebee
This “Spending Freeze” sounds like it’s in the same all-Orwell league as Bush’s “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” initiative.
I am so conflicted right now.
Although I do hope they don’t freeze National Park budgets. Those poor parks have not had a good funding year in the last 30 years or more. This is beyond fat-cutting or muscle-trimming or even bone-shaving. Park budgets are more like in quadruple amputee territory.
fraught
@General Winfield Stuck: This. What a bunch of chicken littles the left has become. The progressives today wouldn’t have lasted a week in the sixties. It’s unrelenting opposition toward it’s own leaders is typical of it’s spoiled brat generation. Everyone has one economics course and one political science course behind them and they think they know better than their truly deeply thinking president. Grow up or STFU.
Little Dreamer
@aimai:
Interesting analogy aimai, especially considering I’m describing the same with the date at the dance.
Also, since Angus, the God of Meat was mentioned in this piece, I just emailed the link to him at work. I’m sure he’ll be interested in reading it, simply because you mentioned him. ;)
AtGoM will probably disagree with my position on this, I’m sure he’s still a believer (I’m the one who talked him into voting for Obama to begin with, but his faith in him is very strong) – luckily, with me AtGoM has someone who reminds him often of why he believes in me… which is more than I can say right now for Obama and my faith in his candidacy.
Brien Jackson
@aimai:
For real? You really want to codify that? You and the RTP’s are actually going to be pissed off if programs like WIC and school lunches get funding increases, but said increases are offset by cuts to more or less useless line items?
This country is so fucked.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Kryptik:
In this, I think you are being a little naive. The budget deficit wasn’t a core issue for the villagers, but it has always (and I mean for as long as I have been old enough to vote) been a core issue for me. That narrative didn’t take off like wildfire because the Republicans possess Voldemort like magic. It took off because a LOT of people are, and have been, concerned about that issue. Part of my fuming hatred of Bush and my utter distrust of Republicans stems from the last 8 years of fiscal irresponsibility. On this very blog, after John had crossed over, the fiscal irresponsibility of Republicans was routinely discussed in despairing terms, because people care. Part of the popularity of Clinton stems from his being willing to work with Republicans to reign in spending and create the surplus. Again, people care about this issue.
Jay B.
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Oh holy fuck. Then you must be shitting yourself with joy over this “leaked” yet formless, self-described “freeze”. And good on you! But, since you’ve decided to be a condescending prick about what us uninformed Obama voters were missing, let me clue you in on some of the OTHER things he campaigned on and let’s see if WE might have a smidge of a point when we decide to be disaffected:
Iraq? Still in business! Hell, let’s spend MORE.
Gitmo? Open.
Civil Liberties? In the toilet, although, to be fair, he went to the other side on FISA and telecom immunity during the primary. Mystifyingly supports the suspension of habeas corpus though.
Stimulus? Not big enough, unemployment is still in double digits (the promise was 8%, if I remember correctly).
Health care reform? That’s been a rousing success.
Banking regulations? He keeps warning them — maybe he should crank up the heat to a sternly worded letter.
DADT? What, and derail all the other things he’s not accomplishing?
And how’s the Green Economy coming along?
Some of these, I admit, are boutique issues. I mean, really, who gives a flying fuck about civil liberties anyway? We don’t protect them or respect them, so really, they’re just a fiction we hold onto to make us think we have something unique here in America. And, yes, Congress sucks (which, of course, being a Democratic Congress doesn’t exactly help the notion that the party we supported on the trail, financially and at the ballot box is actually on our side at all).
But things like health care reform and banking regulations and jobs were the domestic centerpieces of Obama’s campaign. Maybe your orgasm over fiscal responsibility was so loud, it drown out the rest.
But at least he’s getting tough on the national fucking park system!
Little Dreamer
@General Winfield Stuck:
Aimai was never saying Obama has to go. I just read the link posted, the message is Obama has done little since he was elected to remind his supporters that he still remembers the democratic party that carried him to his victory. He’s not doing that, he’s courting the right, and courting them hard – they are aloof and disinterested. He should turn his attention to those who are interested before we also become disinterested.
Brien Jackson
@Uriel:
What aimai should have said is “don’t know what they’re talking about.” There’s lots of voters who “care about” the deficit who, it turns out, are frightenly ignorant about budget reality. But that doesn’t mean they don’t “care about” the deficit, it means they’re really ignorant, and need to be pandered to.
Brien Jackson
@aimai:
I think we’ve covered this before, but:
1. What you’re describing doesn’t exist. A good ground game focuses on moving your own team, not persuading independents.
2. If you’re in a position of having to cater to your base, assuming we’re using “base” in the correct form, of course, and not just referring to te Very Special People, then you might as well just save the effort, because you’ve already lost. By definition, base support is automatic.
John S.
Wow, I didn’t think anyone was willing to actually come and out and say it, but there it is. I generally like what you have to say, aimai, but I’m just appalled by this statement.
Putting your fingers in your ears and going “La, la, la, I can’t hear you!” really doesn’t strike me as a winning strategy.
Pretty tall order when dealing with the aforementioned crowd, dontcha think?
Little Dreamer
@Jay B.:
Personally, I think fiscal responsibility is a fantasy, I just want to see people taken care of better than weapons are.
Rick Taylor
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I used to be much more concerned about the budget deficit during the Clinton administration. After Greenspan used the argument of fiscal responsibility to convince us to raise the regressive payroll tax, and then turned around to support tax cuts after the budget turned around, I’m hell of a lot more suspicious to appeals to fiscal responsibility than I used to be. Fool me once, shame on you.
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At the same time, if one is serious about about addressing our long term budget crises, tiny cuts like these that threaten no one is exactly the wrong way to do it; we need to address issues like health care.
Da Bomb
@Little Dreamer: Yet again, the netroots isn’t his whole entire base.
As always they were other groups who have not become disenchanted with the President, because we are giving him time.
The Black Snob talks about this:
http://blacksnob.com/snob_blog/2010/1/26/the-overwhelmingly-unreasonable-expectations-of-great-expect.html
Al Sharpton stated the same thing:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2010/01/25/VI2010012503171.html
So yet again, you are terribly wrong to feel that his whole base has become disenchanted. It’s simply not true.
Brien Jackson
Also, doesn’t the netroots generally complain that, a) Democrats are horrible at seizing the narrative and changing conventional political mems, and, b) conservatives get credit for being “fiscally responsible” even though they support budget busting policies while Democrats/liberals get stuck having to fix their mess, and that Democrats should be more forceful in pointing out that they’re the real fiscally responsible ones? So now when someone makes a play to kind-of-sort-of do that they’re doing it all wrong?
Little Dreamer
@Brien Jackson:
So, if I’m a disgruntled Democrat, come November, if I choose to stay home, does my vote automatically cast itself and get counted?
Base support is not automatic, unless you are an automaton who needs nothing you voted for to happen to continue supporting a candidate. If you need nothing, why choose a candidate, why vote, what does one gain and why should they put out the effort?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Iraq? Still in business! Hell, letâs spend MORE.
We are spending more in Afghanistan, and we have cut expenses and troops in Iraq. He campaigned on stepping up the presense in Afghanistan. He followed through on that promise. I want the wars to end as soon as possible. He promised, during his campaign, we would begin withdrawal in 2011. It isn’t 2011.
Gitmo? Open.
I want it closed, also. However, it is Congress and the Senate that are blocking action on that. He has made some progress. I am giving him credit for that.
Civil Liberties? In the toilet, although, to be fair, he went to the other side on FISA and telecom immunity during the primary. Mystifyingly supports the suspension of habeas corpus though.
This does piss me off, but McCain would have been worse.
Stimulus? Not big enough, unemployment is still in double digits (the promise was 8%, if I remember correctly).
He barely got this passed. 8% wouldn’t have made it through. Be realistic.
Health care reform? Thatâs been a rousing success.
I wish he had fought harder for it, but he isn’t a legislator. Seperation of powers, and all that. Untimately the responsibility for healthcare reform is in the hands of the Congress and Senate. If they had given him a bill, he would have signed it.
Banking regulations? He keeps warning themâmaybe he should crank up the heat to a sternly worded letter.
He has just now started on this. Why do you expect him to have everything he ever promised done in the first year? I don’t get this.
DADT? What, and derail all the other things heâs not accomplishing?
That has to have through the legislative process, too. If this gets overturned by the end of his term, I will be happy. I’m not a child who expects it all NOW.
And howâs the Green Economy coming along?
The stimulus contained tax and other incentives for green businesses and green home improvements. Cap and trade has to pass for there to be more progress. That is up to Congress and the Senate.
The problem is the Republicans, and that isn’t Obama’s fault.
Kryptik
@John S.:
I think you guys are missing aimai’s point here.
The reason the proposal is not the real issue here isn’t because of the substance of the proposal and whatnot. The proposal itself is generally harmless (which is a different problem in and of itself, but it’s still tangental to the point).
The reason is because of why the proposal came up, and how it was proposed. Going after it like this, and using the right wing frames to boot, is a further ceding of ground to the right and yet another veer toward the center and ‘bipartisanship’ when veering center and going for ‘principled bipartisanship’ are what have created the shithole we’re all standing in to begin with.
I mean, even taking this on in a vacuum wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But again, it’s why it’s being taken on and how it’s being proposed. It’s a blatant fig leaf.
Little Dreamer
@Da Bomb:
I never said it was.
I am one of those people who has been supportive and calm and waiting for the crumbs, but, now I’m starting to feel like I was stood up. I’m not the only one, Obama has a real problem if he doesn’t start steering his policies into the direction of those that pushed for him. In a game of hotter and colder, he’s getting into the sub-zero zone.
Jay B.
@Little Dreamer:
Agreed. But people have as much idea of what “fiscal responsibility” is as they do about string theory. They toss around the phrase, but then, as Rick Taylor points out, don’t stand up for health care reform that actually lowers cost and addresses long-term deficit problems. They talk about fiscal responsibility, but focus on “waste” on things like the National Park system while giving the bloated whale of military spending — to say nothing of TWO endless wars, as well as the soul-sucking fake wars on Drugs and Terror — a full pass on their “fiscal responsibility” mores. They cry fiscal responsibility and warn about Social Security, even though they plainly don’t understand that either. And I’ve also found it terribly difficult to suggest to a lot of “fiscal conservatives” that a more progressive tax system is ALSO a form of fiscally responsible policy.
It’s like they never heard of Ronald Reagan, never mind Keynes, while touting their pressing financial rectitude over a problem they’ve never quite defined other than “I’m terrified other people are getting something from the government and I’m not!”
Little Dreamer
@Da Bomb:
I never said it was his whole base, but this is growing, and the longer he ignores the problem, the bigger it will become.
BTW, please don’t cite Al Sharpton to me, I don’t find his opinions to be worth diddley squat.
