I generally accept the Atrios-Krugman critique of Obama’s economic policy, that the stimulus was too small, HAMP was a failure, and that there simply wasn’t/isn’t enough recognition among the economic team of how serious this economic crisis is. I’m also familiar with the counterarguments — that a bigger stimulus never would have passed, that stemming foreclosures has the side effect of artificially propping home prices, for example — but on balance, I’m in the “Obama could have done better” camp on this one.
But I am thoroughly unconvinced by this lengthy New Republic piece on how Obama’s lack of economic populism has doomed Obama politically, mostly because the evidence that Obama is in worse shape than Reagan was in 1982 is scant. Judis’s best evidence is the fact that Republicans lost only 26 seats in the House and broke even in the Senate in 1982, but given that Republicans were a minority in the House at the time and a marginal majority (53 seats) in the Senate, I just can’t see how the Congressional dynamics were the same then as now. The article is still worth a read, though — it’s the most thorough-going of a certain sort of critique we’ve seen a lot of recently and it makes some interesting points.
The main point of the article is not that Obama should have adopted better economic policies, but that he should have demonized Wall Street more. I just don’t think that the Democratic party is set up to the do that, not just because it is partly in Wall Street’s pocket, but because it’s just not set up to demonize anybody, for better or worse. Sure, given six years and ample support from real world events, Democrats were able to run against the bogeymen of Bush and Cheney, but Republicans are able to gin up controversies against imaginary Grand Muftis and black panthers in a matter of weeks.
As much as I hate to admit to give Mark Halperin and John Harris credit, they had it right in The Way To Win: Rovian — and by extension most Republican — politics is based on division, Clintonian – and by extension most Democratic — politics is based on cohesion. Maybe someone in the Dean or Edwards mode could have used the 11-dimensional bully pulpit to beat the hell out of banksters and rally populist support, but Democrats just don’t nominate candidates like that, not anymore.
arguingwithsignposts
Was I just imagining all those times Obama spoke out against excessive pay for banksters, urged them to open credit lines, and urged passage of financial reform?
I mean, he hasn’t been FDR, but he hit those themes pretty often in his weekly addresses, in speeches, etc.
not just obot defense, here, but genuinely wondering.
DougJ
@arguingwithsignposts:
I think he hit it about as hard as we can expect a Democrat of his ilk to hit it, probably harder than either Clinton would have.
Menzies
@DougJ:
Agreed.
I think the Democrats are going to be particularly wary of nominating Dean/Edwards kind of candidates in the future, though. They’ve already seen that someone like Dean can get hammered by the media over a single incident until any chances of being taken as a serious candidate are over, and Edwards, well, was John fucking Edwards.
Until that all blows over, they’re not even going to try, and by the time they could gin themselves up enough to, they’ll probably be so deep in the bankstas’ pocket that any candidate like that will be done for.
ChrisNYC
I’m sorry but how screwed up is this country? We can’t go through a day without someone trumpeting WHAT OBAMA HAS MISHANDLED and known failures like Rove and Sarah Palin (Sarah freaking Palin) are still held up as political masterminds. Talk about counterfactual.
srv
Obama’s in way worse shape because he doesn’t have Ronnie’s $3 Trillion credit card (before adjusting for inflation), and both parties were happy to spend their way out of a recession.
Hal
Judis makes the point that while Obama is polling better than Regan, the public had more confidence in Regan’s economic policies causing a turn around in the economy than what we see with Obama.
But Regan was also facing Mondale/Ferraro, and won in a landslide. If Obama is facing a similarly weak Republican candidate (I’m looking at you Sarah/Mitt/Newt), perhaps the public will develop more confidence suddenly in Obama’s plans as well.
Whatever the case, woe the journalist who tries his/her hand at election predictions so early on.
Sly
@arguingwithsignposts:
FDR wasn’t FDR until roughly 1935, following the Congressional midterms. Virtually all of the relief and regulatory reforms that are popularized by the left today came about during the close of FDR’s first term and the opening years of his second, and many of the reforms prior to 1935 were only temporary (like the FDIC). FDR didn’t go full populist in the public discourse until he ran for reelection, and big fixes like the WPA, Social Security, and the Wagner Act weren’t implemented until his second term.
The man was President for almost nine years prior to WWII. The New Deal didn’t happen all at once.
DougJ
@Hal:
I also don’t see this as such a great point, because it may speak more to the fact that the public (correctly) views this as a worse financial crisis.
