This is not good:
Look- if Feingold goes down, I don’t know how you continue to scream that the Democrats have been too moderate. We’re clearly a center-right nation that deserves to be ruled by teabagging clowns and their wealthy masters. And that will be the lesson everyone learns- we need to move to the right, because clearly everyone was too liberal!
At any rate, go here to give:
And for the life of me, I simply do not understand the enthusiasm gap, and you manic progressives can figure out how you are going to change your script from blaming Obama for not being liberal enough, because this is Feingold we are talking about. If you aren’t enthusiastic enough as a Democrat to go out and vote for Feingold, you deserve what comes with Republican rule.
*** Update ***
Yes, I am being unfair to progressives, although seriously, wtf is a progressive? I want out of Iraq and Afghanistan, want the military budget cut by 60%, want all the tax cuts to expire and have capital gains increased, I’m pro-choice I’m actively pro-abortion because there are too many of you out there, anti-death penalty, pro stem cell research, pro legalization, if I had my way I would nationalize the health care industry because that is the only way we will ever control costs (and that is a complete shift from my thoughts just a few years ago), etc. Am I not a progressive? Or do I not spend enough time wailing about how the Democrats have let me down?
I’m kind of in shock. I can not, for the life of me, understand how anyone could think Republican rule would not be disastrous. Even if the Democrats suck. And it would be bad enough with run of the mill Republicans, but with the teabagging nutcases running this year. Good grief. It’s terrifying and the nation won’t recover in my lifetime.
cleek
orly ?
Joe Buck
Stop it with the “you progressives”. The people online who read and contribute to blogs are going to turn out, holding their noses, and vote. Yes, there are a few loud exceptions, but no enough to matter. The enthusiasm gap that matters is among disengaged, loosely attached Democrats who feel that the country is seriously on the wrong track. They wouldn’t dream of voting for Republicans, so they’ll probably just stay home.
We need to give them a reason.
jeffreyw
“…good and hard.”
mr. whipple
Part of it is simply complacency. Part of it is the inevitable result of constantly bitching about every bill passed by Congress not being good enough.
But a huge amount of blame goes to these same people who raised expectations by helping to elect a lot of blue dogs then feigned disappointment that they weren’t Kuciniches, and then saying, as they always do, they need to run left.
SenyorDave
Is Feingold running against anyone good? By that I mean a candidate who, while I probably wouldn’t agree with them on policy, at least understands those policies.
August J. Pollak
Huh.
Huh.
arguingwithsignposts
Maybe Bob Lobsterclaw will come along and enlighten us about the enthusiasm gap, or mclaren.
LittlePig
I know I’m down there every time the polls open, even school board elections. All I expected from BO was not to start a war in Iran, and I got that.
I kicked in for Halter, and will vote for Blanche (who is far far right of myself). I even believe she may yet pull it out.
Enthused, not in my nature. But my hammy heinie will be there to push the level, er, um, fill in the dot.
c u n d gulag
Feingold is running against a LOON!
C’mon, how can anyone sit home this year?
If you’re going to sit at home, at least do something useful today like see how the barrel of a shotgun tastes before pulling the trigger.
At least that way I won’t have to waste time in between now and November calling your sorry ass begging you to come out and vote.
Dork
Wisky doesnt appear to be a very red state. So this is rather stunning.
David
“Enthusiasm gap” ~ it’s the same feeling of bamboozlement I had right before the invasion of Iraq.
cleek
@Joe Buck:
“we” don’t; nobody pays attention to us. the Dems running for election need to provide that reason.
Platinum Member
Obama’s failure is not our failure. With a proper stimulus, we would be facing a little more whining about a few hundred billion more and reasonable unemployment numbers.
It is not like Krugman did not screamingly point out Timmy and Larry’s plan did not get us to the midterms.
We DFH’s are used to living with a lot less, you and your teabag relatives can all learn better what that is like.
Pangloss
“Obama didn’t push through an aggressive cap and trade plan, so I’m voting for the orange-haired guy with the round red nose and oversized shoes!!”
Punchy
Wait….we’re supposed to trust a DKos poll?
shirt
It’s a frakking con job. You can not seriously believe the MSM anymore, can you?
Napoleon
I donated this weekend, including to Fiengold. It is pretty much now or never. Here in Ohio we are only a week away from absentee ballots going out.
Corner Stone
Compare and contrast just two of the FP stories that have been highlighted at BJ today.
1. The Privileged Whiners
2. 57 yr old Patricia
General Stuck
@Joe Buck: If having Christine O’Donnell as a potential sitting US senator, not to mention a stable of others like her back in charge running the government, is not reason enough to go vote, then nothing will be. Obama can remind the voters of this, and can drag some of them off their couches, but the responsibility to participate in your democracy will always fall mostly with individual voters caring enough and motivated by their own power.
Allan
You don’t suppose that Wisconsin Democrats, who like Democrats everywhere support Obama very much, are unenthusiastic about voting for Feingold because he always manages to passive-aggressively slime other Democrats for not being as pure as he is?
LT
New Balloon Juice rule: Everything – and I mean everything – is related to how utterly horrible progressives are.
Only the converted are pure.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Much as I enjoy mocking firebaggers, PUMAs, Naderites and the like, I don’t think they really have that much of an effect (“are we really that small a sliver of the party?”). This is more about lay people–so to speak, not terribly politically engaged or aware, who know the economy sucks, and all those people on TV say it has something to do with that deficit thing, and they wouldn’t be on TV if they didn’t know what they were talking about, right? And the Republicans may be crazy, but my brother-in-law says the Democrats are gonna raise my taxes, and…
FlipYrWhig
I’m thinking that it’s not so much an “intensity gap” this year as a regression to the mean after two cycles of Democratic hyper-intensity. In my experience, this is the way Democrats usually are: a vanguard of people who pay a lot of attention, many of whom tend to be disappointed and dissatisfied, then a much larger group who never really care all that much. In other words, among Democrats there are pretty consistently a lot of irregular voters. When they turn out, magic happens. But it takes a HUGE amount of work. And you can’t play the full-court press the whole game.
Sentient Puddle
@SenyorDave:
No.
celticdragonchick
@General Stuck:
This.
eric
@cleek: Obama has given them plenty, it just does not get top-40 repeat play. The media conglomerates dont want a dem victory. Obama schooled the GOP when he held the HCR forum, remember? It got 10 minutes of play and that was it.
We are swimming upstream, not because the dems dont or wont fight (which is true for some and not for others), but because the medium for inforamtion to the “low information “voter” is controlled by the very people for whom the status quo is a good thing and for whom a more egalitarian America is an economic anethma.
It is not the economy stupid; it is the media stupid.
The economy is bad, but the GOP is to blame for it, either in the form of W’s policies or its obstructionism in the Obama era. Those are facts, pure and simple, but you wont hear that on ABC, CNN, etc. You wont hear crying about how the networks are going to make gobs of money following the Supreme Court’s opening up the spigots.
I got nothin else.
harlana
comment deleted
Nimm
I have no love for the Firebagger crowd, but the argument isn’t that outlandish – rank and file democrats are disheartened by a lack of meaningful change after the party got almost unprecedented levels of control over the government. The economy is still reeling, and we’re seeing very little action to correct it, because those in power are kowtowing to every well-heeled donor/corporate lobbyist who throws a tantrum and threatens to withhold the money.
So, you get disheartened and (incorrectly) decide that you’ve been sold out, and/or that it doesn’t really matter if the Democrats stay in power, because you’re never going to get your single-payer pony. And while you still like Russ Feingold personally, you’re just not that motivated to get to the polls, because if the Democrats lose Congress…so what. Your life isn’t going to change either way, it’s still going to be a struggle and DC isn’t capable of taking any meaningful steps to change the course we’re on.
I can easily see how being disheartened with the administration might depress turnout down ticket for people that don’t deserve it, like Feingold. This is, unfortunately, the result of some wrong premises and wrong conclusions, but there it is.
aimai
Because no one is excited to vote for someone who says “I did the best I could and if you don’t like it blame yourselves, or the other guy, or something.” If the Dems want to win they have to start screaming “We did the best we could and those fuckers want you to have to start killing and eating your old people! They don’t care if you die in a ditch! They hate you so much that the more we tried to do for you the less we were able!” The Dems have, so far, insisted that half a loaf is pretty darned good. Well, if it is then they need to be satisfied with half an electorate because if the electorate is satisfied with the dems so far then they probably aren’t motivated to turn out because they figure the dems are handling the republicans ok. If the voters aren’t happy with what has happened so far the Dems can’t keep insisting that they are wrong–they have to point to the enemy. So far they haven’t done that successfully. You know how I know they haven’t done it sucessfully? Because if they had every single former Democratic or independent voter would be rioting in the streets right now against the Republican agenda.
The electorate is disaffected, uninformed, fearful, busy, dealing with all kinds of personal crap like unemployment, health care issues, fear for the future, grandma and grandpa’s inability to sell their home and move into assisted living, declining assets etc…etc…etc… and Obama and the dems are wasting time explaining that, really, the last two years have been very succesful?
You can make that argument but you have to make it in a better, clearer, way than the Democrats have. And they need to stop letting their own blue dogs undercut their message. You can’t blame the electorate for getting confused when the teaparty has a clear message and the dems don’t.
aimai
And, of course, it goes without saying that people like me, manic progressives though we are, are the very ones who still get out and vote dem regardless. Its just that its not exactly a mystery why there’s an enthusiasm gap. Jeebus christ the Cubs and the Red Sox lost every fucking game for years and they yet had a way of getting the bums to sit in the seats for every game. Obama and the Dems could have lost every single one of their big matchups with the republicans and have a better shot at holding the house than they do with their partial victories and their perceived sell outs.
Resident Firebagger
@Joe Buck: I seldom agree with anyone named Joe Buck, but the one here is spot on.
What drives elections is the majority of Americans who are trying to raise families and hold jobs. These people half pay attention to the news, if that. And you know what? It’s been that way for as long as I can remember.
What they’re hearing from the MSM now is that the Republicans are going to roll this fall. What they know is that there’s a Democratic president, and things really suck at the moment. That’s all they hear, and that’s all they know.
And, since it’s midterms, the vast majority of these people won’t be voting. That leaves a few of us blog-o-holics and everyone else who’s freaked out because there’s a black guy in the White House and Muslims building a new Mecca in an old Burlington Coat Factory to, like, decide the election. Needless to say, the latter group seriously outnumbers the former.
Simple numbers, Cole. It’s not about me being insufficiently grateful to Obama because the banking cartel that runs his administration is just okey-dokey with 10 percent unemployment. And it’s damn sure not about Jane Hamsher.
FlipYrWhig
@Platinum Member: Yeah! Also, I’m disappointed that no one sufficiently considered my “Everyone Gets an Iron Man Suit” stimulus plan, which also would have improved the economy tremendously. But they never brought THAT to a vote either!
lol
Here’s a fun graph for everyone who still thinks Russ is a liberal.
Yes, that’s Russ all the way down there with Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
as for the enthusiasm on the right, the Right, from Rush Limbaugh to the National Review to the Chamber of Commerce to whatever that pack of whackadoos in Colorado Springs calls itself… they have been engaged in a forty year war, fought in the media and in every election from school board to the presidency, and if they occasionally get mad at their pols (GHWB, for example) they never give up after eighteen months, or because they only got a partial victory,
Allan
Interesting data from Gallup 9/14/2010, looking at job approval numbers. These are the subgroups that have a significantly significant variance from the average response, arranged from highest to lowest:
Obama Job Approval by Sub-Group
Black 91
Liberal Democrat 85
Democrat 79
Moderate Democrat 76
Liberal 74
Non-white 67
Conservative Democrat 67
Hispanic 54
Ages 18-29 53
Not married 53
Under $2K monthly income 52
Moderate 52
Postgraduate education 51
East 50
Seldom/Never attend church 49
AVERAGE 46
South 39
Age 65+ 38
Attend church weekly 37
Married 37
Pure independent 36
Non-Hispanic white 35
Conservative 23
Liberal/Moderate Republican 22
Republican 12
Conservative Republican 8
My message to the Democratic Party: Concentrate on the groups who are listed as in the 50s, all of which appear to me to have significant potential to lift that rating.