Brien Jackson
@Little Dreamer:
“So, if Iâm a disgruntled Democrat, come November, if I choose to stay home, does my vote automatically cast itself and get counted?”
No, it just means you’re not “the base.”
Little Dreamer
@Jay B.:
And most of them drink the blood of Jesus, why am I not surprised?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Little Dreamer:
Well, Little Dreamer, if we end up with up with a complete stalemate and absolutely no progress on ANYTHING on Obama’s agenda, because even MORE Republicans are actively obstructing Democratic proposals then you can pat yourself on the back for your purity.
Little Dreamer
Actually, I am. You assume things you don’t have a clue about.
ricky
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
That is a terrible thing to say and elsewhere I would launch into a tirade of profanity. Dr. Dean got double didgits in Iowa once and that Dennisitis will spread like the mumps the third time around. If not, there is always a fourth on Nader in the third. Unless the Teabaggers bolt. Then its a fourth on Nader in the fourth.
Little Dreamer
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Fuck that shit.
I’ve been saying “hold on, it’s coming” for a year. The more I say it, the less I believe it these days.
I’m not interested in purity, I’m interested in getting some progressive action that will help people and stop paying mega-money to special interests.
Kryptik
@Brien Jackson:
If the people who would vote for a party no matter what were the only ones considered the ‘base’, there wouldn’t be worries of getting the base out come election time.
There are people who I’d consider the ‘base’ for the Dems, by dint of nearly supporting the party at 90-100% rate, but could easily be demoralized enough to just simply not vote.
Isn’t that what one of the reasons bandied about for Coakley’s loss was? That she wasn’t able to mobilize the base?
Jay B.
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Hey, it’s YOUR rhetoric. It’s funny, when you get your “fiscally responsible” bone thrown your way, it’s right and obvious and we’re idiots for thinking anything else, yet when our issues are not only not solved, but seemingly become radioactive, your response is “hey, come on, it’s only been a year. And Congress, also!”
I was paying attention and those are things he campaigned on that I care about. He’s delivered on none of it. You can make up excuses why this exists, but that’s not exactly a reason to vote for him is it? I will because obviously, what’s the alternative? But how do I tell other people to support him even though he, in the most favorable climate possible, can’t do a single thing about the issues most important to me?
Edit: Here’s another way of thinking about it. He was elected with a sizable majority do you think it was because, in the middle of an economic meltdown, he was campaigning on fiscal responsibility or because he was campaigning on doing something about the economic meltdown?
Little Dreamer
@John S.:
He’s been pandering to conservatives for a year, expecting them to bite is a pretty tall order, dontcha think?
johnny walker
I fail to see how this is not directly attributable to Jane Hamsh… wait, my bad. That was last week. This week these “circular firing squads” are tearing the party apart.
Lord only knows where we’ll be by the first. I can only hope our buzzwords are strong.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Jay B.:
I’m not in that category. I know exactly what I would cut, if I had the power to do it (Military, medicare, raise the retirement age, corporate welfare, negotiate drug prices, eliminate Bush tax cuts, etc). I am also not naive about how hard it is to do it. I supported the healthcare bill, BECAUSE it reduced deficit spending over 20 years. I viewed it as a trading cuts to Medicare for extending access to others in need, plus it had lots of other good technical fixes. But what I have seen, over my life of watching politics is that once people have a benefit, they keep pushing for incremental changes to make it more expansive AND more expensive. (See Medicare, Part D) So, I don’t think 20 years of cost savings are really going to happen. If we even get 10 years, that is good. But in the end, I think there is a good chance the bill will turn into something that creates bigger budget problems. This has made me only lukewarm in my support. It is better than the status quo, but that isn’t saying much.
aimai
I’m losing track of who believes what. Is it all going to be little dreamer’s fault if we lose the next election? Or sister machine tun of quiet harmony, or brien jacksons? I take it its going to be mine because I used the word “base” in a way that Brien didn’t like. There is no “base by definition” just as there is no singular electoral moment. Obama and the Dems are fighting to keep a majority, and in the Senate to gain a supermajority–you’d better believe a lot of “bases” are at issue in each locality. Its obvious they are trying to appeal to one, the (to my mind largely illusory) deficit worrying independent voter. I’ve said why I believer (and I think JayB would agree) that person, though they exist in the abstract and may even appear occasionally on line in a blog thread, is not really going to materialize as a voter long term. Where “the deficit” is a big worry that person is usually so ill informed and so subject to manipulation that the republicans and their mouthpieces have a far better chance of capturing their interest than the dems. That’s not fair. I’m so sorry! Its just so crashingly wrong that when the dems try to do certain things to attract right wing voters it doesn’t usually work. But think medicare: how on earth did the teabaggers get old people to come out and shriek “government hands off my medicare?” Its not because it was the dems who were really doing anything to harm medicare, and its not because the republicans were really defending medicare, its because their mmessaging is better than ours.
And that was the entirely obvious point of my “it doesn’t matter” comment upthread. Of *course* Obama is trying to appeal to the mythical fiscal conservative/centrist in the middle of the country or whatever. But he’s doing it wrong. And he’s doing it clumsily. And he could do a far better job of it without doing anything differently but trying a little harder to get his message out without being such a god damned boob. And lecturing other blog commenters on how they “don’t get what he’s trying to do” when we obviously do, we just think he’s doing it wrong, is a total waste of time.
aimai
ricky
My I am late. Way more than 50 comments have passed.
@GregB:
Letâs not forget this is the same American public that bought the notion that Saddam Hussein and his staggered and rotting little country of 25 million was a threat to the continental United States.
Little Dreamer
Well, perhaps you should run for office then, because I can guarantee you, the way you want it done is NOT how it will come down.
By the way, I know of several situations where the retirement age is killing people (my father wanted to retire, he never got a chance, he got ill and died instead). I would seriously study that raising the retirement age thing, I don’t like it. Do you think people should have to kill themselves working so that they get no benefit? What the fuck is the point of SS if you never get to collect on it? The problem is not with how old one is when they receive payments, it’s the problem of how to replenish the system when one retires (and for the record, population has been rising for millenia, the formula of numbers is the problem, not the retirement age).
Brien Jackson
@Kryptik:
No one worries about getting the base out come election time.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
He was elected with a sizable majority do you think it was because, in the middle of an economic meltdown, he was campaigning on fiscal responsibility or because he was campaigning on doing something about the economic meltdown?
He DID do something about the meltdown. We aren’t in a depression, just a severe recession because of that action.
Itâs funny, when you get your âfiscally responsibleâ bone thrown your way, itâs right and obvious and weâre idiots for thinking anything else, yet when our issues are not only not solved, but seemingly become radioactive, your response is âhey, come on, itâs only been a year. And Congress, also!â
Basically. This is all the same piece of me saying your expectations are completely unrealistic. If you had been paying attention to Obama, and the divisions and attitudes across the country (outside of your circle of like-minded friends), you would know that. You called yourself an idiot. Just saying.
Brien Jackson
@aimai:
Well then we’re all jolly well fucked, because like it or not those are the voters who swing the generic election.
mattH
No narrative was “seized”, only taken wholesale from the Republican playbook. Seizing the narrative would mean actually trying to create your own, seeing as how narrative is being referred to as formed, not a monolithic, reified object to take and use. But if narrative only means “common wisdom” like you seem to, then we really are screwed and wasting our time.
ricky
“Iâm afraid we may be entering the school uniforms/âwelfare reformâ phase of the Obama presidency.”
If this is true he should easily win re-election, although he has already beaten up on the old veteran.
Let us hope he is steering clear of interns and has a good idea where the birth certificate is.
Jay B.
@aimai:
Yep. I’ll go further, these voters do “exist”, but are easily fooled and even more easily swayed by other things. Somehow the GOP got the “deficit hawk” label despite observable reality, and yet the “fiscally conservative” types are still reliable Republicans by and large â or become easy Republican votes with simple rhetoric. Either they are completely ignorant (a certain percentage, of them, obviously) or they actually have other political ideas they value more (after all, who is going to say they are fiscally reckless?) and vote accordingly.
There’s a Pavlovian response to “tax and spend” (drool, liberal), but if there were many honest fiscal conservatives, they’d instantly understand that that approach is far more preferable and responsible than the GOP method. But they either aren’t honest, or really have no idea about what they are complaining about, despite their steely-eyed “realism”.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
By the way, I know of several situations where the retirement age is killing people (my father wanted to retire, he never got a chance, he got ill and died instead)
When social security was enacted, that was the norm. That was why, at the time, it was a fiscally sound program. It purpose of the program wasn’t to finance healthy people sitting on their butts and voting Republican, it was to take care of people who were too old (and that usually meant too sick) to work. People are not only living much longer. They are also staying healthy much longer. The retirement age is too low.
John S.
Right. So even if Obama’s plan was to unveil this as part of the SOTU three months ago, then it’s bad optics for him to move forward with his plans? Because otherwise, it’s a knee-jerk reaction to…oh wait, isn’t it a knee-jerk reaction if he changed his plans in response to last week? Emotional arguments get so confusing to follow.
Yes, for the same reason that pandering to progressives for this next year isn’t going to work, either. People with their fingers in their ears screaming, “La, la, la, I can’t hear you!” don’t fucking listen. Does it really matter what side of the aisle they are on?
Which falls pretty flat considering that, you know, he hasn’t fucking said or done anything yet. But as you’ve already mentioned, it doesn’t matter what he says or does. You already have your mind made up, and the facts are completely irrelevant.
And lecturing other blog commenters on how âheâs doing it wrongâ when nobody really knows what Obama is actually doing, is a total waste of time. Especially when prefaced by the notion that what he actually does is irrelevant — because he’s doing it wrong!
/facepalm
mattH
I really hope 172 doesn’t get deleted, even though I accidentally clicked delete instead of edit. (hint hint)
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Little Dreamer:
Well, no. The author of the referenced piece, and most of you, have my position completely wrong, and I mean, wrong a priori, by definition.
I am not “loyal to Obama despite the ways he has disappointed us.” I have not been disappointed. The man ran as a centrist, and governs as a centrist.
Progressive “disappointment” in Obama is about progressives, not about Obama. It’s about them projecting their magical thinking onto his pretty vague and pretty middle of the road positions during the campaign.
Taking HCR specifically, I never expected Obama to get a bill passed. Bills are passed in another branch of government. I expected congress to pass a bill … and still do. Obama will sign a bill if it passes. I don’t blame his administration for the hideous track the thing has taken. I blame the opponents of HCR, which are powerful, numerous, dishonest, and relentless.
Taking the economy, I am seeing pretty much the economic track we said we’d see over a year ago, pretty much as we said we’d see it. A slow recovery, with jobs lagging the trends.