Professor
Now I am just curious, but what has happened to John Edwards? Is he still alive or quit politics altogether?
Davis X. Machina
If we lied better, we’d have a 65-35 Senate, and a 70-seat majority in the House.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@DougJ: We don’t know that. Obama and Clinton are both cut out of the DLC mold. Clinton didn’t have a cratering economy to face, like Obama does.
FlipYrWhig
“Obama’s lack of economic populism” nonetheless has been tagged as command-and-control socia1ism, spreading the wealth around, and all of that. As long as a substantial portion of the Democratic party runs scared whenever they start to look like they’re fighting a “class war,” I’m not sure “economic populism” is going to be embraced more widely in the party, irrespective of its merits.
Also, and maybe this is implicitly part of the familiar counterargument DougJ cites, if Obama is out there swashbuckling against the “banksters” but can’t translate that into legislation, wouldn’t it just look like empty rhetoric? And hasn’t he been pretty sharp rhetorically towards banks and insurance companies all along?
Don’t forget that one of the original “tea party” flashpoints was the Rick Santelli thing specifically _against_ the idea of helping the little guy with his mortgage. Liberal-populist approaches aren’t necessarily winners in this climate. I’d also like to see Democrats in general try harder to make the case for small-d democratic populism, but I understand why so few of them do.
KG
HAMP was a failure because it was about three years too late. By the time HAMP came along, the modification horse had not only left the barn but had galloped out of the county. I could probably write a few million words on why modifications can’t and don’t work, but suffice it to say that it’s not nearly as easy as people think it is.
HAFA has been a much bigger success. It is getting properties on the market (and thus stabilizing prices a bit) and helping get people in a position where they aren’t going to be financially screwed for a decade.
Davis X. Machina
In mod — too many links. Reposted as edited below.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Menzies: Why would the Democrats ever nominate someone even vaguely resembling Huey Long now and in the future? The money men won’t allow it. You understand that the TradMed did Howard Dean in, right? That Robert Gibbs led effort wasn’t the only thing in their arsenal. The “Dean Scream” was a manufactured controversy designed to torpedo any chance he had left.
Brachiator
Sounds almost like a call for pointless political theater. People who are out of work, who are cashing in their pensions, whose wages have been stagnant for years, are looking for solutions, not finger pointing.
Friday I saw a news piece about Democrats running commercials bashing Bush. This is a huge waste of time. Dubya has left the building and he is not coming back. I can see a point in bashing the current crop of obstructionist Republicans, but reminding people of how badly Bush screwed the pooch inevitably raises the question, “OK, what have you done to fix it?”
@Sly:
Yep. And after a certain point, FDR assumed that the moneyed interests were against him, and although he would blast them, he concentrated on solutions, not demonization.
Davis X. Machina
@Hal: At least one team of scholars thinks Mondale over-performed. (PDF) (Bartels and Zaller, 2001)
James E. Powell
Comparisons are irresistible but rarely useful. Despite the recession in 1982, Reagan still had the uniform adulation of the corporate press/media. On this point, I think the assassination attempt almost immunized Reagan from personal attacks. Contrast that with the constant chorus of hatred and bigotry that Obama faces every day. Reagan did not have to contend with anything like Fox, Rush, and the Tea Party circus.
There does seem to be something like naivete in Obama’s refusal to identify anyone or any interest group as the enemy. As much as that way may please the Broderists, it doesn’t seem to work and it is certainly not the way Reagan did it, and it’s not the way the Republicans have been kicking Democrats’ asses since Reagan.
What is also missing from the Democratic side is the wild and crazy senators and congresspeople who push the boundaries of the debate to such extremes that almost any other position seems moderate.
TJ
Don’t know about the midterms, but Obama is in a world of hurt economically, much more than Reagan. Not only are you going to need more stimulus than Obama figured, but you’re probably going to need more than Krugman figures. Oil’s at $70/bbl, and any recovery is going to be pounded into the ground by rising oil prices before it gets started. And Geithner’s shot his wad already bailing out banks. A lot of this isn’t Obama’s fault, but he’s going to take the blame for it. And he should have seen it coming.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@FlipYrWhig: So few adopt that because most of the rest are owned by the banksters. Polls show the approach would be pretty popular, if people were willing to stand up and do it.
DougJ
@FlipYrWhig:
Exactly. Judis sees this and general teatardism as filling the populist void that Obama left by not being populist enough.
At a certain point, discussions like that break down for me because I don’t know have a clear enough definition of populism. Does it just mean people with no prior background in politics developing conspiracy theories and running for office?