Hispanic 54
Ages 18-29 53
Not married 53
Under $2K monthly income 52
Moderate 52
Postgraduate education 51
East 50
Seldom/Never attend church 49
Keith G
For 30 years the right has done a quite a comprehensive and effective job of demonizing some of the very “left of center”? social policies that made the life lived in the 50s-80s possible.
Religious dogma, old prejudices, unwarranted security fears, coordinated campaigns of outright lies have all had their impact.
The left of centers, god love us, have always felt that common sense, superior ideas, and concern about the plight of our fellows would be enough.
It isn’t.
The world is at best a scary place and it is getting scarier as the cheap resources and the monopoly of technology that the US has depended on for three generations disappears.
The right has spun a soothing tale that soothes the afflicted. The other side hasn’t.
FlipYrWhig
@aimai:
How do you “stop letting” this happen? That’s the way Blue Dogs roll. They _define themselves_ by undercutting other Democrats. It’s how they think they can win in districts where more orthodox Democrats would not. How do you control that? I don’t think you can.
Nimm
@Punchy:
If you don’t think PPP is reliable, tell us why. Otherwise, there’s no basis to tar them with the previous pollster’s malfeasance.
Corner Stone
Well, after reading this I’m a little more hopeful:
U.S. recession ended June 2009, NBER finds
Get ready for your enthusiasm boooost!
Earl Butz
The enthusiasm gap is there. I’ll be voting with my nose held for the current crop of stinkers, and then vote for Dem primary challengers in 2012.
And I pray that Obama gets one. I’ll vote for them in a heartbeat. I want his ass primaried out and someone who can run an effective message machine for the Democratic agenda in office. What the fuck did him and Plouffe do, dismantle his campaign machine the day after the inauguration? Fuck. Shit message discipline and a seeming inability to understand that the Republican party was never going to help him, not once, on anything. He’ll still be trying to cut deals with them as the 747 is taxiing out of Andrews for the last time.
August J. Pollak
Or maybe we can finally start listening to Atrios with a few weeks to go before the election, what with that stupid hippie (that’s what we call doctorates in economics when they use mean words) having only been completely fucking right for, oh, let’s say three years now.
FlipYrWhig
@Nimm:
I don’t think “rank and file democrats” are disheartened. I think that the Democratic surge troops from ’06 and ’08 have tuned out.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: ng
This, and your whole comment
El Cid
@Allan: Where is the ‘manic progressives’ supposed to fit on this list?
Those with ‘post-graduate education’? I don’t think that’s a huge section of the population. Maybe I’m wrong.
Does Gallup break down voter enthusiasm or likely voter rates into demographics?
Because I’m finding it pretty hard to believe that the bitching and moaning of ‘manic progressives’ are heard by anyone but a tiny segment of the population.
Unless there’s some actual evidence of, say, FireDogLake having an actual effect on a significant part of the voting population, this is a bunch of horse-shit moaning and groaning and focusing on absolutely the wrong issue. But it’s easy to do, so, you know, do it.
mr. whipple
@Punchy:
We can only hope this polling outfit isn’t run out of a Kinkos.
ruemara
Here’s the thing, you don’t have to be enthusiastic to vote. So let’s not bang the heads of “progressives” who are busy having a dose of the sads in polls. The issue is-“will you get out and vote”, not “are you so happy to vote you don’t need boner pills”. I doubt these polls are asking that, because those results probably would be less newsworthy. Fear, doubt and anger make better headlines.
On a personal note, my ultra religious, fairly conservative mother can’t wait to vote, because Palladino is a thug, tea party people are crazy and anyone with an R after their name on the teevee is so unchristian that she’s starting to tell people not to call her a christian conservative. She’s a Democratic conservative, dammit, and she thinks! Plus, she’s reminding people to vote against lunacy. So there.
edit:
ok, we’re black, we’re kinda sensitive to nutters yapping about taking the country back. Back wasn’t so good for us.
Plus, what Stuck said.
FlipYrWhig
@August J. Pollak:
Atrios is in no way, shape, or form, “the base.” He’s petulant, though, I’ll give him that.
harlana
I simply cannot imagine progressives sacrificing the nation, not when it comes time to vote, because of disenchantment, when there is no other alternative. Is bitching and disenchantment necessarily an indication of how one will vote in the end or whether or not they vote at all?
Here I am, one of those formerly whiny progressives (I no longer have the strength) and I would never dream of sitting home in November!
Libby
I will explain the enthusiasm gap. The modern Left is controlled by financial interests. See Geithner’s Goldman Sachs’ lobbyist-Chief of Staff. This control can only be maintained in the presence of a dim electorate. See handing out cigarettes on election day to get dummies on the bus. Taken in aggregate, we behold the Democrat-Party-2010, and to a lesser extent, the Republican Party-2010.
Now, America contains plenty of people who work hard and are made to foot the bill for this big welfare system for both Wall Street and sloth, which is becoming more apparent each and every day. These are the people who are enthused.
Go Teabaggers.
Allan
@Earl Butz: Shorter Earl Butz:
I’ll tell you what
the coloredsObama wants. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.”John S.
Does the fact that Feingold decided to suck up to the Teabaggers and try to position himself to the RIGHT of his opponent on gun rights have anything to do with it? Or the fact that he doesn’t think the filibuster is need of reform? Or the fact that he royally fucked up on the FINREG bill?
Nah, he’s a True Progressive, so he’s incapable of error. Just like Howard Dean.
Singularity
Right. The proper response is to get your back up and indignantly point out Obama’s failings. We are the world’s largest circular firing squad.
Right now, the Repubs are going through the most bitter internal battle they’ve had in decades, with Jim DeMint basically telling the leadership he’s willing to burn down the Senate rather than compromise his ideology. But even given that, they manage to put up a united public front.
When your average voter looks at the Repubs, they see a bunch of guys united with purpose. It makes no difference that the purpose is childish obstructionism and tax breaks for the super-wealthy. People see an organized group. When they look at us, they see a group of people who couldn’t agree on the proper way to pay bus fare.
lol
@El Cid:
Manic progressives are the 10% of liberal democrats that didn’t approve of the job Obama was doing *when he took office*.
BenA
@Allan:
The problem is…. We (big We… United States of America) as a people through mainly ignorance and apathy have allowed these people to have an oversized influence on political discourse and policy. And it’s because of a MSM that is bought and sold by the corporate world and sees this chunk of the population as useful idiots.
Obama, Ben Nelson, Olympia Snow, the Blue Dogs, etc are symptoms of the disease…. it’s just frustrating. I know why Krugman’s an asshole… it just makes me bitter.
And I really don’t know what to do about the problem…. I’m just tired of it.
homerhk
three reasons I think for the horrible results that will be forthcoming in November (for democrats, for the country and for the world):
– the US public are stupid and lazy. Obviously that is not all of them – and probably not a majority of the people on this blog but I think it hangs true for the population at large. The population is so lazy and stupid that when it is shown that 25% of them think that Obama is a muslim, that is generally chalked down to – well there’s always a certain segment of the country that are crazy. No country can sustain having a quarter of its population as being crazy, I’m sorry.
– the US media is stupid and lazy – mirroring the public in every way, I am afraid. Does the public make the media or the media make the public? Don’t know the answer to that, but I bet that if the US public was more discerning there would be major cable channels and news publications catering to them rather than to the lowest common denominator. In the UK, despite Sky News and Fox News being available, the BBC is still the most trusted and viewed name in news, both broadcast and online. The BBC has not ‘cable-ized” itself to compete with the lowest common denominator, doesn’t have to compete for profits and is still amazingly well respected both in the UK and globally.
– US politicians – generally – are stupid and lazy and greedy as well. One of the things that I love about Obama is that he is neither stupid, nor lazy nor greedy. I may not agree with him on every decision, I may feel that he is too restrained by institution at times, but I never feel like he doesn’t understand the problem, that he can’t be bothered to work out the best solution (out of a bad bunch, naturally) or that he is choosing the way that will make him or his friends richer.
FlipYrWhig
@Allan:
And yet this is all we fucking hear about. How to make a group of people that has 85% approval have more deeply and intensely felt approval.
NSinNY
You seem to misunderstand the progressive argument. Progressives think Democrats need to act more liberal, because liberal policy will result in actual achievements, which voters like. To the extent that Democrats enact either middling bullshit or nothing at all, that failure infects all Democrats essentially equally.
It’s very hard for a liberal like Russ to go before his Democratic constituents and say, “Our party has done very little for you but I’m trying to get them to do more.” If that approach isn’t yielding results now, why trust that it will yield results next term? It doesn’t matter that he’s better than the rest; he is running based on the claim that his presence makes their lives better.
Actual progressive reform — better stimulus, less war spending, financial reform with consequences for banksters — would make that argument much more credible, for liberals and moderates alike.
Bob Loblaw
@Joe Buck:
Cole just needs somebody to cry about. Because life isn’t fair and he has a sad.
It’s odd what happens when you big, tough political “realists” get your realism good and hard. But hey, maybe your pony is in the mail after all. Ha, ha, ha, ponies. Always such a stitch.
BenA
@John S.:
Say what you want about Howard Dean, but he was a FAR FAR more effective head of the DNC than Tim Kaine is.
sal
I’d bet that most Progressives/Liberals/Professional Lefties would be more than enthusiastic & motivated to vote for a candidate like Feingold. I would. However, I live in Michigan and don’t have that opportunity. I will unenthusiastically vote for the D’s in my area (and, it won’t be Stupak this time).
I don’t know why there’d be an “enthusiasm gap” in Wisconsin, but blaming the PLPL nationwide is bad reasoning.
As you’ve pointed out, “my guy sucks big time, but theirs sucks worse” may be a reason to vote for your guy, but why you’d expect it to raise enthusiasm I don’t know.
John S.
I am NOT a manic progressive, and I also go out and vote for Democrats regardless. I have never missed an election since I have been eligible to vote. And this year will be the first time I will ever NOT be voting for a Democrat, because I care more about Marco Rubio losing than being ideologically pure.
I generally love your comments, aimai, but it would be nice if you would stop pretending that you and the tiny portion of liberals whom you claim to represent are the ONLY ones who put Democrats in office. You’re not.
lol
@FlipYrWhig:
Contrary to popular belief, 2006 wasn’t a gang busters year for Dem base turnout either. Check out the census data for turnout. We won in 2006 because we slaughtered the GOP with independents. We won in 2008 because we had gang busters base turnout AND killed with independents.
Now, we’ve lost indies and the base is staying at home like they do every mid-term so that’s going to be a recipe for an assfucking.
mr. whipple
That was supposedly one of the functions of the left blogosphere. But instead of pushing policy successes, they’d rather find fault with everything and be as relentlessly negative as possible.
Tractarian
I’m no pollster, but it seems to me that “enthusiastic” is not the same thing as “likely to vote.”
I bet there are millions out there, like John Cole, who are lukewarm on the Dems but are terrified a new GOP-run congress. The best case scenario for these folks is that the Dems retain the majority — in which case we’d see no progress on climate change or civil liberties, more pandering to the affluent, and more legislative clusterfucks — but at least we’d be spared the dicking that we are assured of getting from a GOP majority!
No, they’re not enthusiastic about voting — who would be with these choices? — but they sure as hell will make it to the polls, hold their nose, and vote Dem.
(Wishful thinking, I know)
FlipYrWhig
@Singularity:
I don’t think so. Approval ratings for Republicans are in the toilet too. When your average voter this year looks at the Republicans she thinks that the local Republican may be slightly less sucky than the local Democrats, so she’ll vote for the Republican, but she thinks that everyone else’s local Republicans are a bunch of flaming catastrophucks.
Odie Hugh Manatee
The only poll that matters to me is ones that are taken on election day. IMO, the majority of political polls are a narrative looking to be turned into a story for for the media and others to hype. If ‘we’ decide to turn right and drive off the cliff then I say that we deserve it. I’ll do my part to try to prevent that from happening but only because I happen to give a shit about our country.