I supported Obama not because he was as liberal or progressive as me. I supported him because I personally like him. I like his intelligence, his cool demeanor, his detachment from the phony ideological battles. I like his personality and his style. He has totally lived up to my expectations.
The “disappointment” meme is just all bullshit. For me, good government, and good politics, begins with people taking responsibility for their own shit. When the people project their stuff onto a politician, and then cry crocodile tears when they don’t get the things they imagined they would get, they are avoiding responsibility for making the most rational choice and then responding accordingly. They can pretend that the world really revolves around DADT or some other pet hot button issue and scream and stamp their feet to attract attention to themselves and appear to be engaged, when in fact, they are not engaged at all, they are just spectators at an event they never took the time to understand in the first place.
I have no dog in any fight on this thread, but I do (as always) insist that if someone is going to talk about my views, they represent my views accurately, otherwise I am going to be all over them like a dog on a bone.
Jay B.
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
That’s something to run on! And now the “freeze”, depending on how deep or real it is, threatens to extend that severe recession for a few more years. And since he still hasn’t addressed the foreclosure problems, perpetual economic anxiety will continue anyway.
.
So, in short, the things Obama campaigned on — and won with — were unrealistic dreams (Yes, we Can Not! And why even bother!), but the part that YOU responded to was, obviously, the only REAL promise that mattered. It’s funny how that works. Here’s where it gets interesting, though. I’ll bet you any amount of money that if the unemployment rate stays at 10% AND he follows through on his “freeze”, he’ll lose the election. I’ll leave it to your realistic, finger-on-the-pulse-of-the-common-man genius to figure out why.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Jesus. It appears some of the progressives here have bought into that whole “unitary executive” shit wholesale.
Must of what Obama wants to do (HCR, repeal DADT, close Gitmo, increase stimulus spending) relies on the Democrats in Congress doing their fucking jobs. He can bribe, he can cajole, he may even be able to threaten a few of them, but at the end of the day he cannot make any of them do anything they don’t want to. You’re disappointed that Obama hasn’t checked everything off of his list in the first year? Then scream at your local congresscritter.
But no. It’s easier to threaten to stay home and hold your breath until you turn blue and die. Because that’ll show ’em you’re not to be fucked with.
Let us also remember that much of what Obama promised to do was pre-empted by the largest economic clusterfuck in over 70 years. Were it not for that last little “fuck you” from the Bush maladministration, it’s virtually certain Obama would be a lot futher along in his agenda.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
if there were many honest fiscal conservatives, theyâd instantly understand that that approach is far more preferable and responsible than the GOP method.
I think the GOPs ‘borrow and spend’ is worse than ‘tax and spend’. After the prior 8 years, I trust the GOP less to cut spending. I want ‘tax and reduce’. I expect to get a few bones thrown my way, here and there. I’ll keep agitating for it.
mattH
The ADMINISTRATION leaks a proposal to cut “discretionary” funding, calling it a spending freeze and they haven’t said anything? Most of the people here are complaining about the rhetoric, not the substance of the bill. Address that please, not the strawman that’s seems to be so fun to smack.
Da Bomb
@Little Dreamer: You might not, but others do.
That’s the point you keep missing.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Well said!
AngusTheGodOfMeat
I don’t know who wrote that, don’t care, and don’t have time to track it back. But I do say, bullshit.
Obama is not trying to appeal to a mythical centrist. Obama is a centrist. Both the right and left imagined Obama as a liberal or progressive. Both were, and are, wrong.
Most of the churn around Obama’s first year is grounded in that basic misunderstanding.
You can’t have a rational discussion when the beginning assumptions are just bullshit.
Little Dreamer
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
I’m not surprised by anything you wrote, and I expected you to reply in much the same way as you did. I don’t pretend to speak for you, because I know if I ever tried, you’d point out my shortcomings. I merely tried to relay that you believe in Obama (and sadly, I didn’t take the time to say how much you like him).
I like him too, and have all along… but, I don’t like that weapons are going to continue to be protected expenditures while shitloads of programs that benefit the people are going to get trashed).
I just want us to buy less bombs and bomb throwers and do what we can to help people more, as I stated upthread.
John S.
Oh, well then I suppose you can explain exactly what their plan is based on what they leaked, right jackass? I mean, seeing as how what you just said really gives us all a good sense of what it’s all about. Here, let’s try it another way and see how it works:
What, you mean that doesn’t tell us everything we need to know about their plans? You know everything you need to know from that statement, right?
And that is exactly the problem.
Bobby Thomson
I called this last Wednesday. There will be Social Security cuts this year. Bank on it.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
I know, dear. I was talking about aimai’s long headache-generating piece that you sent me a link for. He misrepresented my position, or else misspoke, I can’t really tell. But either way, I think I have been clear on my position since early 2008 WRT Obama, and nothing about that position has changed, or produced disappointment, since.
The reason why the right and left are urinating on Obama right now is because they found out that he wasn’t what they thought he was. Not because he misrepresented himself — he did not. It is because they projected their own hopes, or in the case of the right, fears, onto him. Fools, all of them.
America is about having the chance to make choices. That process works best when the choosers take the time to understand what they are choosing. For those on the right and left edges of our politics, in the case of Obama, epic fail. They failed to understand who Obama really was.
And I totally do not agree that this was his fault. I understood him, others had the same opportunity to do so.
Jay B.
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Yeah, because Presidents never supported a domestic policy agenda before Bush came on the scene. And whatever happens, they shouldn’t be held responsible for the pledges or promises they made on the campaign trail because, really, they are completely helpless figureheads.
.
If only he had, I don’t know, a database of 100 million committed and enthusiastic volunteers willing to support his agenda and possibly pressure Congress to enact it with sustained lobbying and organizational focus. That must only work on campaigns, though. Oh, and on the Teabagging right. The President really has no role in domestic politics. LBJ told me that.
How about anything? That, or you could conflate something with everything
Well then I live in the best place in the world because my Congressman and two Senators generally support the things I support! Now what?
OK, how about I campaign, go door to door, raise money, support candidates who reflect my values and help them (in some small way) win. Do I get to complain yet? Because that’s where I am.
How? He’s helpless. If there were no problems, there would be no Obama. And even if he won, he’d still have the same Congress. And he’d still be a figurehead without any power.
Jay B.
Obama can not fail, he can only be misunderstood. You are a total fucking joke.
Little Dreamer
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Several months ago, we had this same conversation on another thread. I understood that he was a centrist, I understood that he was not about pandering to progressives and I was fine with that… but, honey, on military issues, he is changing his tune.
Gitmo is still open (after he stated it would be closed), he is changing policy positions on detainees, he is protecting the military financial bohemoth – I didn’t expect those things.
I’m sorry, this is not who I was supporting. I understood he was a centrist, but, I didn’t hear him say he was a defense industry protagonist. I heard him speaking in humanitarian tones, and I’m not seeing it now. The messaging on his campaign pledges is changing. Are you not seeing this?
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Slightly off the subtopic, but this blurb made me realize … this and other blogs were burning up with anti_Bush rhetoric when he flexed is Unitary Executive muscles.
Enter Obama, and all of a sudden the same crowd is chagrined that Obama doesn’t act more unilaterally to ( enter your favorite hot button issue here ).
The change I wanted to believe in was that (a) we’d have an executive that would govern as a adjunct to the legislative branch, and (b) we’d have a legislative branch that could tie its own shoes.
We got a. We probably did not get b. That’s a shame.
But note: Bush’s administration pushed executive power as relief for a messy and inconsistent legislative branch. Did the same with the judicial branch. I reject those excuses for advancing executive power.
Let the legislative be what it is … which is, to be precise, what the people elected it to be. The voters designed this congress, and every congress. If it is a pile of dung, then we get what we voted for. If you want better than a dung pile, then you have to get to work and elect a better congress.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
So, in short, the things Obama campaigned onâand won withâwere unrealistic dreams
God. Arguing with you is like arguing with my conservative Republican parents. Everything is black and white, all or none. Obama working on SOME of these things he promised, and not meeting success because of Republican obstructionism, means that Obama has FAILED you personally. He stabbed you in the back. He threw you under the bus. Booooo hooooo you are sooooo BETRAYED. The fact that specific members of the Senate have blocked concrete action on his agenda is just ‘excuses’. Really. Did you fail civics?
aimai
Angus,
Sorry little dreamer sent you a link to my piece. Really. I didn’t “misrepresent” you or your opinions on anything, I alluded to people like you and you by name and linked to an entire thread. I’m not interested in any positions you may have taken since 2008 on Obama–I doubt if they are any different than mine. I voted for Obama, supported Obama and worked for Obama during the election and will do so again. I’m not disappointed in Obama because I was under any illusions that he was a centrist/not a centrist. The point of my essay, and of the many comments I’ve made here with which you have disagreed for a wide variety of reasons, is that Obama had many supporters, many of whom came to support him for a wide variety of reasons, and many of them are now expressing buyer’s remorse or negative feelings about him and the party generally as a result of largely avoidable missteps of marketing.
I absolutely stand by my statement that the “mythical centrist voter” is a myth–just like the “whole country is center/right” is a myth. The republican party is dying, demographically speaking. A democratic party that caters to the interests and the goals and prejudices of a largely white, rural, regional rump party is not going to do well in urban areas and with non white voters. That doesn’t mean you can turn out the voters you want at the drop of a hat, or that the rising tide of non white/non republican voters will continue to list democratic without serious action by democratic politicians to capture those votes. Deficit reduction or a short “freeze” of some government expenditures is a gambit aimed at a particular subset of the voting population–its transparently a ploy. I have nothing against that if it reaps a huge tide of democratic victories and turns out an enthusiastic set of democratic voters for the midterm. I just don’t happen to think that it will. I just don’t happen to think that it will because I happen to think that those voters who care about the deficit enough to get out and vote on it as a single issue are actually going to be captured by the republicans on a lot of other issues. Or they will have forgotten the momentary image of Obama as a fiscally sound cost cutter in the flood of other costs that the government actually has to continue paying for.
aimai
AngusTheGodOfMeat
No doubt. And good for him. I wouldn’t want a guy to take that job and not change his view of it once he was in there.
Liar, that is a complete misrepresentation of my view. I did not say he couldn’t fail, of course he can fail. But he is not failing to be what he said he was, and that is the central question here. Whether being what he said he was, and acting accordingly, works, or not, remains to be seen, and will be judged in the fullness of time.
Please take the time to understand my words before you try to put your version of them in my mouth, because if you don’t, I will shove them deep and hard up your lying ass.
Little Dreamer
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
I understand this, but, I’m now seeing that Obama and his cabinet are changing position on war issues. I’m not even speaking to the things that it takes a congressional vote to approve, but policy coming out of this white house.