Would blue blazer guy and the doctor and the former NFL star from the “Running” show count as populists?
FlipYrWhig
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle: IMHO in the wake of Clinton’s success with it, the DLC approach infected a huge swath of the Democratic party, and now Obama — who I don’t think is particularly DLC-minded — is hemmed in by people who over-learned their DLC catechism, like Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln. But I consider “DLC” to be more of the triangulation and “reinventing government” and “ending welfare as we know it” stuff, as opposed to Rubinomics and all those other projects to make Democrats more palatable to the rich. They were linked under Clinton, and you can make a case that Rubinomics has sunk its teeth into Obama, but I don’t think Obama is “DLC” in terms of how he sees partisanship and electoral politics.
Sportello
Some amount of conflict should be unavoidable. Republicans point to high unemployment as proof that the stimulus didn’t work. Unless someone besides Atrios and Krugman argues that unemployment is high because Republicans refused to pass a bigger stimulus, they win.
DougJ
@James E. Powell:
You’re right, the assassination attempt was big. It’s weird that no one ever mentions it when doing these comparisons.
Bob Loblaw
@FlipYrWhig:
How do you explain his foreign policy objectives, then? Or his OMB?
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Brachiator: It seems you forget what Ray-gun said. He wasn’t afraid to remind people that Carter was the cause of the country’s problems, whether it was true or not. That’s the way you move(that dreaded term) the Overton Window.
DougJ
@FlipYrWhig:
I also think that Obama is big on avoiding certain types of empty rhetoric. He throws out a lot of air-fairy stuff that is probably empty rhetoric, but he seems to avoid crossing certain lines unless he thinks he can get the legislation to back it up. I realize some see that as lack of leadership, but it may be a smart political m.o.
cat48
Obama is higher in the polls than Reagan, Clinton, and Carter were at this time in their presidencies, per Gallup’s new prez poll comparer? FDR only had Radio to contend with and I’m extremely sick of progs wanting “Obama to be just like FDR”! It’s nonsensical. Sorry kids, but it’s 2010. That gig is up and will never return for any president.
Maybe if he had media on his side more it would be helpful. I don’t see how it’s helpful to progs to continually write his obituary 19 mos. in, “The Unnecessary Fall” explaining it’s all over for the O man is one of several progs have written. “We must hold him accountable!” they all say. Yes, it’s working real well “professional left.” Fuck you all very much. When we lose both houses of Congress, look in the mirror and take credit for the wonderful job you’ve done!
Dems wonder why they don’t have any power and it’s just so obvious they don’t want it.
MikeJ
@Sly:
So all that talk about the first 100 days and how it was transformative? Every historian in the US has it wrong?
Allison W.
Dean and Edwards? Didn’t some of you point out that their rhetoric didn’t match up with their record? why are they being used as examples here?
FlipYrWhig
@Bob Loblaw: My view of the DLC is that it was mostly an organization dedicated to winning elections for Democrats by offering to roll back the welfare state, rather than having anything much to do with foreign policy. But, after looking at the DLC Wikipedia page, that may be an idiosyncratic view.
Allison W.
@cat48:
I wouldn’t be so mad if it had really started 19 months in, but the fact is they started this “Obama’s presidency is a failure” meme within just a few months of him taking office.
Brachiator
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:
I don’t know anyone besides wingnuts and a few bloggers who give a rat’s ass about anything that Reagan said.
The GOP, Palin and assorted nuts blame Obama for economic problems that he had nothing to do with. And when they’re not blaming him, they are claiming he doesn’t care because he’s a stealth Muslim.
But both this crap, and the incessant Goldilock’s carping about whether the stimulus was too little, too big or just right is increasingly irrelevant.
I think that Obama was doing about the best he could. But the economy is still stalled, and Obama and the Democrats have to come up with something workable despite GOP obstructionism. And the bottom line is that the sane portion of American will judge Obama on whether he succeeds or not, not the degree to which he rails against Wall Street and the evil bad free market.
LosGatoCA
And by ‘most’ you mean ‘all’ Republican politics are based on division except for the ones based on lies, ignorance, and plain old hate.
While Democratic policies are based on wishful thinking followed by variations of the fetal position as they get hit repeatedly by 2x4s upside their head.
While the level of educational attainment declines with each generation. Ain’t it wonderful?