If everyone else decides they want to finish fucking this nation up and vote in the fuckers to do it, then who am I to argue?
Allan
@El Cid: I would assume that the manic progressives are reflected in that portion of those who self-identify as liberal or liberal Democrat who do not have a favorable opinion of Obama, in other words, the Democrat’s OWN 27 percenters.
As I said before, if you look at the drop from the mid-70s to the 50s, that’s where you have the greatest likelihood of finding voters who are still able to be persuaded to turn out.
And yes, my purpose in posting these stats was to illustrate that the true Democratic base is still very much in favor of Obama. But bases don’t win general elections.
fourlegsgood
Well. We may well end up getting the government we deserve.
That would be a shame, because I don’t think I personally deserve to be saddled with a bunch of asshole republicans.
But collectively, I’m going to have to say that I think americans are a bunch of ignorant, spoiled, brain dead assholes.
Joel
the non-voters tend to be on the more rightward side of the spectrum, IMHO.
John S.
ABSOLUTELY. I will not and cannot dispute this.
But what Howard Dean said about Park 51 and about his support for Teabaggers, not to mention his comments during the health care debate, were colossally stupid and out of step with the purported ideals of Democrats.
There is a lesson in there about casting your views onto a politician instead of being honest about what their views are. NOBODY is fucking perfect.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig:
If Atrios would concentrate his firepower, such as it is, on Blue Dogs and the Senate, instead of childish sneers about “Mr Hopey Changey”, I’d take him a little more seriously. IT’s one thing if people who work two jobs while trying to raise three kids and meet a mortgage don’t get the subtleties of national politics and a fundamentally anti-democratis (and anti-Democratic) branch of government, it’s another thing if people who follow politics full-time are propagating the myth of the monarchical presidency.
fasteddie9318
Seriously, there aren’t enough disaffected manic progressives in the whole country to cause Russ Feingold to be 10+ points down versus whatever mouth breather he’s running against, let alone enough of them in the state of Wisconsin alone. And, sorry, but the manic liberal wankosphere just doesn’t have that kind of influence. Traditional Democratic voters are out of work, struggling, and pissed off, and the “non-traditional” voters who turned out two years ago are pissed that they never got their pony so they’re staying home.
And they’ll all deserve what happens next. You need to hit rock bottom before things start really getting better, and I suspect that this country still has a long way to go before it hits rock bottom.
Brachiator
@aimai:
Sorry. I just don’t get this. It’s not like a new and exciting crop of progressive candidates have sprung up to revive the Democratic Party. It’s not even that progressives and others who lack enthusiasm have come up with effective policy proposals or new strategies for dealing with Republican obstructionism.
Instead, there is just a crowd of crybabies who seem to be upset that they didn’t get all their dreams fulfilled when Obama was elected. They keep fantasizing that they are the mystical deserving base who were the only ones responsible for Obama’s election, and now they seem intent on proving their value by threatening to stay home.
Meanwhile, the GOP is being overrun by angry, stupid, fearful tea baggers who feed on racial anxiety, xenophobia and feverish Randian dreams of jumping into a hot tub time machine, returning to 1850 and magically restoring an America which has never existed.
And craven mainstream Republicans are calculating that they will be able to control tea baggers if they win. They also realize that tea baggers in Congress will provide reliable, permanent, unceasing opposition to all Democratic Party proposals.
Shit, if you are miffed that you didn’t get all you wanted, imagine how you’ll feel when you get nothing at all.
Dennis SGMM
Here in sunny California, Boxer and Fiorina are polling within the margin of error. You can blame manic progressives or sunspots or whatever else you prefer to blame but, the fact is that the Dems have sucked at creating a compelling narrative since the Kennedy years and they still suck at it. When your best argument is that at least you’re not as bad as McCain/Palin, or Sharron Angle or any of the other loonies then an intensity gap is inevitable.
FlipYrWhig
@Tractarian:
I would like to see some polling about the reasons people give for being _un_likely to vote. Because my gut tells me “The stimulus was too small” and “There wasn’t a public option” and “Obama targeted a guy in Yemen for assassination” aren’t going to be anywhere near the top of the list.
Zam
His asshole opponent dropped out from the debate that was supposed to happen last night.
aimai
@FlipYrWhig:
The DCCC holds the money and controls a whole lot of good stuff. You control the message by telling the local congresscritter that his vote will be released, or his money will be released, if and only if he finds a way to run center/right that doesn’t involve sliming the entire Democratic party. Perhaps you, I don’t know, even hold seminars and lecture series to explain to these outliers that their utility to the party, and their ability to actually get money and perks from the national government, varies inversley with their tendency to attack the party. I fail to see why the dems don’t even bother with some kind of clear, national, strategy but they don’t seem to have one.
aimai
steviez314
If I’m a moderate, I look to the right of me and hear “Obama sucks (socialist!)”.
I look to the left of me and hear “Obama sucks (corporatist!)”
But since I don’t pay much attention to details, all I hear is everyone agreeing “Obama sucks.”
I don’t blame these people for not voting–all they hear is the loudest voices screaming the same thing, so it must be true.
There’s a not so fine line between constructive criticism and fragging.
John S.
@Allan:
This.
@Brachiator:
This, too.
cleek
@eric:
getting “top-40” play is a big part of the job.
like it or not.
@Nimm:
this feels true.
we’re still in Iraq (blah blah blah… on schedule), and it’s still a mess. we’re spending $1.2B/week in Afghanistan and it’s still a mess. whatever the health care bill promises in the future, it hasn’t hit main street yet. ditto financial reform. the various stimulus bills might have prevented catastrophe, but they haven’t restored normalcy so it’s a tough sell to say they “worked”.
whatever the Dems have accomplished, it hasn’t really hit main street in any real way. so it’s very easy to feel that the Dems haven’t done anything positive. yes, feefees. motherfucking feefees. that’s what “enthusiasm gaps” are made of.
it’s fun to pretend that people evaluate candidates based on Excel spreadsheets of objective comparisons of accomplishments and policy prescriptions. but they don’t.
it’s all about the motherfuckin feefees.
Alice
John: I don’t understand why you’re so excited to punch hippies about the enthusiasm gap when two posts down you’re writing about Patricia at 57.
As much as I’d like to pretend my kvetching about Obama’s progressive fail actually makes an difference, I’m pretty sure it’s situations like Patricia’s that are really dragging down those numbers.
Scott P.
Whatever happened to “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for?”
BenA
@John S.:
I’m with you on the HCR debate… I wanted someone to kidnap him and lock him in a closet with somewhere until the whole thing was over.
FlipYrWhig
@fasteddie9318:
I thought that was John’s point: that if Feingold is lagging in his own race, it doesn’t seem like Being Like Feingold is a foolproof electoral strategy anywhere.
FlipYrWhig
@aimai:
Why wouldn’t he then just run as the Democrat Democratic elites love to hate?
Seedee Vee
Feingold is not a progressive. He is a Zionist and a Law and Order type like my Feinstein and the other fake liberal/progressives in the senate.
Feingold just doesn’t like the gov’t breaking the laws. Not enough to filibuster anything, but enough to comment on them.
fasteddie9318
@FlipYrWhig:
He’s blaming “manic progressives” for the enthusiasm gap, and my point is there just ain’t enough of them out there to cause that big a gap.
Kryptik
Yeah, I have to agree with several folks here that the problem really, really does not seem to be with the professional left, as those are the sorts that will make noise, but then hold their nose because they’re the connected types and really have no choice.
I just have no idea what we’re supposed to do with that larger disconnect with the layvoter now, because it seems like this whole situation screams “YOUR FUCKED” no matter what.
Paula
@fasteddie9318:
Second this. Seriously, I thought the whole point of bagging on those types was precisely because they had about as much influence on actual policy as Nancy Pelosi’s designer suits (which is to say — looks nice and polished but ultimately negligible).
There’s also the raving incoherence of their seeming political worldview, but they would first have to talk to “real, non-blog people” in order to disseminate that, so …
fasteddie9318
John, I think you’re looking for “would NOT be disastrous”
Kenneth Fair
You’re preaching to the choir here, John. The problem is not that committed Democrats and party activists won’t vote. The problem is that everyday people who don’t pay much attention to politics aren’t convinced that the Democratic party is working for them.
Why is that? The national Democratic party, particularly the Senate: (1) has been structured too much around getting Wall Street money to run elections, and structured too much around top-line races rather than party building; (2) as a result of that structure, has been hampered in enacting progressive policies that help ordinary people today; (3) also as a result of that structure, has had a mixed message to voters about who they’re really trying to help; and (4) can’t seem to understand that rhetoric and pushing the envelope, even on some fights you lose, helps build the environment for winning those fights down the road and helps everyday folks understand you’re on their side and those other guys aren’t.
The mid-terms are a potential disaster that the progressive blogosphere has seen coming, and has been warning about, for quite some time. It’s not our fault that the administration and the national party can’t figure out how they’ve screwed up the politics of what they’ve managed to accomplish legislatively.
LT
@Brachiator:
Two-dimensional beings are less shallow than this.
* Only “crybabies” care about stuff like this. (And before you, John, or anyone else responds, please note that I’m voting in 2012 and it will be for Obama – no questions asked.)
aimai
@Brachiator:
This is so full of shit, and so beside the point. The people for whom there is an “enthusiasm gap” are *not progressives!* That’s really clear. When the polling is done it is being done of all voters, likely voters, and etc… Obama and the Dems pulled a ton of new voters into the system with the last election–those voters were, oddly enough, not progressives because progressives like me *always vote*–always have, always will. We are not the ones who are at issue. The ones who are at issue could care less about national health care, or Obama continuing with Bush’s policies, or the imperial presidency. Those weren’t their issues in voting for Obama in the first place and they won’t be their issues in this round of elections. Those people voted a very simple issue, captured in the dem bumperstickers last time “had enough? Vote Demoratic!”
This is a midterm election in hard economic times. People are literally drowning out there. To get them to show up at the polls you have to really promise them something, otherwise its just too exhausting to take time off of work in a tough economy. The teaparty has yet to show that it can get people off the couch but they have chosen a frequently winning strategy: when people feel helpless and angry tell them there is one thing they can do: “vote/send a message/act on their anger and then go back to the couch.” That’s easy. The Dems simply have failed to give their voters an equally clear reason to break routine and get off the couch. That’s not the fault of progressives–that’s the fault of Democratic complacency or despair at the top levels. Every single one of these races ought to have been an agressive battleground for the national dems. But you can’t look at what they’ve done so far and say that they’ve tried to win every one of them by motivating their own voters. They just haven’t.
Again this is not an issue of progressive/not progressive. Activist voters generally vote. Most people aren’t activists. Angry people use voting expressively. At the moment the angriest voters are planning on voting Republican because they have the illusion that the democrats were the party in power. The Democrats can counter that by saying “we weren’t really in power” or “but its going to be worse…” but those aren’t really very good motivational tools at this late date. This is purely a question of tactics and not morality, of what is and not what should be.
aimai
Aloysius
“Yes, I am being unfair to progressives, although seriously, wtf is a progressive?”
Nobody knows. It doesn’t matter. There are hardly any of them, and they’re political junkies, so they’ll almost all end up voting for the Dems no matter what they say or do in the run-up. They’re powerless and disorganised and have very little influence over anything in American political life, and this has been demonstrated amply by the last two years of history. Whoever these people are, they don’t matter. Dems are down in the polls because they haven’t won over normal people, and whoever these progressives are, normal people don’t have any more time for them than you do, Cole. Progressives are irrelevant. Democrats are screwed mainly because of, surprise, what Democratic politicians do and say!
jimBOB
@Platinum Member:
Exactly right; the coming midterm election was set in concrete when we failed to do an adequate stimulus.
Everybody screaming about messaging or ideological calibration or the fact that the teabaggers are lunatics is missing the point. This election will be about 10% unemployment and not much else.
I might be pissed at the idiot Dems finding another excuse to “keep their powder dry” or some such (Dem consultants love thinking up reasons to roll over and play dead), but the reality is it won’t much matter.