If you ask me (and I’m no one, but, I have an idea why this is happening), Cheney’s rhetoric is creating a harder line in Obama’s administration, and it’s a change I don’t want to see.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@aimai:
How can you “allude” to me when you misstate my view? I do not defend Obama despite disappointment. That’s what you said. You are wrong. I am not disappointed. That’s a pretty big miss on your part. Rather that write long essays explaining that away, why not just acknowledge that you got me wrong, and go forward?
Meh. I have expressed no opinion on the existence of, or numbers of, centrist voters, in this context, or anywhere recently that I know of. I am not talking about the centristiness of voters. I am talking about the centristiness of Obama.
Jay B.
Jesus Christ. Riddle me this, genius, how does Clinton get the credit for passing the 1993 tax increase? Do you think he passively relied on Tom Daschele to do all the heavy lifting? How did LBJ not only get the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 passed — but got the bulk of his Great Society program through Congress well after the martyr period of JFK passed?
The difference between the Executive Branch taking an active role in legislation and a passive one isn’t “Unitary Executive” theory, it’s part of the job description.
Unitary Executive is when you institute laws and/or wars without Congress involved at all or believe you are able to be above the law. It’s completely and utterly different. And it takes a real idiot to think otherwise.
Little Dreamer
@aimai:
Then perhaps you shouldn’t have used his moniker. I see his name, I send him a notification. He is my significant other, I don’t just glance over something referencing him without notifying him – he would do the same for me.
Personally I think your piece was quite interesting and thought provoking, but, using his name meant I would notify him. Perhaps you didn’t know that AtGoM and I live together? Now you do.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Little Dreamer:
I can understand why you’d see it that way, and why a lot of people might. But I don’t have a problem with the course he is taking.
The worst thing a new president could do, in my opinion, would be to come into office and start rearranging the military furniture without studying the problems in depth. And that study is going to produce course corrections. This is exactly why I voted for this guy, so that he would do that.
It’s exactly why we hated Bush, because he didn’t do that. He and Cheney and Rumsfeld came in there and proceeded to operate on the basis of assumptions they had made before they took office, and we saw the results.
Give me a man who is strong enough to change his mind, not a guy who thinks he is strong because he doesn’t.
aimai
Oh, I missed this from Angus
For those who, understandably, didn’t read my totally inaccurate attack on people like Angus’s relationship with Obama in my blog post at No More Mr. Nice Blog I observed that many of Obama’s supporters behave like wives in a polygamous relationship:
I think Angus’s continued insistence that he, alone, of all Obama’s supporters truly “gets” him makes my point for me.
aimai
Little Dreamer
So you agree that the Bush admin military scenario was crazy, but when Obama doesn’t pull back from that crazy, that’s sane?
Ummm, we’re going to have interesting dinner conversation tonight. ;)
Brien Jackson
@aimai:
“I absolutely stand by my statement that the âmythical centrist voterâ is a mythâjust like the âwhole country is center/rightâ is a myth.”
And I’ll submit that you’re confusing the point then. Whether or not “centrist voter” is a good way to describe them, there are a block of very low information voters who know very little about policy of any kind and switch their votes from election to election. And yes, these people do by and large decide who wins our elections.
As for center-right nation, while the piece that originated that bit of snark was pretty bad, I’m not sure how anyone familiar with other advanced nations at all could possibly conclude the US isn’t a center-right country by contrast. Having a larger share of ill-informed voters make it a bit murkier, but by and large, Americans hate taxes of any kind and want lots of money to be spent on military gadgets. That they also want goodies like Medicare and more education spending doesn’t really change that much; the center-right has become all about having everything you want without paying for it.
aimai
No, little dreamer, I didn’t know that you and Angus live together. Why would I? I don’t have a problem with you forwarding a link to him, though. I just didn’t think it would go over well. Which, apparently, it didn’t.
aimai
AngusTheGodOfMeat
The same way that Obama gets credit for getting his economic measures passed right out of the gate.
But HCR is not analagous and not an apt comparison.
The right doesn’t get much “right” about HCR, but one thing they do seem to understand is that the thing is the biggest package of change on the domestic side of the ledger that we have seen or will see in our lifetimes. The guidance of congress that a president can apply to something like the 1993 tax increase or even the recent stimulus package is not even in the same ballpark as what is required to do something like HCR on the grand scale.
Even a stupid f_ck like you should be able to see that.
Little Dreamer
@aimai:
I see both your point and his. His point is that he’s not disappointed so you didn’t quite accurately describe him, so while you want to equate him with what you wrote, it’s not exactly the truth.
Brien Jackson
@Jay B.:
Well, because people like the Great Man Theory. It makes for nice neat narratives, and doesn’t require a whole lot of thinking to explain why things happened. LBJ and the Civil Rights Act is actually probably one of the more pernicious ones, both because it’s wrong and because a better understanding of the dyanmic would help activists out today.
aimai
Brien Jackson,
I’m not confusing the point. I’m quite clear on the point: most switch hitting voters in this country are “low information voters.” Low information voters are not, however, “centrist” voters–they may be low information and have lots of interests or concerns that can’t be tracked on a clear left/right division. We actually know that. There are low information and fragile/new voters on both the left and the right, though they don’t always have the language needed to identify themselves. Every election both parties try to reach those voters, while locking up their regular voting “likely voters” from previous elections. I don’t think those low information/switch hitting voters are, in fact, deficit hawks though I’m sure that after a mad round of fox news specials on the dangers of the deficit those voters may be brought to think they are. But I don’t think that this particular program, such as it is, will do the slightest to influence their votes come election time. Because its too small and too badly marketed. And because Obama and the Dems are swimming upstream against a historic tide, and a media tide, which is not going to let Obama market himself as some kind of succesfull fiscal conservative. If only. But the dems would have to be a lot better at managing their message than they are.
aimai
Gene108
Conservative narratives work because they use them. They construct their whole politics around them, like “government bad”, “tax cuts good”, etc.
Liberals on the other hand refuse to establish a narrative and when a politician tries to do things liberals want, like healthcare reform, and liberals get frustrated they aren’t getting single payer they turn bat-shit crazy on the politician who listened to them in the first place.
This doesn’t engender a strong desire for politicians to follow liberal narratives, in my opinion.
gwangung
If we’re limiting this to within the US, one should separate out the social issues from the economic issues; being more liberal on race, for example, does not mean being more liberal on taxing and government spending. (And even social issues can be subdivided; a country that consistently votes down same sex marriage can conceivably be called center right on that issue).
Little Dreamer
@aimai:
Well, apparently you don’t know the saga of me and TZ on this blog. Most people are aware of it. I thought you were, apologies.
We are an item, and I notify him when I see anything referencing him.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@aimai:
No big deal. I’m pretty sure that my approval of your piece means as little to me as whatever you think of my view here.
But that said, if you are going to reference me on your blog, at least take the time to make sure you know what my view is. You could, you know, always ask me. I not exactly shy about telling people what I think. In this case, I have been telling people what I think about Obama for going on two years, and you manage to get it dead wrong.
Sorry, I didn’t come looking for this disagreement, dude.
And this shit? Get a fucking clue, man, honestly:
That is not what I said. Again you can’t read. I said that the people at the right and left edges didn’t get him. The ideologues on both sides. That’s a fairly narrow band of people, really, but that’s the band that makes all the noise.
My exact words, upstream, were these:
There is no way that anyone but a dumbass liar like you could turn that into an assertion that I think nobody but me gets Obama. His approval rating is at around 50% or thereabouts after a particularly tumultuous and nasty year. As in most things in America these days, about half the people have the thing about right. At this stage of this presidency, I see that as quite satisfactory.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@aimai:
I absolutely stand by my statement that the âmythical centrist voterâ is a myth
Who knew I was a mythical creature… but then again… I created a budget freeze using my mental powers! Wahh haa haaa! I have more work to do….
aimai
Little Dreamer,
I didn’t think I wrote that Angus was a disappointed follower of Obama. I don’t think that and if that’s the impression I left I’m sorry. I think that Angus’s comments about Obama always boil down to this
“the rest of you are ignorant/stupid/fools who believed wrong things about our leader. This is harmful because you aren’t as good a follower as I am–you never were (you are all naderites, or not really good voters, or you didn’t do anything during the last election) or you never will be (you won’t do any of those things for Obama next time). The really good followers, like me, Angus, understand Obama, see that he’s just the same as he always was, and know that if we just keep agreeing with his tactics and his strategy we will get exactly what we were promised during the election. Or at any rate all he can get us politically. And we should just be grateful because this is the best of all possible worlds and anything else would be asking too much, or irrational, or counterproductive, or something.”
I analogized it to the relationship of wives to spouse, or romantic follower to romantic ideal, not because I think Angus (or any of us) is “in love” with an elected leader but because the same passionate attachment to an idealized relationship between self and leader is evident every time Angus lectures the rest of us about what fools we were for having had whatever opinions we had about Obama when we voted for him. It must be trivially obvious that out of several million voters, in a coalition that ran the gamut from far left to disgusted republicans, that a lot of people voted for Obama for a lot of different reasons. Because Angus imagines himself to be the perfect, exact “voter in the middle” doesn’t make him so, even if he thinks he’s perfectly matched by centrist obama.
aimai
socraticsilence
This seems (like much of Obama’s initiatives) to be a play right out of the Clinton playbook, so I eagerly a wait those who regard Clinton as a the great progressive force of the late 20th century to tell me I’m wrong and not only would Bill have refused to do something like this but that Hillary would have fixed the economy, killed Bin Laden and given us single payer by now.
Jay B.
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Me: Obama can not fail, he can only be misunderstood.
You:
Hahahahahaha. You:
“Not because he misrepresented himselfâhe did not. It is because they projected their own hopes, or in the case of the right, fears, onto him. Fools, all of them.”
“For those on the right and left edges of our politics, in the case of Obama, epic fail. They failed to understand who Obama really was.”
“And I totally do not agree that this was his fault. I understood him, others had the same opportunity to do so.”
So…Despite his promises on health care reform (supporting the public option, among other things), closing Gitmo, implementing stronger financial regulations, lobbyist rules, increased transparency in government, overturning Bush Administration state secrets privileges and indefinite detentions â things he either didn’t do, or can’t do or has done the opposite, I misunderstood him?
He’s had failures. You can’t even admit it. And that’s my fault, how again?
Jay B.
.
I see. When he helps gets something passed, he has power.
But when he doesn’t, he is powerless.
Sycophant.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
He is not going to “pull back” from it in some dramatic way when he comes into office. That would be dangerous and produce a tragic backlash in theater that would equal the tragic fuckups Bush made in the first place. You can’t walk away from a war in the Middle East without huge danger and risk to your own people, to say nothing of the risk to the locals. I don’t agree that he “dithered” as those on the right claimed, and I don’t agree that he is moving too slowly to get out as people on the left seem to think. What’s more, and probably most importantly, I don’t have the information to judge the latter well enough to criticize it. My idea was to stay out of Iraq in the first place, but now that we are in there, we have to be careful getting out.