MikeJ
@Allison W.: They started the failed presidency meme the day after the election. Really why I left previous blogs.
cat48
Good thing he was never in the DLC since everyone accuses him of being DLC-type. Somehow he’s just not Harold Ford & Evan Bayh to me, but I could be wrong. Frankly, in this climate he might be better off if he were more like that.
Speaking of populist’s, I love the hardhat’s revolting against him in NY. They will so take a job building a mosque if they can’t or don’t have a job.
LosGatoCA
It’s the economy, stupid.
Some brilliant political strategist came up with that.
Even simpler for the slower folks, like Summers:
No job, no vote.
JWL
“At least one team of scholars thinks Mondale over-performed”.
Before or after his acceptance speech at the convention, when he promised to raise taxes?
As a rule, democratic politicians are embarrassed by their colleagues who are able and willing to unload rhetorically on the GOP. They either forgot how it’s done, or never knew to begin with. As a result, voters perceive them as a party of boneless wonders.
For example, compare most of them with Alan Grayson. Now there’s a anti-Emanuel politician who doesn’t mollycoddle the Blue Dog brigade. Take this bit from an e-mail solicitation for a donation to his re-election campaign:
“As we approach our MoneyBomb next Monday, I’ve been introducing you to my opponents. On Friday, it was Dan Fanelli, the racist. Yesterday, it was Bruce O’Donoghue, the tax cheat. And today, it’s Kurt Kelly, the warmonger.
In Congress, I am one of the most outspoken opponents of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Before I was elected, I spent years prosecuting war profiteers. So I know what I’m talking about.
Unlike chickenhawk Kurt Kelly. On Fox News (where else?) Kelly said this about me: “He put our soldiers, and our men and women in the military in harm’s way, and maybe he wants them to die.”
Yes, Kurt. I do want them to die: of old age, at home in bed, surrounded by their loved ones, after enjoying many Thanksgiving turkeys between now and then. And you want them to die: in a scorching desert, 8000 miles from home, alone, screaming for help, with a leg blown off and their guts hanging out of their stomachs, bleeding to death.
I need your support”..
John
That’s certainly true from a modern perspective, but I think it would be more accurate to substitute “conservative” for Republican and “progressive” for Democrat. It wasn’t that long ago, from a historical perspective, that it was conservative Democrats like Lester Maddox leading the charge to keep the South divided by race.
cat48
Actually, I think Dean might be helpful to him right now. He defends his policies better than anyone else. He was on the SitRoom today & did a good job. I’ve developed a lot of respect for him lately as he consistently defends him which is refreshing for a Dem.
Violet
@JWL:
I really love Alan Grayson. Not every politician could or should be like him, but more Dems could move in that direction and it wouldn’t be a bad thing, imho.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@FlipYrWhig: The DLC is all about being Republican-lite. And in most cases, sucking up to them. Ever notice why the Republicans never had a problem with Democratic obstructionism when Republicans controlled the Senate?
mai naem
You can’t really compare FDR’s situation to Obama’s. The United States was considered to be better off than other countries even if it was doing awful. Not so much now. It’s not just the current issues, it’s that we think BRIC countries are going to be whipping our asses in the future. That’s not just Obama’s problem Even if a Repub wins in 2012, they are going to face the same issue. American voters may be kind of stupid in general but there’s only so long you can keep on telling people “cut taxes and you’ll get your pink ponies.” And if the Repubs do get in charge and pull off Social Security “reform” they will get the ass kicking of their lives.
cat48
Grayson makes me laugh with the words he uses, but I think the way Dean defends Democrats is more effective. I like Grayson myself, but he’s mad dog partisan which turns some wimpy Dems off.
cleek
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:
Obama hasn’t been shy about blaming the recession on Bush. he does it all the time. and, the public largely agrees (at least they did the last time i saw a relevant poll).
Obama’s problem is that he’s not doing anything effective to fix it, and it doesn’t look it’s going to fix itself.
Allison W.
@JWL:
My problem with pols like Alan Grayson is that the media will NOT focus on the message but on some word he shouldn’t have said or just comment on his behavior (and not in a positive light). Just like Weiner – he had a point, but when I saw it on my local news, his behavior rather than his intent was the topic of discussion.
I want Dems to hit harder, but the message MUST not be overshadowed.
FlipYrWhig
@JWL:
IMHO Democrats aren’t considered “boneless,” i.e., they don’t fight hard enough; they’re considered ineffectual, i.e., they don’t get anything done.
EconWatcher
For the entire period up until health-care reform was passed, I was pounding the table that we needed to go after financial reform first, and that by waiting, the furor would die down and we wouldn’t have the momentum to get sufficient financial reform.