The good news is I think this makes Obama pretty much a lock for 2012; GOP rule never wears well. The teabaggers will shut down the government and launch an impeachment as their first order of business. In fact I expect both within the first month of the Boehner speakership.
Allan
It’s easy to be distracted by the volume from a deranged fringe group willing to make the most outrageous attacks on the President in order to get air time, and fail to notice that they have no constituency.
Also, too, remember that 27 percent of Americans are insane, and that cuts across party lines and ideology.
LT
Only crybabies care about stuff like this.
Cat Lady
Here in deep blue Mass. I’ve been seeing a lot of yard signs that simply say Vote Out All Incumbents. I don’t know where the signs come from or what else the fine print on them says, but I think that represents a lot of thinking. Frustration with the status quo is the common denominator of left and right and the party in power is going to bear the brunt of that, consequences be damned, full speed ahead.
BTD
It’s all mental masturbation. Nothing you say or Atrios says is going to affect the “enthusiasm gap.”
What the politicians do and say will.
What’s strange is your obsession with discussing what “progressives” say as opposed to what the politicians say and do.
In the end of course, it matter not at all that these arguments take place here and at other sites.
jayackroyd
@Tractarian:
Rather, there are millions out there who think it DOESN'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE who is in office, and even some who feel betrayed because they believed that electing Obama WOULD make a big difference.
Marcy Wheeler put this really well in a conversation we had last month:
Ajay
I was in shock in 2004 elections when it was pretty clear what was going on. It took less than 1 year after Os election for a majority to blame O/Dems for everything wrong in their life/ecomony. Most cant see that this is mostly due to R policies. They raped the country’s wealth and now our idiot voters want them back.
No matter how you dice it, this country, as we use to know it, is finished for all practical purposes.
And, yes, we are center right nation, as has been clear; except now center right is synonym for loonies.
Linda Featheringill
FWIW, electoral-vote has two senate race maps, one including Rasmussen and the other one without Rasmussen. There is a difference.
I don’t know how accurate everything is, but at least go to the site and look at that before you slit your wrists. Okay?
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2010/Senate/Maps/Sep20-n.html
The Tragically Flip
Jim:
Actually I’d say Atrios is very careful to criticize the administration for doing or not doing things that are entirely within its power and when he notices a shortfall that requires congressional approval or some other external factor, he stipulates that the admin should at least publicly take the ideal position and blame the other thing for not allowing it to do the ideal thing. You know, try to get the whole loaf rather than asking for half and celebrating when they get a quarter.
Best example is his ongoing war on HAMP which a) sucks and b) is entirely under Geithner’s power to control and fix a). Why hasn’t this happened?
So if you’re not going to take Atrios seriously you should do so for stuff he actually does rather than imagined faults.
Earl Butz
@Dennis SGMM: A prospect that should fill anyone with horror, and one that I frankly can’t understand. Fiorina’s history is public and her agenda – eliminating jobs for Americans – could not be more explicit. That she polls over single digits fills me with despair for the future of the Republic.
Davis X. Machina
Let’s all not get out there — those contradictions don’t heighten themselves you know, people.
“Nach Boehner, uns!”
aimai
@FlipYrWhig:
Of course he can, and in some cases he will. But he may not win that way. If he doesn’t, then next time he either runs as a Republican, or runs as a quieter sort of Democrat. But in either event he doesn’t cost the party anything–that money can be spent on better candidates–and once he gets to Washington he still has to toe the line to get the goodies and you just tell him “you sell it any way you want to back in your home district” as long as you a) vote the way we tell you and b) find a way to sell it that isn’t harmful to the rest of our program.
Its good for liberalism/progressive policies/the democratic party to have a big tent. But its bad for liberalism/progressive policies/the democratic party agenda to let fringe elements attack the core of what you are trying to do. It makes the party look weak. It weakens the agenda. And it doesn’t require local party members who benefit from democratic money and time and energy to support the national agenda. This is not easy, but its clear that this is a complicated dance that the Dems are fucking up.
aimai
El Cid
@lol: Does this affect their likelihood of voting, per surveys? Is this different than prior elections with other candidates?
According to the breakdown of Gallup above, that would represent at most 15% of those labeling themselves Liberal Democrat.
It’s not a direct number figure, but polls of self-identification show that those who label themselves “very liberal” make up about 20% of the electorate.
That is 1% higher than 1996 or 1998.
The percentage which classify themselves as “liberal” (which excludes the set of “very liberal”) is 35%.
So, if it’s one out of 10 of the “liberals” who are “manic progressives”, then it’s up to 3.5% of voters (assuming a 1:1 representation of actual voters to this poll), or as a 10% of “very liberal”, then you might be talking about 2% of voters.
An argument which might be resting upon predicting the voting behavior of 2-3.5% of very liberal or liberal voters.
I’m still not convinced of any real world impact of the “manic progressive” imagined community.
Sly
“Manic progressives” are nothing more than a giant ATM. There’s not a viable political constituency called “Liberals on the Internet,” and there likely never will be.
Wisconsin has union membership rates that are higher than the national average, and Feingold has traditionally benefited from union support. If he is in trouble, unemployment is probably a bigger reason than a bunch of bloggers with little political capital having a sad.
homerhk
aimai,
I take your point but it simply cannot be denied that if political supporters – those that are supposed to be the most supportive and enthusiastic etc – constantly make noises to the effect of both parties are the same, Obama is so shit because he did X or didn’t do Y or only did 50% of X or whatever, those people who don’t follow politics very closesly but catch snippets on the news will only hear people complain about Obama. For my sins, I’ve tried to watch cable news (what I can get here in the UK) and NONE of them – and I mean NONE of them – ever have anyone on that is completely supportive of President Obama. I am not saying that one has to be completely and utterly supportive no matter what but what I am saying that conservatively speaking there are at least 40% of people who approve of the job that Obama is doing and at least half of those STRONGLY support him – that’s at least 20% of the country – I would think that’s somewhat equivalent to the core supporters of the tea party (and probably larger than the firebaggers or the constant critical professional left) – why do they never get on the teevee?
Well, it’s because the media loves the meme of ‘infighting’ ‘progressive disappointment’ etc and the progressive blogsters just feed that troll constantly. There are numerous objections I have to that – substantive in nature to be sure – but perhaps the one that should be most convincing is that constant complaints of betrayal and disappointment serve to advance the progressive agenda NOT ONE INCH. Do you think that progressive obsession with the public option helped or hurt its chances? Do you think that progressive obsession with appointing elizabeth warren to head the consumer agency helped or hurt her chances? Do you think that constant bitching about Larry Summers or Tim Geithner served to advance the progressive economist case or hindered it?
You may not be the problem, but you sure as hell ain’t the solution either.
Paula
@Ajay:
“And, yes, we are center right nation, as has been clear; except now center right is synonym for loonies. ”
Well, there is always a fair bit of bloviating in the blogosphere when one makes this observation. No, it’s because we don’t pursue enough lefty talking points. If the Dems got left-ier, the people would be on our side.
fap fap fap
Nick
@cleek:
are you telling me Feingold isn’t doing that?
El Cid
@The Tragically Flip: There’s often a tone I see in which any serious, particularly impassioned, argument against actual policies and policy decisions are derided on the grounds of pissiness or fantasy-thinking, and it just sounds like one should never make any serious and repeated criticism of a Democratic President or overall Party policy.
Zifnab
@jimBOB:
Or set up health care legislation to kick in before 2014. Or pass a financial regulation bill that actually hammers away at bank profiteering. Or successfully orchestrate HAMP and get cram down legislation through. Or extend unemployment benefits past 99 weeks. Or crack down on immigrant bashing. Or end DADT in anything resembling a timely fashion. Or prosecute the Bush Administration for their myriad of criminal pursuits.
Or properly embrace netroots media, and get the message out that money is being both saved and spent efficiently at the federal level.
This administration has simply failed on so many levels. And don’t get me wrong. It was a hard fucking job, made only harder by jackass Republicans that were banking on a resurgence on the backs of Democratic incompetence. But it has been meet with failure. And failure is a piss poor way to GOTV.
lol
@BenA:
I’ll dispute that. People who get all excited about the 50 State Strategy’s “successes” aren’t likely to know what the 50 State Strategy entailed in actual practice.
Here’s the 50SS: give each state party a hundred grand or so to hire whatever staff they wanted. That’s it.
There was no strategy. Staff weren’t tasked with anything in particular and they were only as good/competent as the state parties that hired them. It was just about keeping the lights on at each Dem HQ during the off-years.
Candidate recruitment? That was done by the DSCC (Schumer) and DCCC (Raaaaahm!). Candidate recruitment has been less successful this time around because everyone knew it was going to be a rough year and that better opportunities would be available in 2012 with Obama on the ticket.
Competing everywhere? All three national orgs were stingy with their money and only spent it in races they thought they could win, which because of the cycle (not the 50SS) was a lot of different places. If you were a hopeless schlub in an ultra-red district, Dean didn’t send you a single cent.
2008? Once Obama got the nomination, his people took over the DNC and ran the ground game their way.
The 50 State Strategy was mostly just attitude.
Dean was a good chair but let’s not pretend he wasn’t lucky to be chair during two extremely blue cycles. Most of what he did (infrastructure building) was incremental or longer term pay-offs.
Finally, OFA 2.0 under Kaine is everything in reality the manic progressive left thinks the 50 State Strategy was in fantasyland. But Obama came up with it so they have to hate it.
Donald
$25.00 to Feingold, done. If WI votes him out it will be a real shame.
Paula
@Paula:
@Zifnab:
thanks for the example
wasabi gasp
Standing all day long in sensible shoes and a pleasant sweater behind a folding samples display in the chilly freezer section isn’t nearly enough. You’ve gotta bring the hot pockets. Where are the fucking hot pockets?
Nick
@BTD:
Because it’s simply a sign progressives have been flat out wrong when they say “when people choose between a fake Republican and a real one, they chooser the real one.” They more often than not choose the fake one over a real Democrat.
Feingold is pointed to by lefties as the model all Democrats should follow to get out the “base,” and he’s not doing it, because the “base” isn’t staying home because of tax cuts or failure to repeal DOMA, or failure to end the war in Afghanistan or inadequate HCR, they’re staying home for another reason. I don’t know what that is, but I suspect it’s because they’re in power and they don’t care.
Catsy
I refuse to give credibility to any approval, generic ballot, or other similar poll as an indicator of how Democrats ought to govern–unless said poll gets granular enough to identify whether someone disapproves of Democrats because they’re being too liberal, or not liberal enough. Crosstabs, bitches.
An honest answer to just about any such poll would have me registering my general disapproval with the job the Democrats are doing, were it not for the knowledge that idiots would use said poll to prove that “OMG people don’t like the liberal agenda”.
BTD
@Nick:
I’m pretty sure your comment has no relation to Cole’s view of Feingold.
But party on.
Bob Loblaw
The moral of the story is to not rush into things without knowing which problem you’re actually entrusted to solve.
Democrats took power looking to update the plumbing in the downstairs bathroom and painting a few walls here and there. Maybe they should’ve looked up and realized the fucking roof was missing. That would have been a start…
Nazgul35
And now young Jedi…you are a Democrat!
Roberto
I respect Feingold too much to help him continue his awful relationship with the failed Democratic Party.
I have a feeling that a 3rd party is about to emerge in this country. But for that to happen, the Democratic Party needs to crack in half. Painful, I know. Yes, the tea partiers will get to party for a while. But in the long run, it’s in this country’s best interest to have a real shake-up of the existing order. The Dems cannot be reformed. There’s no reason a decent man like Russ Feingold should be associated with this band of thugs and whores.
Platinum Member
@FlipYrWhig:
This is why you’ll always be a loser. The information that the stimulus would not get Dems to the mid-terms was widely available and discussed.
You and your ilk, as expected, failed then to understand the consequences, allowed someone unnamed and possibly Republican to set the ground truth, and blindly accept that anything else was an “Iron Man” fantasy.