As for Gitmo, meh. It’s a trainwreck but you can’t just shut the thing down. I think it will get taken care of, but only in time. Ask me in November 2012 how I think it went.
All of our conversations are interesting, love.
Brien Jackson
“I analogized it to the relationship of wives to spouse, or romantic follower to romantic ideal, not because I think Angus (or any of us) is âin loveâ with an elected leader but because the same passionate attachment to an idealized relationship between self and leader is evident every time Angus lectures the rest of us about what fools we were for having had whatever opinions we had about Obama when we voted for him. ”
Well, I can’t speak for how anyone else feels, but I would submit that you’re grossly mischaracterizing the nature of the people you’re trying to describe, most likely projecting the way you look at the world onto them.
Jay B.
@Brien Jackson:
Oh jeez. I, in fact, went out of my way to reference the Great Society that followed the Civil Rights Act to show that Presidents, in fact, can often get their preferred policies passed! Can’t read? More interested in passing off idiotic “Great Man” theory than addressing the point? Gah.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Jay B.:
Whatever, asshole. Your schtick apparently is to take what someone else says and twist it into some snarky shit that you can try to pass off as an argument.
Think whatever you want, I don’t give a shit. You are not having an honest exchange with me, and I have other things to do.
Comparing Clinton’s 1993 tax increase is in no way analagous to the current HCR legislative effort, in scale or in effect. Any damned fool can see that. But keep pimping the comparison, please. It befits you.
socraticsilence
You know maybe Obama needs to do stupid gimmicks- its obvious that talking to the country like adults and doing the right thing isn’t working (big suprise- the village basically roasted Carter for his “sweater speech” which 30 years later seems almost freakishly prescient- this is the crap Clinton did and people loved him for it- Micro-policy and all that crap- of course considering people hated on even smart, politically brilliant things like Cash for Clunkers it might not work.
Little Dreamer
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
I’m not saying he should pull back from the middle east. I do want to see a scale down in Iraq eventually, and I want to see us finish the job in Afghanistan (and yes, folly as it may seem, take a stab at going into Pakistan and getting bin Ladin)… but, to say that spending freezes will invariably not affect any military spending at all is crap as far as I’m concerned. We’ve already built up our military beyond comprehension, and we spend much more money on killing people than we do at taking care of them.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Nope. He never defined any public option. He used the phrase “public plan” and then deliberately and unambiguously stated that what that meant, exactly, would have to be worked out later. Others came along and made the “public option” the centerpiece of the debate, not Obama. Christ, even Associated Press got that one right, IIRC. And don’t ask me for a link on the “public plan” thing, as I already looked it up and posted it once and I am not doing it again. Do your own lookups.
Again you misrepresent the facts. You’re a liar.
Corner Stone
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
He had you at “Hello”?
AngusTheGodOfMeat
On that we agree as usual!
I consider the US to be a dangerously bellicose nation, as you know. A thing I am definitely NOT in favor of.
Brien Jackson
And this is why the firebaggers drive me crazy:
Of course that means theyâre defending all the corrupt aspects of the Senate bill that proved to be so unpopular in MA, starting with the Cornhusker Kickback (and including the Louisiana Purchase that similarly bought off Mary Landrieu). And theyâve flip-flopped on their earlier demands that such corrupt deals be removed from the bill.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Corner Stone:
Sure. I liked him right away. I don’t agree with him all the time on policy issues, but there aren’t any dealbreakers for me in his policy views. But as I said TWO YEARS AGO, I supported him because I liked him. Still do.
After a year, I still have not encountered a dealbreaker in the implementation phase. And I don’t write the game summary after one quarter.
Little Dreamer
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
I thought you’d agree with that. ;)
I need to get sleep now. I got a big night tonight.
Jay B.
Right. It’s my fault you think like a fan boy and write like a Soviet. Or is it vice-versa?
Sigh. From his campaign website under “Quality, Affordable Choices”:
âą Offers a public health insurance option to provide the uninsured and those who canât find affordable coverage with a real choice.
âą Immediately offers new, low-cost coverage through a national âhigh riskâ pool to protect people with preexisting conditions from financial ruin until the new Exchange is created.
Still think that doesn’t “define any public option”? Or am I just misunderstanding his centrism again? My guess is you’ll avoid this one like the plague and blame Congress again.
Jay B.
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Oh yeah. I forgot about that one. Care to apologize or are you simply a total asshole? Hey, it’s only his CAMPAIGN WEBSITE, so you can keep thinking I’m a lefty Naderite douchebag who believes in purity and unicorns lying all the time about the things it literally says in his own campaign literature, or you can shut the fuck up. I backed it up, dickhead. What’s your excuse?
Flugelhorn
I have not bothered to read the rest of this thread, but I thought it appropriate to bring this up here since Obama is so familiar with the term.
A 3 year freeze reducing departmental budgets by LESS than 1% for 3 years, saving an estimated 15 billion a year (whoopie) is the very definition ofâŠ
…wait for itâŠ
âLipstick on a pig.â
Little Dreamer
Jay B, it appears you’re arguing with yourself now.
AtGoM left you a clue of where to find what he cited. It’s already there. Here let me give you a hand:
WAPO article:
Back when Obama was campaigning, it was called “a public plan” – you can look it up, there are many articles referencing it.
I think AtGoM is being utilized at work, and I need to get sleep so I can work tonight. Enjoy your reading.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@Jay B.:
We already had that argument in here, and your side lost.
And not just in here. Factcheck sites came to the same conclusions. “Public Option” was
This was a refinement of the “public plan” concept that had been loosely described in earlier discussions and popping up in the 2008 campaign. The closest thing we could find to an Obama description was a “public plan” that might feature “subsidized” coverage options. Not the same thing as a Medicare model.
Part of the problem here is that nobody took ownership of the nomenclature. If Obama can be faulted, and I think he can in this case, it’s for not seeing that the language was being twisted around for bad reasons. Opponents of HCR saw the Full Monty public option as a steppingstone to Single Payer, and built their opposition to HCR on that idea early on. Proponents of a simpler public plan which would amount to an exchange with subsidized alternatives for people who needed them, basically limited to private insurers who would get public money, failed to make a clear distinction between these two very different models.
Obama wasn’t quick enough on his feet to see that the overblown Public Option model would be used to lobby against HCR, and then that his base would turn around and claim that he had advanced that overblown model himself and then failed to sell it … which he didn’t. Obama’s team was trying to be careful not to box in the voters in 2008, and then congress in 2009, by being deliberately vague on the details. Not well handled.
But not a deception, and not a broken promise, or anything even close to one. Similar to the “broken promise” claims that McCain made WRT campaign funding in 2008, saying that Obama had broken his promise to take public funds, when Obama had only agree to meet with McCain and discuss the matter. When the Obama team saw that McCain was not interested in negotiating a fair deal, and only wanted to box Obama out of his own (wildly successful) fundraising operation, they walked out on the talks, and McCain claimed that he’d been stiffed. It was a clever move by McCain, but it didn’t work.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
Whoops, this link fucked up in my previous post.
fraught
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: This. this. this.
Mark S.
@Jay B.:
There’s where you are wrong. You don’t go by what Obama or his campaign website said. You go by special AngusGodofMeat powers of deduction to understand what Obama really stands for. You had the same opportunity to do so. Fools, all of you!
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
ĐœĐ”ŃĐŒĐ”ŃŃĐœŃĐč.
aimai
Forget it JayB, its chinatown. I think my takeway from this part of the debate, such as it is, is that some commenters are really very overinvested in thinking that their passionate political opinions are dispassionate ones and that their snapshot of the campaign, and the candidate, is a 360 degree view.
Brien,
I’m not expecting you to read my blog post but I think you may have missed a rather obvious point I made there: “the romance” as a genre doesn’t require an actual romance, or even love. I specifically drew attention, as well, to the phenomenon of what we might call romanceless/passionless unions like arranged marriages. To the extent that its useful to analogize some aspects of the voter’s relationship to a romantic novel or narrative I specifically want to include the arranged marriage and all that those arrangements imply for how one party comes to know another. To the extent that this reflects my own relationship to candidate Obama I’d say that it was an arranged marriage of political convenience with some aspects of a post marital romance followed by disillusionment with those who arranged the marriage and my new spouse. But not much. I didn’t have that high expectations of the party politics that led me to marry/choose Obama, and I didn’t have that much involved in thinking he was the perfect candidate for me. He was available, and I was available, and I thought he’d fit the bill pretty well. And he has.
I don’t know why Angus and you can’t tell the difference between an abstract discussion of a political issue on the merits as a tactic and personal identification. I don’t think Obama’s new ploy is a mistake because I don’t like Obama. I do like Obama. I just think its a mistake. I don’t think that lots of people relate to Obama (or any candidate) as they do to a kind of romantic lead because I think that’s embarrassing and I want to humiliate them. I just think it for all the reasons I laid out in my blog essay.
I think lots of people who voted for Obama had lots of reasons for doing so–more analogous to my arranged marriage scenario–and I don’t think they are wrong to be watchful, thoughtful, suspicious or critical about how their candidate is working out for them. Its not because they don’t understand politics, or didn’t “Get” Obama. Its because he was the only choice available to them in an off the rack suit and they aren’t sure they like the fit. That’s politics. That’s not something else. Its absolutely just real politik. The democrats grasp that–that’s why they run polls and change their tune at different times of the election cycle. Because they want more votes, to depress republican votes, to bring out their own voters. I just happen to think they may be doing it wrong. I don’t think they are particularly well served by the chorus of “you blog commenters/voters are idiots” anymore than they would be well served if you and Angus got out to rally real world voters and told them the same thing.
aimai
Jay B.
@Little Dreamer:
Right. Tell your lover he’s a fucking blowhard who chickens out after wrongly calling people liars. He calls me a liar by saying Obama “never” called it a public option or defined it as such — except on his own campaign website, of course, which doesn’t somehow count as calling it “a public option” or supporting it, evidently — and you parse tactics farther down the road, which has literally nothing to do with my original point which was that Obama promised a plan with a public option. Which, again, he did ON HIS CAMPAIGN WEBSITE.
This is Meat’s statement, which is demonstrably false:
He DID define it, once upon a time. I cited where with a link. And partly from that, I made my choice to support him — I didn’t “misunderstand” him. That he LATER reneged on his support, well, that’s another matter entirely.
And this:
Isn’t a defense. First, it’s very poor reporting. Obama may have called the public option his “preferred choice” (then again, I was told he never used the words) but there’s ample evidence since he took office that he really felt otherwise. In fact, he also called it “not the most important part” (which makes you wonder why it was his ‘preferred choice’) and abandoned it altogether to court Olympia Snowe. Even though, at the same time, Valerie Jarrett went on CNN in late October to “reaffirm” Obama’s support for the public option and added “we’re going to keep pushing until the very last moment”.