Well, the furor did die down, and we did not get sufficient financial reform. But still, I’ve now come to the view that I was wrong (FWIW) and Obama was probably right to wait.
There was just no way to demonize the bankers wholesale and go after aggressive reform until the financial markets settled down and the economy was beginning a (shaky) recovery. The effort would have generated even more chaos and contraction. You can’t try to rebuild the house until the fire is completely put out.
The hard reality is, there were no good choices. And the Dems were pretty much doomed from the time they took over this economy, because there was never any possibility that they were going to get it cleaned up by the mid-terms, and it was always a certainty that they’d be blamed.
Life is like that. Some problems do not have realistic solutions. Krugman can posit all the ideal ways things might have been handled, and he’s a useful citizen for doing it. But Obama lives in a world of heavily constrained choices.
Violet
@cat48:
Dean’s wading into the New York Islamic center (aka “Ground Zero Mosque”) wasn’t very helpful.
askew
One of the reasons I like Obama (and most Democrats) is that he doesn’t demonize his opponents. We had enough of that during W’s presidency. However, I think the professional left/netroots loves the demonizing and the empty rhetoric, because it is easier to cheer than the complicated and compromised politics.
cleek
@cat48:
odd how the politicians get no blame.
Bob Loblaw
@askew:
Which is why they’re all a bunch of simpleton mouthbreathers! Garsh.
Allison W.
@askew:
well said. Obama made an excellent point during the hcr debate that the Republicans have demonized him so much that its impossible for them to work with him even if they wanted to. ‘you don’t told us he was the worst thing ever and now you want to betray us by working with him?’
Allison W.
@cleek:
Odd how politicians in congress get a pass when the subject of what Obama could have/ should have done comes up.
FlipYrWhig
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:
What’s sad-funny is that the success, such as it was, of the DLC approach under Clinton seems to have bred the McConnell strategy of just shutting the place down. Clinton, as everyone always says, took Republican agenda items, re-framed them in a vaguely leftward way, and got them through Congress — and got _credit_ for doing so, which ended up helping Democrats. McConnell is obsessed with making sure Obama can’t get credit for anything, because if he does, it would help Democrats. He has concluded that he’d rather see Democrats lose than help advance the implementation of policies congenial to Republicans. Both the Blue Dogs/ConservaDems and the Republicans in the Senate are fighting the last war.
cat48
@cleek:
Of course, the pols are also to blame. It just seems like “professional left” like HuffPo, FDL, & other online media is more interested in holding just the prez responsible for every other pols failing. The Congress, mainly the Senate, are the ones who refuse to do anything else about the economy until AFTER the election. I think that’s criminal when folks are suffering.
This all started on the left with a lot of folks when he did not nationalize the banks like FDR & has continued incessantly.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Brachiator: But that’s just the point. Obama(and his surrogates) needs to make the case repeatedly, and he isn’t doing it.
bago
August doldrums must be in effect. I can’t find sunday talk show threads anywhere!
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@FlipYrWhig: Except that succeeded in pushing the party right-ward because he dressed up Republican ideas(welfare .. which .. how is that working out for you .. to say nothing of NAFTA?)
gnomedad
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:
And the Repubs never mentioned Clinton again after 2000, also, too.
BTW, I talk to wingers who claim they didn’t like Bush, either. The amazing vanishing President. So glad he’ll be promoting his book before the election, no snark.
stuckinred
@bago: Here’s a sample”
Lindsay Graham
cleek
@Allison W.:
i don’t think they do.
and note that Congress’ approval ratings are in terrible shape.
FlipYrWhig
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle: It did push things in a rightward direction. I think ideologically it sucks in a particularly sloppy way, because I’m a liberal. But electorally it’s a different story, especially in red states, where _lots_ of the Democrats aren’t liberals. “Better” Democratic messaging has to make moving in a leftward direction ideologically also a winning electoral strategy. Economic populism is the best hope for that, but it runs up against the DLC orthodoxy that has already succeeded in delivering blue Senators from red states, and politicians hate to depart from a winning formula.
JMY
@ChrisNYC:
I wish we could go a week without some journalist writing about what Obama could’ve, should’ve, would’ve done. It’s getting irritating honestly. It’s easy on the outside looking in to say what his plan of action should have been. What would have demonizing Wall Street more do? Nothing. Wall Street already hates the guy. I’m sorry but many idiots are idiots. I don’t need the president to with guns blazing telling me how Wall Street is horrible. I know that, and if people didn’t realize that, then that’s really a problem.