This is SOP for Balloon-Juice. While DFH’s are calling their congressmen and screaming about them extending GW’s tax cuts, you and your ilk are resigned to the reality they set for you.
kay
@lol:
Bingo. That’s how it was in Ohio, anyway.
John Cole
@BTD: I think losing Feingold in the Senate would be a tragedy. I like the guy a lot, even though he pisses me off from time to time with his grandstanding.
Triassic Sands
With all due respect, John, I think you made a better Republican.
@SenyorDave:
Feingold is running against someone who is, I was told, spending more of his own money to get elected in Wisconsin than Whitman is in California. It that is anywhere near true, then Feingold, who refuses to take money from scum, is in trouble.
On the other hand, polls this year are all over the place. Here in Washington State, Murray has been running neck-and-neck with perennial loser Dino Rossi. An 8/18-8/19 Survey USA poll had Rossi up by 7. Then, suddenly, three polls in mid-September show Murray up 9, 9, and 5. WTF? The only poll this year that is likely to be guaranteed accurate is the one taken on election day (figuratively, if not literally) — by actual voters.
For health reasons, both physical and mental, I’ve stopped paying attention to the polls. They have no bearing on the need to vote — everyone should vote, period, although I certainly hope all the TeaBaggers get so deeply involved with their moronic, self-righteous act that they forget to vote.
Nick
@BTD:
No, that’s John’s view of electoral issues.
Feingold is a good guy, honest, decent, stands up for what he wants. That doesn’t win you elections if you’re a Democrat. Exciting you isn’t the path to victory.
You guys want us to believe a Democrat who stands up for Democratic values, like Feingold, will win. How’s that working out for ya?
Svensker
@arguingwithsignposts:
If Bob can explain mclaren then there is some good left in the universe.
You Don't Say
Life *will* change if the Repubs take over both houses. Lewinsky-level investigations into every fucking thing that this administration has done. Anyone think the economy or anything will improve under those circumstances?
Paula
@lol:
LOOOL
jimBOB
@Zifnab:
None of that moves midterm votes. Unemployment is the reason we are here.
I know all that stuff is top of mind for you. For the average swing voter, they’ve never heard of it. But they do know when the economy sucks.
mr. whipple
@Linda Featheringill:
This is so amazing to me. Rather than focusing on what a disaster republicans are and will be, we have instead for two years focused on the shortcomings of Democrats and assembled a circular firing squad to cast blame.
It might be a tad more productive to be urging people to volunteer/donate.
anticontrarian
Just in case John’s rant wasn’t ranty enough, here’s another one.
BTD
@Nick:
How’s what working out for me? Feingold has won 3 elections in a row. And contrary to the ignorance exhibited in this thread – Wisconsin is a purple state that has been a nailbiter on the Presidential level for Dems.
In the face of that, Feingold has won 3 in a row against tough competition.
In an environment like we have today – where Boxer is in a tough fight in California, your silly rantings about “running as a Democrat” are not worth discussing.
Frankly, you have no idea what you’re talking about. I do not associate Cole’s post with your comment. I give Cole more credit than that.
Pangloss
Where I vote, I have a clear choice.
First term Democrat Debbie Halvorson or GOP challenger Adam Kinzinger (another Aaron Schock, only in uniform).
Incumbent Pat Quinn, or State Sen. Bill Brady (who would be the most conservative governor in the history of Illinois).
For Senate (in Obama’s former seat), State Treasurer Alexi Gianoulias or Rep. Mark Kirk.
All three Democrats have significant experience in state government, but have circumstances weighing them down. All three Republicans have never held statewide office and (except for Kirk) significantly to the right of the political median.
I expect all three Dems to go down by 5 points or more, even though I’ll be voting for them. The same thing happened in 1994, when Republicans won the governorship by the largest margin in history and Jerry Weller won the first of his 7 terms in office in the 11th District. 1994 was also the year that brought us ideological lunatics/sleazeballs like Rick Santorum, Bob Ney, Lindsey Graham, Bill Frist, Sam Brownback, Tom Coburn, Bob Barr, John Shadegg, John Ensign, Saxby Chambliss, J.D. Heyworth, and Joe Scarborough.
Sentient Puddle
@Triassic Sands: For what it’s worth, Survey USA polls have been giving Rasmussen a run for the batshit money lately. I remember one recently that had Fiorina up by something like 8 or so, which makes no goddamned sense. Between that and several others, Tom Jensen at PPP basically came up and said “Y’know, I do like SUSA, but Jesus, they really need to adjust their likely voter model.”
BTD
@John Cole:
I agree. On everything you say about Feingold.
Jim Pharo
I overheard the following, which I think will help John understand: “It just seems like the republicans CARE a lot more…”
All you eggheads think it’s about positions, stands — policy. Voters could give a crap. They want to be courted by someone they like, someone who seems to be really energetic, etc. We keep offering up candidates who are moderate, reasonable, looking for compromises, etc.
A lot of marginal voters (those who could go either way) don’t understand that anything is at stake in this election. Those that do get a whiff of anything think the GOP is standing up for the little people, and that the Dems are their usual hapless selves.
This emotional narrative is what’s driving the GOP’s success. Obama cleaned up by being inspirational, having enthusiastic followers, and facing a plainly unsuitable opponent. Christine O’Donnell won’t strike nearly as many swing voters as plainly unsuitable.
If we think these things are decided by reasoned evaluation of each voters own self-interest, the GOP wouldn’t win even one more election. Clearly, what drives our elections is something else…
mr. whipple
Jeebus. If, in the impossible event, the stimulus was twice as large as it was, what would unemployment be now? Would 8.5% have everyone all cheering and enthusiastic as oppossed to 9.7?
The money would be running out now either way, and the layoffs would just be larger. And the usual bloggers would have been invited to treasury and the White House to tout the success of the stimulus and would instead be bitching it was too small or asking the administration how many sparkles their ideal pony would have if they could have their ideal pony.
Matthew G. Saroff
I won’t stay home, I won’t be at home at all actually, I’m on the road 4 days a week, so I’m voting early.
That being said, when Barack Obama makes his campaign slogan, “Vote for us, you stupid cocksucker liberals,” as he did at that $30,000.00 a plate fund raiser in Connecticut, it makes the couch look very good.
The argument for voting this year is, “You have to vote for us, suckers.”
People do not like being suckers.
Zifnab
@You Don’t Say: The Repubs won’t take over the Senate. They ceded that turf when they gave Delaware back to the Democrats and handed Harry Reid a new lease on life with Sharon Angle. Every Senate race they win is going to be fought for tooth and nail. I’m more worried that DINO Senate sell-outs will flip over and hand the chamber to Republicans by default.
Passing legislation in the House has been almost a foregone conclusion (because Nancy Pelosi is a freak’n bawler). Losing the lower chamber to the Republicans will basically end any hope Democrats have of getting even passably acceptable legislation through Congress. It’s going to be a nightmare media circus if Republicans win that fight.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
You’re perfect for the Democratic Party.
It’s a politician’s job to win the support of voters. If this does not happen in sufficient numbers then the politician has failed. Period, end of sentence.
Bob Loblaw
@mr. whipple:
Yes, because 8.5% nationwide unemployment spares more white people. The higher the unemployment, the more white people affected, the more dissatisfaction.
This nation would be perfectly content with 8% U3 forever as long as it disproportionately affects those of the darker persuasions just right.
Nick
@BTD:
Well gee why not,? Maybe because I’m RIGHT and whether or not you stand for “Democratic values” is irrelevant? You’ve basically admitted that, thanks.
fasteddie9318
@Zifnab:
Angle is neck-and-neck with Reid in the polls and, if Feingold loses, that washes out the surprise in Delaware (which that lunatic may still win anyway).
Tom Betz
@Linda Featheringill: Interestingly, with or without Rasmussen, electoral-vote.com’s worst case analysis (all ties go R) leave Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate.
I’ll let someone else do the math on how the Blue-Dog effect would determine the real voting pattern of such a Congress.
You Don't Say
@Zifnab: I live in Nevada and Reid is no shoo-in.
TJ
@aimai:
Centrists can never fail, they can only be failed. The left must be at fault for everything.
MBunge
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
It’s a politician’s job to win the support of voters.
It’s also the job of voters to be adults and not fanatics or whiny little children.
Mike
Nick
@Bob Loblaw:
Perhaps, but some of what progressives argued we should do to reduce unemployment to that level would not spare white people, it would help those most effected, meaning white people would still be stuck in high unemployment, just darker people wouldn’t have unemployment rates as high, and that might make things worse.
Regardless, I don’t know it’s unemployment per se that’s causing white rage, their unemployment rate is still very low, less than 8%, it’s a convenient excuse to “the black man is destroying our country”
Joe Beese
All you clutching your pearls about O’Donnell and her ilk are encouraged to read Chris Floyd:
It’s true that O’Donnell has taken the politically risky step of denouncing America’s national pastime — masturbation — and has, over the years, supported any number of positions that put her on the far side of common sense. But one struggles in vain to find that she has advanced anything remotely as radical — or lunatic — as the idea that the President of the United States is some kind of intergalactic emperor who holds the power of life and death over every living being on earth in his autocratic hands. Yet this is precisely the position proclaimed — openly, before Congress, God and everybody — by the highly educated, intellectually sophisticated, super-savvy Laureate of Peace currently residing in the White House.
This same president has also fought tooth and nail — often in open court — to shield torturers, escalate pointless wars of aggression, relentlessly expand a liberty-stripping Stasi-style security apparatus, give trillions of tax dollars to rapacious financiers, health-care corporations, insurance companies and bloodstained war profiteers, while launching cowardly drone missile attacks on the sovereign territory of close ally, killing hundreds of civilians in the process – and has just signed off on the biggest arms deal in history with one of the most viciously repressive tyrannies on earth.
So I’m sorry, but I just don’t see how a putzy, klutzy, wilfully ignorant Tea Partier from perhaps the most corrupt state in the Union is somehow more dangerous than the people we have in power now — including a Vice-President who for decades was the senator (and corporate bagman) from this very same most corrupt state in the Union, and used his power to advance a “Bankruptcy Bill” that was one of the most savage class-war attacks on working people — and the poor, and the sick, and the vulnerable — that we have seen in many a year. Then again, as far as I know, Joe “Bankruptcy Bill” Biden has never publicly condemned the practice of masturbation.
jimBOB
@mr. whipple:
It could make the difference between the 2011 House gaveled in by Speaker Pelosi instead of Speaker Boehner.
BTW, a stimulus isn’t a one-time handout; it stimulates (thus the name) economic activity; then we’d have a healthier economy even after the money stopped. This is why Nobel Laureate Krugman was screaming for us to do it on an adequate scale, and not listen to the crazies telling us that it would be “too big” for unexplained reasons.
binzinerator
@John S.:
As a Wisconsin resident, I’m not going to vote for Finegold because he’s a True Progressive. I’m going to vote for him because most of what he does I agree with, unlike the Tax-Cut parrot he’s running against.
Btw, if it’s true he’s modified his position on gun rights, it’s because it’s politically astute and necessary now, and although I don’t like that I do want him re-elected. This is Wisconsin, dude. Hunting is practically a religion here (not quite like the Packers, which is the state religion) and I don’t think there’s anyplace where the people likes them their guns more, except perhaps in the South.
And outside of Madison and Milwaukee proper it’d be damned stupid not to pay attention to what’s going on in the Tea Party fevered hinterlands and white metro ‘burbs.
And speaking of white, the Badger State is whitey white white outside of the aforementioned cities, and pretty damned white inside them. I was actually surprised at the level of support for Obama in 08. But the state’s economy is worse now — the effects of what the goopers have wrought has had 2 years to hit home, hard. From for Joe Blow things have gotten worse. Alas, the Teatard bigotry is piggybacking on the anger of finding themselves with little to show for the last decade and a sense it will get worse.
The Dems have allowed themselves to get out-messaged, to lose control of the narrative when they had it in the palm of their hands and should have been bitch-slapping the fucking snot out the goopers at every opportunity over the past 2 years.