He said a lot of things. A lot of very weird, contradictory things. But to say that he â or his surrogates â never said anything about the public option or his support for it is laughable.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
I am not sure what your message is. And why are the arcane subleties of Obama’s tactics a reason to start trying to psychoanalyze the voters? Concern about what motivates voters is blog churn material, because we’re the voters and we love to talk about ourselves. But if you are Obama, and the history they write about you will describe what you did and what effects it had …. isn’t that what really counts?
If we get an HCR measure, will anyone really care ten years from now how we got it? Or why a particular base was happy or unhappy about it? Financial reforms … same thing? DADT, same thing? You name it, same thing?
General Winfield Stuck
aimai
I don’t believe you. Not a single bit.
edit – at least him as president
Jay B.
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
So I’m hallucinating about this from his own campaign website in terms of what his plan was in terms of a “public option”:
“Offers a public health insurance option to provide the uninsured and those who canât find affordable coverage with a real choice.
And what that part of his plan would do:
“Immediately offers new, low-cost coverage through a national âhigh riskâ pool to protect people with preexisting conditions from financial ruin until the new Exchange is created.”
Seems clear as fucking day and hardly the misty, murky, “who’s to say what ‘public’ means?” dance you’re describing. Now, sure, it might not be a deal breaker — in fact, I’m saying pass the fucker anyway — but it certainly IS a broken promise. Literally. Can’t be clearer.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
Actually, it was from a speech transcript which we cited here a couple of months ago. Also pointed to by AP and MSNBC, among others, as the answer to the question, “Did Jay B lie about Obama’s healthcare plan?”
Paraphrase: We need a public plan, and the details are not that important, but it should include subsidized choices that would be available in an exchange.
I think that’s close to the exact language but not the exact sentence construction.
Definitely not a Medicare model, which is what the Public Option moniker was described to mean a year later. Definitely not a step toward single payer, either.
Not, not so. The language was being used carelessly, and he meant one thing while others meant something else. At first, nobody thought it was that big a deal … a “public plan” than included subsidized alternatives, versus a true Medicare clone with public insurance. Two completely different things. By the time our side realized the confusion, the other side had capitalized on it to drum up opposition.
Our side could have evened the score on this if it had seen the obvious language confusion and stepped in to clear it up. Instead, like you, it preferred to turn it into a bash on Obama that is not justified. What is justified is a compaint that he missed the distinction when it would have made a difference, not realizing what the other side was going to do with it, and by then, it was too late. Hacker’s Public Option became the standard definition, and before Obama could adjust, the opposition seized it and turned into a weapon.
All’s fair in politics. I don’t fault the opponents for doing this. But for our own base to get this wrong and to blame Obama for the whole mess, as if he caused it, is just a lie.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Jay B.:
So, to be clear, you believe that Obama can unilaterally create HCR legislation, revoke DADT, spend gobs of money on stimulus packages, etc., all without Congressional approval?
Who the fuck was claiming that the President had no role in domestic politics? I didn’t say that, and I don’t remember anyone else saying that. Not sure where you’re getting that from.
LBJ had a few advantages that Obama does not: he had commanding Democratic majorities in both houses, he had won the 1964 election by a huge margin, he had massive public support, he didn’t have to fight for 15-minute-long news cycles, he had built up 20 years of markers he could call in, and the GOP was holding its more fringe elements at bay, rather than being run by them. It didn’t hurt that he was one black-hearted intimidating son of a bitch.
Stopping the slide into outright economic depression, for one thing. Like I said earlier, a lot of the campaign promises had to be put aside to address this issue.
Lucky you. Now if you could only get guys like Lieberman and Nelson on board, and then get the GOP to quit hitting the filibuster button like a monkey on crack, then we may actually get somewhere.
Awesome. And yes, you do get to complain. And if you meet up with a Democrat who’s going to stay home in 2010 or 2012 to “teach Obama a lesson”, please beat the holy living fuck out of them while screaming “I CAN SEE RUSSIA FROM MY MOTHERFUCKING HOUSE!!!!!!”
I never said he was helpless; I said that in the end, he can’t make Congress do his bidding. Different things.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
No, idiot, you are refusing to see that the term meant two different things. Obama’s only description of it was based on a subsidized public insurance alternative made available through an exchange. By the time the term became commonly used, its meaning had shifted to mean basically a Medicare clone, featuring public insurance. Obama never advanced that plan. His failure was that he didn’t see the confusion and realize how it would be used against the plan, first, and then him, later. It was an honest, but quite regrettable mistake, AFAIC.
A few wags picked up on this by late summer, and there would have been time then to clear it up and RENAME the most desirable version of the thing something else, such as Expanded Medicare, which was one of the suggested changes. But nobody picked up on it, and the thing was never properly cleared up. Some factcheck and news sites tried to shed light on it but nobody seemed to care at that point. More fun to yell about something else, apparently.
aimai
At 242 and 243,
Uh. Let me say this very slowly. I.Do.Like.Obama. In fact, I do like him so much that I routinely head over to the white house flickr page to bask in his glory. I’m not even kidding about that. I’m crazy about Michelle and the kids. I also worked for his election. I held a party and raised a few thousand dollars for him. And will be working for him in 2012. To accuse me of lying about that is just weird. Why would I bother?
Second of all, I wrote what I wrote because I’m an anthropologist and I’m interested in how people read social and cultural texts. In particular, I wrote what I wrote because I saw a continuing problem arising between voters/blog posters who are trying to decide what kind of political figure Obama is based on his actions, and those other blog commenters/posters/voters who believe that there is one true Obama who is known because of signs/proofs that occured when we elected him. Maybe this is too complex for a blog post on a long thread. It seemed to me that we were continually having long threads in which some members (perfectly good people) were trying to use information (tweets, leaks, politico articles, letters from congress, tv interviews) to deterimine what Obama “really wanted” or “was really going to do” while others would angrily rebut these attempts to gain information/interpret events as childish, leftist, hysterical, FDL like, lacking in faith, lacking in political acumen, lacking in historical perspective.
I don’t see those two stances are reflecting two kinds of voters or democrats. I just see them as reflecting the fact that people come into Obama’s first year with two kinds of expectations about him as a candidate: that he needs to prove himself/we don’t really know who he is and that he doesn’t need to prove himself/we do really know who he is. Sometimes people started out with a lot of faith in who Obama was, what he was going to pursue as a set of policies, and his capabilities and then started losing faith. They lost faith because they saw lots of inflection points when they thought/hoped he’d lead in a different way than he choose to lead. Others have maintained, or even grown, in their liking for him as a political leader. They see the same inflection points but they read them differently, or they don’t see them at all.
To me this is an interesting issue and I resolved it, for myself, with the metaphor and the analogy of the romance as a genre and of polygamous and arranged marriage as a lens through which to look at these different kinds of desires and investigatory claims. If you don’t like that kind of analysis please ignore it. But for me its an interesting and important issue:how do voters come to gain information about their elected candidate? How do they analyze the signals and information the candidate offers them in the absence of a one on one relationship? And what effect is it having on Obama’s voters, among whom I count myself?
Angus is satisfied with what he bought when he bought his Obama vote. I’m not. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop being a democrat. I’m older than Obama and I’ve been a democrat longer than him too. It doesn’t mean I’m going to stop supporting Obama–I’ve been a yellow dog democrat longer than Obama. But it does help me think about how I want to proceed politically when I call my reps.
aimai
Corner Stone
ISTM that the people who claim to understand Obama the best/support him without fail hold absolutely no expectations for what they thought Obama would accomplish/push for/represent as President.*
At least I can’t discern any standard or bright line that would actually upset them if crossed or not accomplished.
Maybe in his 2nd or 3rd year we can be told what those items are.
*Beyond him not physically being Bush or McCain.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
Fair enough and simple enough. But …. heh, and you knew the but was coming …..
Your dissatisfaction requires a lot of machinations. My satisfaction is pretty simple to explain: I voted for a centrist, I got a centrist, I liked him then, and I like him now.
The end. My satisfaction is not based on loving all of his policies or actions. I have personally seen 12 presidents, and not one of them has met that standard. I don’t expect to see one that does.
Compared both to the predecessor, and to the alternatives displayed in the 2008 campaign season, Obama is a dream choice. And all you guys seem to want to do is play word games with yourselves and find ways to trash him.
Good for you. The good news is, you are doing it on an obscure little blog, and meanwhile, somewhere probably just over 50% of the population still approves of Obama despite a very, very rough year on all fronts, depending on whose polls you read. So, there ya go. With any economic luck you are looking at a two term president. He could finish up with a healthcare bill, repeal of DADT, financial reforms, an averted economic disaster, and who knows what other accomplishments.
Corner Stone
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
This is like saying “Forfeit!”
A million year old dragon emerging from the center of the sun and traveling to earth to burn us all alive with his megafury breath would have been worse too.
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone: That is just too damn funny.
General Winfield Stuck
@aimai:
Don’t care how many times you visit the WH flickr page, or what you did during the campaign. I just know what you write here, and it is chocked full a RW framing, and little freudian slips by an obviously highly intelligent person. Maybe the smartest one here.
But BJ has more than a few average, or a little above average smarts old dogs, and a few newer ones, who have fairly high performance bullshit detectors.
And I seem to remember several months ago, you went full on no Obama, got slammed pretty hard, disappeared, and came back with a more subtle version of it.
And there is not one thing wrong with that, I fully expect and will totally accept a primary challenge to Obama from the left in 2012. That is cool with me, and i wish them un luck. But what has been infuriating these past few months are people coming here hawking or trying to create Obama FAIL memes whether openly or covertly and telling me they just want Obama to do better. Some do, and I have no problem with that, as long as their criticisms are substantial and fact based.
Your bs today about obama not being man enough, or commanding enough could well have come straight out of the RNC, as well as some other lame anti Obama RW framing from you and others. One thing about writing long verbose screes, they can help to fill in cracks in arguments, but they also provide more opportunity for the truth to come out.
Just my opinion, which is what we do here much of the time.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
By 2012:
Any unnecessary war.
An intractable economic downturn lasting beyond this year.
No action on DADT.
Still over 50k troops in Afghanistan or Iraq unless new events change the storyline.
No profound health insurance reforms.
No expanded health insurance availability and affordability.
Just for starters.
The reason you can’t “discern any bright line” is because the discussion has never been framed in that context. It’s all been a trashtalk game that would be a credit to the talking heads on FOX News.
You are not going to find reasonable discussion of these points here. Not when the front pagers themselves vacillate between appearing to be reasonable and then trolling their own readers with fauxrage on a regular basis.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
And what is the difference between that, and John McCain?