You Don't Say
People like a villain in their narrative. Dems don’t always provide one. Republicans *always* do.
someguy
Holy shit dude. That’s the funniest thing you’ve said ever. Maybe the party isn’t but many of its members do a pretty good job of bringing the heat on the christofascist teatard woman-hating, poor-hating, oppressive taliban wing of the neocon racist immigrant hating economically illiterate Republican party.
Seriously. Short of starting physical violence we do a pretty good job of hatin on the Republican cocksuckers. Tell me if I’m wrong, Doug. If we could do a better job of demonizing and labeling, I’m all ears. Now if you mean that Democrats are focused on keeping a fractious base of center-left to left wing jackasses together despite their desire to have it just their own way or not at all, and Republicans are focused on getting them to fight (a job so easy a caveman could do it, and they do), I’ll buy the argument. But otherwise? I think we’re hatin’ on ’em about enough.
Sly
@MikeJ:
FDR’s “First 100 Days” were transformative to the extent that it prevented the Great Depression from getting worse, through policies such as bank holidays and temporary reform measures, of which agencies like the FDIC was included. He continued some policies of the Hoover administration, like the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which did little to spur private sector demand.
In fairness to FDR, when a policy wasn’t working he made the necessary adjustments, even when when it went against the wishes of local party officials (Democratic leaders in the South, for instance, were a bit picky in selecting which people received Federal aid, which was largely given to the states to distribute, and FDR put state grants under Federal control in response). But the fact remains that the big ticket New Deal policies, the ones that liberals all love, weren’t enacted until later.
The best that can truly be said about the first half of FDR’s first term is that, essentially, he stopped the country from bleeding to death. Which is no small feat, to be sure, but this was a situation that Obama (or any other candidate) did not have to deal with in early 2009, largely because the mechanisms that existed since the New Deal to prevent a massive deflation spiral were still in place and the banking crisis had subsided. Obama isn’t FDR because he doesn’t have to be, if only in terms of policy.
Taylor
Let’s just clarify something: The Obama WH undersized the stimulus they proposed because they expected it to get 80 (that’s eight-oh) votes in the Senate.
That is nothing short of political malpractice.
Everything else, including the current shitty economy, flows from that original colossal miscalculation.
tatertot
Sunday night US ex-pat scrolling through most visited blogs and sinking into deep despair. My firefighter cousin was killed with his best friend also firefighter at ‘Ground Zero’; my parents’ neighborhood lost more than a dozen people, including a woman who I used to babysit when she was little, so I guess I could be excused for being a bit annoyed about the Cordoba Project. But I think it’s a great idea, I hope it goes ahead, and I am just horrified at how this issue has become a chew-bone for the crazies that have no compassion or wisdom, or even a need to find out what’s going on in the world. If only they were upset about the fact that their god Murdoch’s second-largest funder was someone from liberal, women-respecting Saudi Arabia.
FlipYrWhig
@Taylor: So if it was too small to get a lot of votes, but then it didn’t get that many votes and in fact it barely passed, how does that prove that they should have asked for, let alone could have gotten, more money?
eemom
Yes, we did indeed fuck up by not nominating someone in the mode of a pathological lying narcissist who would have won the presidency for John McCain before he won the Pulitzer for the National Enquirer……or someone in the mode of a disgruntled has-been who only last week trumpeted his, um, flexibility on First Amendment issues for all the world to see.
Among the many failings of the Democratic party, the failure to nominate someone like Dean or Edwards really does just kind of…….stand out.
Brachiator
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:
This isn’t remotely the same thing as demonizing Wall Street. But Obama is making the case that he is trying, but it is an uphill battle because it is so much easier and sexier for reporters to wallow in the Obama hate and faux Muslims on Ground Zero nonsense.
It also occurs to me that the Obama must demonize and Obama must fight back in a rehash of the same groundless nonsense that we were hearing when Obama was running against McCain. As I recall, Obama won the election.
Some people never learn.
LosGatoCA
@Taylor:
Yes, exactly.
Bill D.
What commentators on the 1982 senatorial election keep missing is that most seats up for re-election that year were Democratic. The balance before the election was effectively 20-13 Democratic (with one independent who caucused with the Democrats) and after the election this balance was unchanged. So the ‘out’ party won most Senate seats but failed to make any headway. In contrast, in the 2010 election 19 seats are held by Democrats and 18 by Republicans. A result similar to 1982 would create a Republican gain of 7 or so.