This state is pretty progressive in spite of itself. 08’ showed what people believed when things were looking bad, when they could smell the smoke and see a glow from the fire down the street. Now their house is on fire in earnest. I’m voting for and giving money to Finegold. But I’m not mistaking the firefighter for the arsonist or believing the arsonist is the firefighter. Alas, many more are and doubtlessly will.
BTD
@Nick:
Irrelevant to what? Winning elections? Probably to a large degree. Politics is stupid.
Irrelevant to governing? I assume you disagree with that.
And of course governing policy has some relevance to objective economic and social conditions which gets us back to Step 1.
TooManyJens
Look. If more progressive policy had been enacted, especially on the stimulus and jobs, Democrats would be in a better position right now. If you believe progressive policies actually, y’know, do some good, this is a no-brainer.
But we’ve got a Senate that’s almost half-full of people who don’t give a ripe shit about improving the economic welfare of 98% of the people in this country. Given that, I think what we did get can reasonably be classified as “not good enough, but a start.” At least we don’t have as far to go as we otherwise would have. No, that’s not very inspiring. But it could be made a lot more so if the people who don’t find it good enough would unite to say, “Great start! Let’s do more!” instead of some of the loudest among them saying, “This isn’t good enough, so it’s not worth doing at all.” Note, I am not calling for anyone on the left to say, “Welp, Obama did it, and that’s good enough for me,” regardless of what the people flinging the O-bot accusation like to think.
The “manic progressives” may be few in number, but they are disproportionately represented in the mainstream media. And the reason they are is that our ruling class doesn’t want us to hear from the “Great start! Let’s do more!” folks. They don’t want us to do more. Of course that’s the media’s fault, but I’m still pissed at the MPs for not realizing or caring that they’re being used that way.
Can we get a “Quit fighting and tell us what you’re doing to help?” thread up in here? TimF, you still there?
FlipYrWhig
@Platinum Member:
Who the fuck cares? Of course a bigger stimulus would have been better policy. Everyone here knows that. The question is and has always been how do you run a bigger stimulus through the gauntlet of a Congress full of shit-for-brains and scaredy-cats. And the answer from your “ilk” has always been, “fight harder” or “bully pulpit,” which is pretty much the same as “shut up, that’s why.” There’s never been one coherent theory to explain HOW to make a bigger stimulus, a better health care bill, a more relentless Wall Street reform law, whatever. The theory is, “balls.” If the Democrats had balls, it would all just magically fall into place. That’s fucking idiotic.
Paula
@TooManyJens:
“Of course that’s the media’s fault, but I’m still pissed at the MPs for not realizing or caring that they’re being used that way.”
What, you mean asking them to develop common sense about how their positions are being framed? How dare you, you Centrist shill!! An Obot is silencing dissent!!
Platinum Member
@mr. whipple: If you don’t believe in Keynesianism, and, you know, experts, you might as well join the teabaggers if you believe everything else is a pony. Why do you even bother?
Various economists on the liberal side had a variety of strategies to get the Dems past the midterms. A 1-2% unemployment difference is HUGE when it comes to defining the success or failure of a policy in the media.
And the “twice as large” and “running out now either way” is just shit your making up – you all really are a mirror of your teabag friends. Hope that “realism” keeps you warm in the unemployment line this winter.
brendancalling
what aimai said (thanks you for pointing me there, atrios).
let me add what my dad, a 68 year old man who’s voted for democrats since he was old enough to vote, and is a member (and former delegate) from the Atlantic County NJ Democrats, had to say via email this morning:
.
My parents are not maniac progressives, just democrats. Dad has done pretty well for himself, working at IBM from 1974-1995 before moving on to Lockheed. He retired for a year, and now makes a substantial sum to work part-time. he was able to afford installing solar power this past year.
he’s furious with what’s happened. livid.
FlipYrWhig
@TooManyJens:
It’s WAY more than half-full of people like that. There’s all of the Republicans who don’t give a shit, congenitally, and then at least a third of the Democrats have to be dragged kicking and screaming towards decency too.
jimBOB
@FlipYrWhig:
One way you don’t get it is by not asking for it. The stimulus Obama got was pretty much the exact size that he asked for, and there’s never been a peep about even trying for another. Instead he said over and over again that this would be enough, and told anyone who disagreed to shut their professional lefty mouths.
Now he owns the unemployment rate, and so do all the Dems running House races.
Keith G
Yes indeed, GOP rule in the House will be no end of good times. Here is what Steve King has in mind:
Maybe it is just time this nation smokes the GOP opium, the peeps on the right party down, and we wake up in the gutter with the rest of the modern world pissing on us.
Do ya think then that the great American center will catch a clue?
Citizen Alan
Just so I’m all clear on this:
1. The fact that the “manic Progressives” and “professional Left” will overwhelmingly vote Democrat in November doesn’t matter.
2. The fact that GOTV efforts directed at independents will largely be driven by the “manic Progressives” and “professional Left” doesn’t matter.
3. What matters is that the “manic Progressives” and “professional Left” fail to show enough love and affection for
Big BrotherObama in blog posts and on poorly rated Sunday morning talk shows. In other words, if November goes badly, it will all be the fault of the DFHs because our negative vibes harshed Obama’s mellow and interfered with the functioning of his Green Lantern Ring of Hope ™.Of course, if the Democrats defy all expectations and retain the House and Senate, it will not be because the DFHs overcame their “hurt fee-fees” and rallied to Obama’s side, but rather because Independents got turned off by the Teabaggers, thereby proving that moderation and incrementalism are what the people want. Thus, the DFHs can still be completely ignored. Funny how that works.
BTW, any word on how Patricia at age 57 is going to vote this year? Or how she voted in 2008?
Paula
@Joe Beese:
See, now that’s some ideological consistency I can respect right there. Of course, the average person doesn’t give a rat fuck about any of the issues this Floyd cares about, and probably doesn’t know that Joe Biden was responsible for the asshat bill that gives them less financial protection, but that’s all beside the point.
None of this “we can support this Dem but not this Dem/ this policy but not this policy” pablum — just a straight up rejection of the big tent.
Bob Loblaw
@brendancalling:
The joke of it is that they never actually wanted the opportunity to begin with. We’ve now reached the point where both parties are psychically predisposed to being in the minority.
Zuzu's Petals
I don’t get it.
Nate Silver projects Feingold winning 50% to Johnson’s 47.3%, with a 67% overall chance of winning.
Granted his numbers are older than the ones Kos has, but still, the discrepancy just doesn’t make sense to me.
MBunge
@jimBOB: One way you don’t get it is by not asking for it. The stimulus Obama got was pretty much the exact size that he asked for, and there’s never been a peep about even trying for another.
And if he’d asked for a bigger stimulus and not gotten it?
Mike
FlipYrWhig
@jimBOB:
Another way you don’t get it is by asking for so much that you permanently poison the well for the whole idea. WE don’t think that $1.4T or whatever is “too much,” because most of us actually believe what economists say. Democratic Senators and Congressmen would rather set themselves on fire than approve ONE TRILLION DOLLARS in anything, even if it was spending one trillion dollars on something that would immediately be worth two trillion dollars. Because they’re stupid and cowardly and worry about being caricatured as Big Spending Libs. They _were not_ going to go for the bigger stimulus, just like they weren’t going to go for the smarter, more efficient single-payer system, just like they never embrace anything sound or smart. But that’s who we have as our representatives. All politics is transacted through them. Continually venting about how it could’ve been better is like complaining that no one should use the letter C because all of its functions are already included under K and S. It’s true, but you’re not going to accomplish anything by bringing it up.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@MBunge:
Now that’s a profound insight. Say, I’ve got the perfect job for you. I want you to buy a ’73 Econoline, mount a loudspeaker on it, and drive all around Wisconsin blaring the message, “Grow up! Stop being fanatics and whiny little children! Vote for Feingold!” I can feel that enthusiasm gap melting away already.
MBunge
@Citizen Alan: In other words, if November goes badly, it will all be the fault of the DFHs because our negative vibes harshed Obama’s mellow and interfered with the functioning of his Green Lantern Ring of Hope™.
No. But the constant bitching from the left certainly hasn’t helped.
Mike
FlipYrWhig
@Citizen Alan:
The fuck it will. The “manic progressives” and “professional left” don’t do that shit. They’re creatures of new media. The people doing voter registration, volunteering, what have you… that’s a different group of people, and I’d venture to say that the overlap is extremely small. The people who do all of the complaining about insufficient lefty purity are _not_ the people who put boots on the ground. The confusion between the two warps every discussion of this topic.
MBunge
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.): It’s virtually impossible for a leader to be better than his or her people. When a leader can achieve the single greatest advancement in health care reform for his side in a couple of generations, and get nothing but shit for it from the people on his side…what the hell is any leader supposed to do?
Mike
TooManyJens
@Citizen Alan:
Assumes facts not in evidence. Any reason to believe that the “Obama is worse than Bush” crowd is out there pounding the pavement and staffing the phone banks?
goblue72
Yes the stimulus should have been bigger. Yes Obama wasted a year dithering on “bipartisanship” and let the HCR process drag on twice as long as it should have, leaving far less time to deal with other legislative priorities. Yes, Obama and the Dems should have (and could have) done more on the jobs front. Yes, we should be out of Afganistan and not doubling down on it.
Yes to all of that. But there’s only six weeks left to election day. We are SO way past that. Only question between now and then is how to prevent a complete and utter takeover of Congress by a bunch of Neanderthal, willfully Know Nothing, corporate whorebagging thugs.
jimBOB
@MBunge:
Then he wouldn’t be sole owner of the unemployment rate.
Platinum Member
@FlipYrWhig:
I see, whatever number Summers came up with MUST BE EXACTLY the pareto optimal for reality, ANYTHING more is FANTASY and Krugman’s (and ohers) “this shit is going to run out before the midterms” is just an impossible reality to explain to their little minds.
OK, you’ve won me over. The Dems really are that fucking stupid, have no real economic long-term strategy at all, other than “let’s skullfuck ourselves before the mid-terms.”
Best of luck motivating voters in November with that strategy.
Nick
@BTD:
Irrelevant to winning elections, yes. The next time I hear some leftie say “the enthusiasm gap exists because said Democrat does not act like a Democrat,” remember this poll.
The enthusiasm gap exists because it does, there’s no clear answer why.
Brachiator
@aimai:
People voted Democratic because they actually believed in the promises of hope and change. I know a lot of people who were inspired to vote. It wasn’t just that they had had enough. They wanted something better.
Now, it may not describe you, but here in Southern California (and among some Balloon Juice posters), I deal with people who identify as “progressive” who are strangely passive and lackadaisical. Some are falling back on the tired pseudo-revolutionary fantasy that if people don’t vote, things will get so bad that people will rise up and demand change, change which always looks like the playbook from The Nation magazine. And then there is a new group of do littles who say, “it doesn’t matter if we lose in 2010. I’m waiting for demographics to save us.” Meanwhile, you can bet that Republicans have some disenfranchisement schemes in their back pockets.
Promise them what, exactly?
This is muddled. I don’t expect progressives to craft Democratic Party strategy. I do expect every progressive to get up off his or her ass and vote.
The tea party folk are obviously motivating a hard core of voters. They are attracting the attention of goons like Limbaugh and Beck and O’Reilly, which gives them more legitimacy among conservatives and makes them a force to be reckoned with. And most importantly of all, they are attracting money.
And yeah, the Democrats have got to do more. On the other hand, when tea party people roar about taking the country back, they are obviously saying that they are going to tear down everything that the Democratic Party ever fought for. If Democrats have so little sense of self-preservation, as well as an understanding of the stakes involved if the GOP makes any gains, then the country is in a sorry state.
I agree with you here. But more people need to be actively on board and stop waiting for an engraved invitation from the White House or Nancy Pelosi.
As an aside, Bill Clinton appears on Letterman tonight. It will be interesting to see what the Big Dog has to say.
@LT:
Sorry, but I’ve never been much impressed by Greenwald. And his Lewis Carroll references here are just stupid. He even admits so himself (“The Queen’s logic, of course, wasn’t quite extreme as the Obama administration’s…”).