Come and live in Arizona for a while. You have him pretty well described.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@aimai:
Isn’t the problem that people are trying to write a game summary at the end of the first quarter?
How can anyone judge the latter question at this stage?
Jay B.
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
You said, in response to what many of us think is Obama’s ineffectual legislative record:
Jesus. It appears some of the progressives here have bought into that whole âunitary executiveâ shit wholesale.
Which is completely ridiculous. There’s a LONG way between having a smarter legislative strategy of getting your own agenda passed and doing it as a dictator. Congress, is, of course, worse than useless. And yet, Obama has been clinging to “bi-partisan” problem solving. That kills him every time and demoralizes the base — but at least it shows a complete naivety of Washington D.C. (unless of course, he wants the excuse of not getting anything done) and the GOP! It’s been a fucking disaster.
His management — or indulgence — of the Health Care debate is a clinic of what the Executive Branch does wrong when it comes to legislation. He let the opposition define it, he confused Democratic Leadership as to what he wanted, he passively let Harry Reid let Max Bauchus sit on it for an entire summer while the media fell in love with the Teabag set. The Obama All-The-Way supporters are reduced to parsing the meaning of “public option” and blaming skeptics for listening to Obama’s own rhetoric. Conversely, if it was his strategy, it’s impossible to be upset with people who wished it was more robust and focused, with some public pressure put upon Congress to pass comprehensive health care reform. He signed up 100 million people and never mobilized them. You tell me if that was the right move.
fraught
@aimai: Please. Just. Stop. Talking. it’s over. You dug a hole with overlong posts wearing down abstruse points to blunt nubs. Have a little self respect.
Also Jay B.
Da Bomb
@General Winfield Stuck: I am glad to see you are back today General.
Corner Stone
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
To continue a metaphor – if one of your strategies is not working at the end of the quarter, don’t you think most coaches would shift to try something else?
If they’re stacking 8 and 9 in the box you start to game against that – you don’t continue a strategy that relies on the linebackers to not tackling your running back.
ETA – some people want to call a screen pass and maybe gain a few yards for the team, but some here don’t seem to see the RB getting stuffed on draw after draw after draw play.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
When you refuse to see the difference between a subsidized (private insurance) alternative in a public exchange (the only plan Obama described) and a publicly funded government insurance plan (the plan Jacob Hacker described) and see that talking about one is not the same thing as promising another, you have no business lecturing anybody about anything.
It’s an Apples-Oranges difference, and your approach to it seems to be “It’s all fruit to me, Obama failed!”
Okay, that’s your stance, keep to it. But you know and I know that it’s bullshit.
Jay B.
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
Any unnecessary war.
His best — by far — quality has been a cool comportment on the international stage. Win.
An intractable economic downturn lasting beyond this year.
Complete probability. Unless you really want to put on the rosiest rose colored glasses. It won’t be all his fault even — he mitigated the worst happening — but this window dressing, do-nothing “freeze” should make you worry.
No action on DADT.
Almost certain that nothing will be done. Why not do it at the beginning of your term when you are popular, people will have years to “get over it” and it’s about 1 million down on the list of voter’s priorities? Maybe a second term issue. If he gets there. And they don’t lose Congress this year, which will probably happen.
Still over 50k troops in Afghanistan or Iraq unless new events change the storyline.
Double guarantee. New events or not, we’re over there for another decade at least.
No profound health insurance reforms.
70 – 30 against. And that’s this year. 95 to 5 against after, say, February.
No expanded health insurance availability and affordability.
See above.
Isnât the problem that people are trying to write a game summary at the end of the first quarter?
That’s only if you think Obama has 3 more years to govern with any kind of Congressional support, even as weak as it is. What will the Democrats campaign on, anyway?
Corner Stone
@fraught:
Hilarious. Angus lays out a tabula rasa defense for the President, your response was “this.this.this.” and you’re telling others to have self respect?
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@Corner Stone:
Heh. I think the football metaphor can be overused, as your witty post suggests.
However, nobody has scored a touchdown in this imaginary game. HCR is not dead yet. DADT isn’t dead. Financial reform is not dead. The economy is still in flux, it is not apparently tanking as it was 14 months ago. GM is in business and Ford is thriving (relatively speaking). Chrysler is on life support but still breathing.
It’s been a tough defensive contest, but I think we have the best team and the best quarterback. And the best blogs.
Grab me a beer while you are up.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
I didn’t say it would be easy. What strategies do you think would be clearly superior in any of the areas we both listed?
Who do you think would be a better president under these shitty conditions than the one we have now?
General Winfield Stuck
@Da Bomb: Too much at stake to quit. Though I will be, stuck as it were, in serious mode rather than the silly mode I much prefer. The times being what they are. :)
Jay B.
When you refuse to see the difference between a subsidized (private insurance) alternative in a public exchange (the only plan Obama described) and a publicly funded government insurance plan (the plan Jacob Hacker described) and see that talking about one is not the same thing as promising another, you have no business lecturing anybody about anything.
I understand the difference. I’m only going by what he said on his campaign website:
âOffers a public health insurance option to provide the uninsured and those who canât find affordable coverage with a real choice.”
That sounds EXACTLY like a “publicly funded government insurance plan” in the sense it is a “public health insurance option”.
With this:
âImmediately offers new, low-cost coverage through a national âhigh riskâ pool to protect people with preexisting conditions from financial ruin until the new Exchange is created.â
Call it whatever you want, it’s NOT in the current Senate bill, except Exchanges, which Bernie Sanders got in there at the last minute. And Obama himself called the “public option” his “preferred method”. At a certain point, I call that rhetoric. I don’t know why you don’t.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
Both the subsized private insurance option and the publicly funded government insurance option are aimed at solving the same problem. Obama was actually being shrewd in avoiding the “government insurance” thing in the campaign, a tactic aimed at defusing opposition.
Alas, along came Hacker and a lot of progressives who decided, on their own, that no scheme short of a government insurance option — what we now call Public Option — was acceptable. And Obama’s team let that shift slide by without saying a word. Big mistake. Within 30 days the entire subject was being called Public Option and only Hacker’s version of it was accepted.
Of course it was rhetoric … it was ALL rhetoric on both sides. But the opposition played the card more effectively and turned PO into a poison pill, when it never had to be so.
Looking back on it, I am surprised that Emanuel let that happen. Seriously, they should have seen that coming and defused it and turned it into a plus. But … and you will hate this part … I think they caved to the progressives. I think they let themselves believe that giving in to the progressives on the definition of Public Option would move the window over to the left, and instead, it backfired. If they had kept to the subsidized-private-insurance version that Obama described in the first place, we might have it by now.
Just my opinion, from up here in the end zone seats.
Da Bomb
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: I think Obama said it best here during his sombering victory speech:
“The road will be long, the climb will be steep. There will be false starts…but America we will get there…”
Jay B.
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
First, these aren’t shitty conditions, if one really wanted to pass their agenda, centrist or not. In fact, from a political perspective, Obama had every advantage — a large majority of the vote, a large Democratic majority, a gift for stirring rhetoric and 100 million willing volunteers, a clear mandate for change — and his Administration started on the compromises from the start. OK. That’s a way of managing, but â if the press is to believed, they thought small victories would lead to a bipartisan inevitability for tackling big things â the larger strategy is delusional.
if he can’t get major pieces of what you call his centrist agenda passed in the shadow of a reviled Administration with a sweeping, energetic mandate, if he can get so easily surprised by aimless right wing rage and if he really didn’t know that the GOP would oppose him all the way, to say nothing of the Democratic Majority turning yellow without any leadership to hide behind, then it really wouldn’t matter who was President, frankly. Any Democrat could do as little. Fair or not, that’s a fact.
Really take on the banks. Take the SOTU to define the Administration’s goals for the next three months. Fire his economic team. Admit surprise at the lack of resolve of the Democratic Congress. Move up the timetable for withdrawal from Iraq to this summer. Call for more stimulus. Stand for something. Challenge the Democrats to stand for something. Attack Republicans at every turn.
Mark S.
@Jay B.:
John McCain’s economic policies.
mattH
John S:
Still not getting it. Obviously no one has an issue with a program that really no one has seen, so every time you keep acting like we need to address the program, you’re beating a strawman. Even if the program itself is a pony and unicorn giveaway, that clears the deficit completely and puts us in the black for the forseeable future, that’s immaterial to what my issue is with this “spending freeze”.
Notice I mentioned above the concept of the Overton Window. The reason I bring that up is that this bill is being presented (“leaked”) to us, sight unseen, with some small indication of what it’s going to do (freeze a very limited number of programs), inside a right-wing frame. The leaking was a political act, not a policy action, the decision to call it a spending freeze was also a political act, so therefore using a right-wing trope to divulge his intended legislation was also a political act. Perhaps like Doug said, this use “was inevitable, given the (inexplicable) power of conservative narratives”, but to not even try to shift the Window just shows some level of political ignorance on the Administration’s behalf.
Now, you seem to have an issue with my even doing this, but maybe you can tell me why pointing out the politically tone-deaf nature of this announcement is a bad thing?
Aimai
I think the somewhat hysterical calls for me to unmask myself as some sort of clever fdl style infiltrator just really proves my point that some Obama voters, for whatever reasons , act exactly like plural wives propitiating an angry patriarch, or trying to climb the ladder of favorite, by accusing others of a lack of true faith.
This thread began way up top with doug, the op, posting an agreement with steve benen and many others about obamas suggested freeze. We three are all in agreement as political observers and, I say it with some trepidation, loyal democrats, that we don’t think it’s a great political tactic or strategy. Are we all, on the basis of this shocking disagreement with Obama, some kind of rightwing fifth column?
I have never accused another poster of faking their bona fides or lying about their beliefs because I disagreed with them on a matter of policy, strategy, or tactics. I’m disgusted with the ease with which disagreements about how we proceed as voters, democrats or as a party degenerated into calls to shut up, leave the thread, or to come clean as some kind of rw stooge.
The only saving grace for us, as a party, is that I have no doubt that the majority of the blowhards on this thread never go out to work a precinct or talk to voters. Because with the kind of higher reasoning skills and social savoire faire you are demonstrating here you’d be a fucking disaster.
Aimai
Jay B.
@Aimai:
I know you’re pissed now. Capitalizing the “A”? Holy shit.
justinslot
Seriously–people need to get out more (read other blogs) if they don’t know who aimai is. (By the way–where is SteveM’s place, aimai? It’ll probably be obvious after you tell me, but googling SteveM isn’t getting me anywhere.)
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
I’d say I would support most of this. My version is yours, with these adjustments:
Fire Geithner, rain fire and brimstone down on the Senate Dems, call for carefully targeted additional stimulus, lambaste the Republicans. Stand for the longterm health of the middle class and the safety net under those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Commit to solvency for Medicare and Social Security, including the expansions to Medicare that we need from HCR.