Kiril
Well, I certainly feel more enthusiastic now. Job well done, JC.
liberal
@Roberto:
A viable third party can’t happen in the US, since it doesn’t have proportional representation and does have first-past-the-post.
FlipYrWhig
@MBunge: I’m not even prepared to concede that Obama critics are “liberals” or “left.” It’s all been confused, so that we keep being asked equate “liberals,” “the base,” and “people who post to blogs,” as though that’s all one group, a big one, whose opinions Obama and Democrats have to flatter lest they lose elections.
Democrats need their base, yes. But blogosphere liberals are not the base. The reasons blogosphere liberals complain about things are _not_ the same reasons “the base” or Democrats are unenthusiastic.
Mr. Ed
John,
Based on your positions in your update, I would say you are a flaming progressive. Congratulations! Or something….. :^)
But what I think you fail to see is that most Dem voters aren’t really all that ideological and their lack of enthusiasm has to do with conditions on the ground, where they live and in their own lives. You may not have much luck with “the Republicans are a million times worse!” argument, because it’s not addressing their problems. It’s an emotional appeal to people who already feel betrayed on one level or several.
After having their expectations raised a great deal, they’ve only seen them dashed and set afire by an arrogant leadership who simply doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them. People, unfortunately, will tend to get that, even if it’s not being explained to them by the mediots.
I think others here are correct in saying the Progressives will go out and vote anyway, because they will eventually have to admit the GOP is actually worse, although I think it’s highly debatable just how much worse they really are.
The real problem Progressives have had all along is they hitched their proverbial wagon to a bunch of Neo-Liberals who despise them in thought, word and deed. Picture Bobby Kennedy campaigning for Strom Thurmond, expecting some kind of niceness after the election, and you get the idea. It’s impossibly stupid that progressives would go along with this, but then again, it’s all we had in the prior two election cycles. We were told, after all, that things would be different and these Neo-Liberals went well out of their way to make Progressive noises to get elected. Now all we get is sneering derision from POTUS while entertaining billionaires in Greenwich. Adding further insult, Bill Clinton tells us there’s “lots of good jobs out there, but not enough people who qualify for them.” Uh yeah. As one who’s been looking for work, I can tell you that’s the kind of arrogant bullshit that really ticks me off.
In the end, there’s simply no substitute for fixing the problems that ail this country and it’s citizens. Emotional appeals, no matter how rightly held, won’t cut it. But this government flatly refuses to deal with any of the major crises besetting this country and that’s what has most people in a funk.
This is a Crisis of Legitimacy and nothing less. This goes way beyond, “The Republicans are a million times worse.”
Playing make-believe won’t fix this.
FlipYrWhig
@Platinum Member:
Yes, that is correct. Anything over a trillion dollars was too scary for ConservaDems to contemplate. So the Obama team had to draw up something that was under a trillion dollars. It is entirely that stupid. And it has happened again and again.
eemom
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s absolutely right. I just can’t BELIEVE this stupid shit about Obama fucking up with a too-small stimulus, because I intensely remember all the horse trading that had to be done to just BARELY drag Snowe, Collins and Specter on board with what was passed.
Seriously, WTF are these people smoking?
@MBunge:
And THIS, very simply, is the answer to all this “oh suuuuuure, blame the progressives who are totally gonna vote” bullshit.
No, assholes. You may vote, but you haven’t helped.
Oscar Leroy
@aimai:
Hey, you’re finally catching on! Maybe you shouldn’t have spent the past year ridiculing people like me, but you were always a bit slow.
melior
Dude, the “enthusiasm gap” exists because Congressman like Feingold aren’t succeeding at accomplishing enough — or convincing the left-voting public that it’s not their fault — not because there are insufficient votes out there for a long overdue leftward correction.
Is that really too difficult to understand?
Nick
@jimBOB:
You couldn’t honestly believe that. He’s not even the sole owner of the unemployment rate NOW. More people blame Bush than him.
jimBOB
@FlipYrWhig:
I’m not venting (note the lack of all-caps in my posts, ahem), I’m just pointing out the reality of why we are here. To use a metaphor, we’re in the rowboat in the middle of the river heading for the falls, and the time when rowing like crazy for the banks would have done any good is past. So we’re stuck arguing about why didn’t we bring a bigger boat, or wouldn’t this work better if we had helmets, or maybe we should dive clear of the boat when it goes over the edge.
The point is, sometimes you’re screwed if you wait too long to do the right thing.
Maybe Obama wouldn’t have got a bigger stimulus even if he’d tried for it. But once he decided not to try for it, it was inevitable we’d be looking at a disaster in the midterms.
Nick
@melior:
If Feingold can’t convince them, no one can. Though Walt Minnick seems to be doing a good job doing it.
Sentient Puddle
@Platinum Member:
You do realize that if we were to take Summers out of the picture, we would have gotten a stimulus of roughly the same size, aye? The choke point was…wait for it…CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS!
And this, this feeds in to what I don’t get about the manic progressives. Everything they bitch, whine and moan about is the fault of Republicans. It’s not Obama’s fault, Rahm’s fault, Ben Nelson’s, Feingold’s, Grayson’s, etc. No, the problem is that the Republicans have decided that they want to fuck everything all up just because they’re out of power.
All of you can whine all you want about how Obama failed you, but at the end of the day, the only way you not make shit worse is by going into the voting booth on November 2 and filling in the oval next to the guys with D’s by their names. If you don’t do that, then you’re part of the goddamned problem, and I don’t want to hear any more from you.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@MBunge:
Yes, yes, yes! Put this one on your loudspeaker too! “Obama is too good for you! Vote for Feingold!” Why aren’t you a Dem consultant???
FlipYrWhig
@melior:
What makes you think that it’s the “left-voting public” that is the unenthusiastic part of the electorate? The numbers above suggest that 85% of self-described liberals approve of Obama’s job performance.
Citizen Alan
@MBunge:
Presumably, he would have been negotiated down to something close to the stimulus we got, but the Democrats would have been in a position to say to voters “We were going to do more for you but the Republicans prevented us” instead of “We thought about doing more for you but decided it would be too hard and the Republicans wouldn’t let us, so we decided not to bother.” I think the former message might do more to reduce the enthusiasm gap than the latter, but that’s just me.
eemom
Also, I have a question for aimai.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the following points
(1) Democrats under Obama have achieved XYZ (HCR, FinReg, etc.)
(2) The republicans are batshit crazy and will make everything worse
are NOT the “messages” Democrats should be focusing on in this election.
Exactly what message IS it then, that you claim Democrats have so miserably failed to get across?
Paula
@brendancalling:
In all seriousness: I feel about the “professional left” — the ones that go on Maddow and Olbermann and/or who write on/populate high traffic progressive blogs — the way your dad feels about the Dems.
The Dems will do what they do, and Obama’s election was not going to resolve the rifts in the party. And given the obfuscation provided by both the dire economic straits we were win and the historic nature of his run, I don’t think the voting populace came out of it suddenly understanding that progressive policies were the way to go. They are underinformed and prone to emotional bullshittery — upon which, like any winning campaign, Obama/Biden ’08 capitalized.
The “professional left”, OTOH, probably has more media and direct access to “real people” and other like-minded organizations that their predecessors ever had, as evidenced by the strong branding of places like DKos and FDL and people like Jane Hamsher ™, Glenn Greenwald ™ and David Sirota ™.
But this entire community, as recognized a media presense as they are (though arguably less powerful than others), has not really made this community of “the left” more coherent in their ideas, much less their strategy. So their numbers remain, I think, rather stagnant despite their media presence.
Of course, this “professional left” is in its relative infancy in comparison to the whole conservative movement, which has been in effect since the sixties. And it’s not really a surprise that a movement that gains such a rapid following on the internet over a short time is going to be subject to same kinds of intellectual lapses (the incoherence, the political naivete) that all “popular” movements are subject to (no matter how small this section seems to be in comparison). The people who populate these blogs aren’t always ivory tower intellectuals/professional organizers and that’s a good thing, but then again that probably means that people (like myself) are making a mistake when demanding organizational and ideological coherence/consistency that might be more the purview of professionals (either intellectuals or organizers). I mean, look at how all responses to “meta”-progressive threads devolve — it’s always about feelings — or more specifically “disappointment” or “resignation”. Is that any more intellectual than, say, the motivation behind teabaggerism?
FlipYrWhig
@jimBOB:
If he had “tried for it” like the health care bill, and the whole thing dragged on forever–which is what I think would have happened; it would also have completely undercut the argument that the stimulus was urgent–it would be an even bigger disaster.
Brachiator
@liberal:
Alternative parties have emerged before and displaced existing parties.
And proportional representation might not be a good thing. I have noticed some posters wish for a parliamentary system in the US (I am not at all suggesting that this is your view). But the UK got a hung parliament the last time out, Australia nearly got a hung parliament, and it is likely that the tea party would do much better than they are doing already under some alternative voting schemes.
Just imagine what the country would be like if the US had to come up with some compromise similar to the one that elevated Cameron to be the British prime minister, and Obama had to make Sarah Palin his vice president.
Nick
@jimBOB:
You don’t get to “try” when it comes to legislation like that. You get what you ask for, or you don’t.
If you try for one thing and fail, it weakens your hand when you try again. You only get one shot, he chose the sure thing. He knew that, and he adjusted accordingly. That may mean, like Corner Stone likes to mock, it was doomed from the start, but I said that on Nov 8, 2008.
I predicted unanimous Republican opposition, since they’re willing to risk suicide for power, conservative Dems balking, since they did that even to Obama and Clinton as candidates, and liberals who would feel less than pleased.
Actually, I had to admit, I didn’t think he would get HCR passed or a financial reform bill, or even end combat in Iraq. I thought we’d be looking at a bloodbath in 2010 with no accomplishments. I’m impressed they’ve been able to do what they’ve done in this unique unprecedented environment.
Davis X. Machina
It doesn’t matter how large the stimulus is, or wasn’t, or could have been. It’s not about whether Gitmo is open or closed, and if still open, why. It’s not about Dawn Johnson, or Shirley Sherrod. It’s not about EFCA or DADT.
Entirely too many Democrats believe that being in power by itself, or holding office by itself, is corrupting, to the extent that they’re uncomfortable actually being in power or holding office, or doing what feels like acting as accomplices to those who do. That they’ve been encouraged in this view by long experience with the Republicans, and not a few Democrats, who when in power, or in office, turn out to be corrupt, is an explanation. It’s not an affirmative defense.
The next march on Washington should be the Million Hamlet March.
melior
@FlipYrWhig:
It’s not Obama who is up for re-election this cycle, so why didn’t you cite the approval numbers for “generic Democratic congressmember”? Their enthusiasm gap stems from their own pathetic record of letting themselves be gamed by Goopers, Blue Dogs, and uberpatriotic military contractor welfare queens into selling out our principles.
MBunge
@Citizen Alan: Presumably, he would have been negotiated down to something close to the stimulus we got
And that is the fundamental problem with almost ALL of the lefty bitching about Obama. Even when it is somewhat legitimate, it flows out of a childishly stupid conviction that nothing bad could ever happen from doing what the lefty wants. You can argue for any course of action if you assume there will never be any negative consequences from it.
Mike
Nick
@Citizen Alan:
It’s just you.
The Democrats tried that with the 9/11 health bill and Reid tried that with the public option, it failed both times, usually because they blame the Democrats for not actually getting the votes and “capitulating”
They’ll be blamed if they don’t try, and they’ll be blamed if they try and give up.
lol
@FlipYrWhig:
Don’t forget $1.4 trillion *is* what Obama started with when he started negotiating with Congress. But that would involve listening to people involved in the process instead of reading blogs.
Manic progressives seem to think that all negotiations take place in the media when in reality, by the time Obama announcs a bill, 99% of the negotiation has already been done.
Nick
@melior:
Really, Russ Feingold gets gamed by them? Really?
MBunge
@jimBOB: Then he wouldn’t be sole owner of the unemployment rate.