On Iraq … I don’t know. I am in favor of accelerating withdrawal as long as there is no great risk to the Iraquis or us owing to the acceleration. If there is, I am not sure that I can support it. But I wouldn’t oppose it if Obama made the case and did the thing skillfully.
sglover
@geg6:
Except he really didn’t. By 2008 the Republicans were justifiably and broadly loathed. The election that year was a foregone conslusion.
In fact, by 2006 the GOP was generally despised as well. Thus, the Dem congressional sweep of that year. And what did the Dems do with their “mandate”? Roll over and abdicate at every opportunity. Starting at the very first moment, when darling Nancy Pelosi said that she would not pursue the CONSTITUTIONAL remedy of impeachment.
Obama’s political talent, and the sympathy of the Democratic Party to liberal/progressive goals, are both myths.
Mark S.
@Aimai:
Oh, I don’t know, I’ve found that if you want people to come around to your thinking, calling them stupid is a very good tactic. Oh, wait, I haven’t really found that is the case.
A lot of these threads really break down to “Obama cannot fail! Only we can fail Obama.” We make fun of it when the right wing says the same thing about conservatism.
This is not to say that I think Obama has failed or that he’s a terrible president. I do think he’s been kinda losing the thread, lately.
mattH
It’s here, but then she links to a post up above that caused a lot of this mess.
General Winfield Stuck
@Aimai:
For the record. My bonafides extend only to whatever dem is in the WH, I was originally an Edwards supporter, as many here were, and only became an Obama supporter when it was clear he would win the nomination. I would have been a Hillary supporter if she had won. It was only after she and her campaign went bugfuck nuts with using RW campaign tactics after it was clear she could not win the dem nomination, that I went anti Hillary for awhile. But now I likes me some Hillary as SoS She had been a solid trooper in the Obama admin. and my hat is off to her for that. The primary, water under the bridge, at least concerning her.
But your response here belies your defense of only wanting Obama to do better. It is laced with dead ender and ratfucking memes, and strawmen, and I am not necessarily accusing you of being either, but the memes are still what they are. “like plural wives propitiating an angry patriarch”
This is the tired old Obama Cultist crappola made famous by Malkin during her season of discontent, which is pretty much year around these days.
Or, the “we need a commanding presence, not bean counter”
(paraphrased). I mean what is this but an effort to slap a “girly man” wingnut meme onto Obama’s ass, or introduce notions from the fetid swamp of Modo’s starved libido, that accomplishes the same thing.
If these, and I only read a couple of your comments in this thread to get the drift of where you are coming from, is your idea of bringing fair and balanced criticism on Obama, then we just live on different planets, you and I.
You want to discuss Obama shortcomings, bring something more like solid evidence rather than pop metaphysical political beliefs of people supporting the president of their own party as being innately negative. And BTW, I like theories like this, for philosophic discussion, not for realistic arguments on political blogs, especially this one.
Maybe something like this
AngusTheGodOfMeat
You assume that having “people come around to your thinking” is the goal. I never, ever, make that assumption. I advance a position, and defend it as necessary. I don’t care a fig who comes around, or who doesn’t, or who agrees, or likes what I said. Not the tiniest bit. The arguments have to stand on their own feet, separate from the theatrics. Or fail, as the case may be.
I have found that reducing your adversaries’ arguments to absurd reductions and the using them as strawmen in your rhetoric is somewhat less effective that just calling your adversaries stupid, and being done with it. It’s the Don Drysdale approach. Asked to intentionally walk a batter, he hit the man with the next pitch. Asked about it later, he said, “Why waste four pitches putting a man on when I can hit him and do it with one?”
I don’t know anybody who has said, or thinks, anything even remotely like “Obama cannot fail, only we can fail Obama.”
I distinctly said, upthread, that Obama can certainly fail.
But he hasn’t failed yet, and I don’t see failure looming. However, politics and history are damned difficult to predict. Who knows what will happen?
General Winfield Stuck
@Aimai:
LOL, I had missed this earlier. You be in the hurtlocker of the Balloon Juice comment section. A whole other country. :-)
Mark S.
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
I certainly agree with that. And while I don’t think 2010 will be pretty, I think the Dems will keep both houses and Obama will win in 2012, so I’m hardly a Cassandra.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
I agree completely.
General Winfield Stuck
@aimai:
I suspect it is a wordpress screw up, but when I click on aimai’s handle at the above linked comment, as well a other of her comments, it goes to the dashboard of my blog The Funhouse.
If this happens to anyone else when they click her handle, I would appreciate knowing about it. thanks.
praise be FSM
Brien Jackson
@aimai:
All those words, not one of them “Congress.” Imagine that.
General Winfield Stuck
@General Winfield Stuck: Man, that is weird. I went and signed out of my blogger.com google account and now it aimai’s handle link goes to only the blogger.com sign in page. not good going to someones dern blog dashboard.
Damn you wordpress or blogger.com.
mclaren
The power of the bsaic conservative narratives isn’t “inexplicable.” The conservative narratives are powerful for a good reason — they tap into the basic sense the American people have that something has gone terribly wrong in America.
Unfortunately, while the conservative narrative correctly points out that something has gone terribly wrong with this country, it completely flubs what’s wrong and why.
The rest of the conservative narrative says that things have gone so terribly wrong with America because of liberals and hippies and the way to fix that is to cut taxes for the rich and increase military spending and start more wars and tear up more of the constitution (if there are any provisions left in the constitution that haven’t been trampled on by our government, which seems doubtful — I guess, on second thought, the U.S. government hasn’t yet quartered troops in our homes, so maybe the third amendment is still in place).
America is in serious trouble. We keep starting meaningless pointless wars that we can’t win against the world’s poorest people, and they’re bankrupting us and turning our society into a militarized police state. Civil rights are going away, America can’t enact basic reforms like reining in the uncontrolled power of giant corporations or enacting simple health care reform (it’s not magic or voodoo, every other developed nation has a national health care system, what’s the problem?) or raise taxes on the rich.
You know, from 1936 to 1980, the top tax rate in America was 70% minimum, it never went below that, and sometimes went up to 92%. Since 1980 the top tax rate has never gone above 40%. If you want to know why America is broke, that’s the goddamn answer right there.
This is not rocket science. It’s simple. The rest of the world does it. The rest of the developed world refuses to invaded third world countries for reason and fight endless losing wars for no reason. The rest of the developed world has nationalized health care and it world. The rest of the developed world has sensible high tax rates on billionaires, and they work.
Things have gone terribly wrong in America because we’re way off track and we’ve abandoned the principles that made America great: [1] Never attack another country unless they attack us first; [2] restrained moderate military spending; [3] high taxes on rich people.
Conservatives have struck a nerve with their narrative that America has gone horribly off track. It’s just that their prescription for what’s wrong (too many civil rights, too few foreign wars, too many abortions, too many gay marriages) are insane. The extreme radical leftists (namely, the other 73% of Americans who aren’t teabaggers) need ot jump on board and grab that narrative but substitute sane prescriptions for fixing America — higher taxes on the rich, curbing the power of giant corporations, no more foreign wars if the country hasn’t directly attacked us.
Incidentally, I’m sick of this “progressive” and “liberal” crap. I’m not a progressive. I’m not a liberal. I’m an extreme radical leftist because I believe in things which are now identified as “extreme” and “radical” and “far left”: the rule of law; the right to a trial before a jury of your peers; the absolute unacceptability of torture; the right to hear the charges brought against you before you can be arrest; the right to face your accuser and not be thrown into a secret black hole prison if you’re arrested; I believe that the president of the united states must obey the law.
These ideas are now considered “extreme” and “radical” and “far left” so that makes me an extreme radical leftist, and I will henceforth identify myself as such. I believe in the constitution, with the teabaggers and Republicans apparently believe is an extreme fringe radical far-left document, since they dispute its most basic provisions, like the right to a jury trial or its prohibition of torture.
FlipYrWhig
Somehow I missed this whole thread earlier…
Anyway, I think the principal audience for this whole initiative (as I posted other places today) isn’t even the public. It’s the center-right Democrats in the House and Senate. They’re the ones who are the shakiest supporters of the big stuff Obama wants to do, and the most nervous about being painted as Big Spending Liberals. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it had to do with horse-trading in conjunction with HCR, especially once that deficit commission thing went down to defeat.
mclaren
The debate here seems to be between folks who think Obama is a great guy and is doing something so clever none of know what it is, and people who take a look at Obama’s total failure to deliver on his promises and conclude that he’s a closet neocon who scammed them with cynical “hopey changey” language.
There’s a third alternative:
Obama could be just a decent guy who meant well but is totally over his head.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
I think this is a good point, and I am all for progressive taxation ……but …..at what rate does the tax become confiscatory?
Asking for your view, not trying to start an argument.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
Uh, no. I am not aware of anyone here who is serious and who thinks this.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
Eisenhower had a stroke. Kennedy had the Bay of Pigs. Johnson obsessed over Vietnam. Nixon was a paranoid schizophrenic and had a sociopathic Secretary of State. Ford was a decent guy who meant well, but we will never really know what he could do. Carter was a decent guy who meant well and was way over his head.
Reagan was an actor who read his lines well. Bush the Elder was a potatohead. Clinton was a womanizer. Bush the Younger was the president during the Cheney Administration. Cheney is crazy.
I don’t know about you, but as near as I can tell, we have the best guy in this job that we’ve had in 50 years. That’s enough for me to give him a full term before I decide whether he can do the job or not.
General Winfield Stuck
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: LOL well said!
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@General Winfield Stuck:
Heh. I just wondered what in the hell he was holding out for :)
mclaren
Tax rates above 80% on earned income start to sound confiscatory to me. Unearned income, that’s a different deal — that’s Masters of the Universe pushing around scam numbers in Goldman Sachs offshore accounts in the Caymans. Hell with that. 99% tax on that kind of crap.
But if a guy owns a business that actually builds things (as opposed to outsourcing everything overseas), the top tax rate probably shouldn’t go above 80%.
I’m not on board with the “we won’t know how Obama’s doing until his administration’s over.” Dude, believe me, you will know. During the goddamn Johnson administration we knew it had tanked before ’68. The Reagan maladministration jumped the shark the minute that senile sociopath gave his inaugural speech and said “Government isn’t the solution,’ it’s the problem.” Really, asshole? Then why do you want to run it? The Clinton administration tanked the minute the health care bill got killed.
Look, this ain’t rocket science. Everyone knows what Obama was elected for — I manned the phone banks enough to know for damn sure. Obama got elected to enact real trasnformative change. Not to tinker around the edges.
So far, Obama’s just tinkered. Sure, he’s got time. But the time’s running out. Obama has got to kick some ass and enact some serious transformative change, and if he doesn’t do that, his administration will be a failure.