And THIS is the other thing that irks me about anti-Obama bitching from the left. Here we have someone implicitly stating they’d rather have 12.5% unemployment that can be partially blamed on the GOP than 9.5% joblessness for which Dems are held responsible. They care more about the political impact of policies than they do their actual effect.
Mike
FlipYrWhig
@Citizen Alan:
“The Democrats” include a large number of people who get queasy at the very thought of “doing more for you.” They don’t actually want to run on the idea of “doing more.” They want to run on the idea of being fiscally disciplined, unlike those other Democrats who throw money at problems. You have to keep them on board. You have to convince them that this is a terrible, unprecedented emergency that justifies a break from everything their instincts are crying out for them to do.
I say this confidently: every complaint that the liberal blogosphere has about the big pieces of legislation under Obama can be laid at the feet of conservative Democrats in both houses of Congress. There are also complaints about the executive branch, like the civil liberties and civil rights issues; go to town with those. But this stuff about how the stimulus wasn’t this and HCR wasn’t that… the reason is not that Obama is a wuss who likes to spite liberals, the reason is that conservative Democrats won’t play any other way.
hilzoy
Look. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. It doesn’t matter what Obama or Feingold or the media might have done differently — unless you are Obama, Feingold, or a member of the media.
What matters is what each of us, personally, does to remedy this situation between now and election day. Do you know any eligible voters who might not vote? If so, talk to them. Can you volunteer to knock on doors or make phone calls, or whatever? If so, do.
Just for starters: the very idea that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans being in charge is crazy. I can imagine how someone might believe this had the Republicans been out of power for a generation. But not now. They will try to dismantle health care reform, and defunding it would do a lot of damage. A lot. They will waste our time with hearings on stupid things like Christmas card lists. They might well shut down the government. They will certainly place any progressive achievements at all beyond our grasp for the next two years.
And only Democrats seem to think that there’s any point at all to things like unemployment insurance and food stamps. If the story about older people who are unemployed moved you at all, you can’t say that there is no difference worth caring about.
You might or might not like the Democrats in Congress — I certainly have reservations about some of them. But they have done a lot. Plus, they’re not completely insane.
We should pressure Democrats from the left. But we should not so much as begin to think that there’s no appreciable difference between the two parties, or that there’s no point to voting. Because it’s just not true. It wasn’t true in 2000, and it’s not true now.
MBunge
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.): Yes, yes, yes! Put this one on your loudspeaker too! “Obama is too good for you! Vote for Feingold!” Why aren’t you a Dem consultant???
Being a smartass doesn’t actually disprove the point.
Mike
lol
@Nick:
There’s one big reason – the Democratic party is made up of groups that have historically voted at lower rates during mid-terms than white people.
FlipYrWhig
@melior:
Find me one person who tells you anything remotely like “letting themselves be gamed by uberpatriotic military contractor welfare queens” as the reason why he or she is unenthused about voting for a Democrat in 2010.
melior
@Nick:
I think that’s quite obviously the case, unless you consider him to have been a secret conspirator. Or is that what you think? Really?
Midnight Marauder
@Citizen Alan:
Um, “We were going to do more for you but the Republicans prevented us” has never stopped being true. And that’s the biggest problem with a certain segment of the Left, regardless of what you want to call them. They create a false dichotomy between logic, such as the previous “We were going to do more for you but the Republicans prevented us/We thought about doing more for you but decided it would be too hard and the Republicans wouldn’t let us, so we decided not to bother.”
One of them is a reality that we have seen over and over again on every single issue, even innocuous things like judicial appointments that are stymied for months on end until they finally receive a vote with unanimous approval. The other is a twisted sense of perspective where the people who are actively trying to do away with things like DADT are somehow the ones responsible for its current intractable state.
There is all this ire and rage on the Left because things aren’t exactly what some people though they would be at this time. And instead of getting pissed off at the assholes who are preventing you from ringing up larger victories and striking back at them by voting against them at the ballot box, you instead bemoan and cripple your supposed allies for laying the groundwork for future victories.
It’s ri-goddamn-diculous.
Elizabelle
@eric:
Everything you said. I don’t understand why people cannot see this.
Paula
@Midnight Marauder:
“Um, “We were going to do more for you but the Republicans prevented us” has never stopped being true.”
But, you know, many of these kids know American politics from as far back as 1994!!
jimBOB
@Nick:
You’re right, it would probably be only a marginal help to the Dems if they’d hung together for a bigger stimulus. But it would have been the right thing to do.
melior
@FlipYrWhig:
You might live in your own tiny bubble, but there are disaffected voters all over my planet right now — and yes, many many of us understand that it was manic supporters of Liebermann like you that got us here.
FlipYrWhig
@melior: When did I support Lieberman? What the fuck are you talking about? How is it that the reason for voter disaffection has something to do with military contractors?
Paula
@melior:
Some people live in a bubble like yours, but others live in a bubble like FlipYrWhig’s.
There are more things in heaven and earth, I know!
jimBOB
@MBunge:
You’re presuming I’m saying Obama should have abandoned the stimulus we did get in order to lose while trying for a bigger one. What I actually said is he could have recognized the inadequacy of what he had gotten, and talked up the need for more, rather than pretending what we got was hunky dory.
Citizen Alan
@MBunge:
But you assume the exact same thing from the Right! Your position is that the best course of action for Obama is always to preemptively capitulate on issue after issue because there’s no hope of overcoming Republican obstruction so we might as well just give in.
If we have really reached the point that a Democratic president with a 59-41 majority in the Senate is largely incapable of pursuing his own agenda, then we should just acknowledge that our democracy has failed and begin stockpiling weapons for a Leftist revolution. And as far as I can see, this is only a problem for Democrats because there is no way in Hell, the Dems are going to filibuster a Republican president with even a 51-49 Senate. If they ever had the balls to even try it (an unlikely prospect), the Repukes would abolish the filibuster that very day, and the conservative media would pillory them for being “divisive.”
You want to talk about why we have an enthusiasm gap? It’s because the events of the last 18 months have demonstrated a systemic, possibly flaw in our democracy. When people don’t believe in democracy, they either stay home in disgust or they cast their votes for people who at least promise to make the trains run on time. Either way, the result is the same.
melior
@FlipYrWhig:
That was a response to the snide use of the phrase “manic progressives” above to refer to, you know, progressives.
I think you’re being deliberately obtuse now, since many commenters have explained more patiently and clearly than I the disaffection resulting from repeated compromises with Blue Dogs and other coalition members at the expense of the rest of our interests.
FlipYrWhig
@melior: Which is more likely an explanation for an “enthusiasm gap” among people who voted for Democrats in 2008?
1) They like Obama more than “Democrats.” Obama isn’t on the ballot.
2) They thought Democrats would do more to help the economy.
3) They think Democrats have tried to do _too much_ to help the economy and now the bill has come due.
4) They think Democrats have caved to Republicans too frequently and have become disheartened.
5) They think Democrats should do more to stand up for due process for terror suspects, civil rights for LGBT people and Muslims, rein in the national security state, and renominate Craig Becker and Dawn Johnsen.
I personally think 5) is full of super cool things I’d love to see. But I don’t think I’m typical of Democrats.
I think you vastly overrate 4). And I’m not sure you’ve factored in 3).
And I shouldn’t keep acting so snippy, but, for fuck’s sake, there’s a difference between a person’s ideological positions–I’m comfortable saying that my ideal society is WAY to the left of anything the US political system would ever tolerate–and that person’s opinions about what is feasible in the current political climate and how to formulate policy to account for that.
Citizen Alan
@melior:
Yeah, that’s another thing I’m getting tired of. As far as I can tell, “manic progressives,” “professional Left,” and “dirty fucking hippies” are all just interchangeable terms used to describe someone anywhere to the Left of Obama who dares to complain about his job performance on any issue, and in so doing, unleashes the evil spirits and negative chi that will interfere with the Green Lantern Ring of Hope and Change ™.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: Reading through the thread, recognizing the fact that Lieberman (and McCaskill, and Webb, and Bayh, and Lincoln, and Baucus, and Nelson, and Nelson) exists, is “supporting” Lieberman. And the fact that Max Baucus refused to allow a health care bill to come to a vote in committee (because he wanted to maintain his special friendship with Chuck Grassley) means that Obama “dithered for a year” on health care. He should have kicked somebody in the balls, I guess.
FlipYrWhig
@melior:
Yes, that is a reason for some disaffection. My point is that it is a reason that explains only the tiniest sliver of the disaffection felt by people who have voted for Democrats recently. It explains a lot about why blogosphere liberals are disaffected. But the blogosphere liberals are a minuscule portion of the electorate.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@MBunge:
Quite the religious fanatic, aren’t you.
NobodySpecial
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if doing a Shaft on Max Baucus or hitting him with a chair in a steel cage match would have raised his approval rating 15 points. Bonus 5 if he would make the appearance in a monster truck.
LiberalTarian
Wait wait wait. Let me be sure I understand … it’s *my* fault people in Wisconsin don’t appear to be reelecting Russ Feingold?
By double digits?
Are you fucking crazy? You vastly over estimate numbers of people like me. I could throw a 1% election, but I can’t do shit about double digits. And I’m just a real lefty, not a manic progressive firebagger O-hater.
You want to blame somebody? Who you gonna blame for this Great Recession? The left? Really??
So, although I love you like a … well, some guy I’ve never met who constantly runs my opinions down but is good to his fat pets, but really man … STFU. Manic progressives have little to do with this. They have the same effect here as they had on going to war with Iraq, even if all three of them vote. Diddly.
FlipYrWhig
@Citizen Alan: Personally I think “manic progressives” can be identified as those who see suboptimal policy outcomes, are aggravated by them, and attribute them to spite or weakness or corruption by Obama and his people; whereas non-manic progressives can still see suboptimal policy outcomes and be aggravated by them, but take into account that there are other pieces on the board besides Obama, Rahm and Geithner.
LiberalTarian
@Citizen Alan: Yay. I love it.
FlipYrWhig
@LiberalTarian: I thought the point of John’s post was not that disaffected firebaggish people were dampening Feingold’s numbers, but that the firebaggish prescription for success (i.e., if more Democrats were ballsier progressives like Feingold they’d be doing much better this cycle) is called into question by Feingold’s own performance.
MBunge
@jimBOB: What I actually said is he could have recognized the inadequacy of what he had gotten, and talked up the need for more, rather than pretending what we got was hunky dory.
Yes, because a President bad mouthing his own policies is always great for him and the people in Congress who voted for them.
Mike
fasteddie9318
@TooManyJens:
No, but now we’re talking about a fraction of the manic liberals, who are themselves a fraction of all liberals, who are a fraction of the Democratic Party’s supposed “base.” There’s no evidence that the “Obama is worse than Bush” crowd was ever interested in pounding pavement; has Jane Hamsher ever done anything but gripe from the sidelines? Most liberals, however, even (or especially) the manic ones, will be out there doing just that.
Corner Stone
@Citizen Alan:
It’s tribal marking. Tells the PollyAnna Pragmatists(tm) here that it’s ok to put their inner shame to an outward facing target.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@lol:
Your reality-biased graph will fall upon deaf balloonbagger eyes.
Corner Stone
@lol:
Ok. Like who?
TooManyJens
@fasteddie9318: See, I’ve always understood that crowd — the ones for whom everything Obama does is another letdown and proof that he’s no better than Bush — to be the Manic Progressives. I could be wrong, of course. Amazingly, our snarky terminology may not be the best way to communicate clearly.
Corner Stone
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
Or maybe this one:
Adam Lang
@eemom:
I can field that question.
The reason Democrats may get creamed in November is because of the economy.
It therefore behooves the Democrats to campaign on ‘DAMMIT! WE COULD HAVE FIXED THE ECONOMY IF THESE REPUBLICANS WEREN’T STANDING IN THE WAY!’ It’s a lousy, crappy talking point — people don’t want to hear excuses, they want results — but if you tell people that it’s the Republicans’ fault that the economy is still in the ditch, and that they did it on purpose, and that all you’ll get if you elect more of them is more of that, well, it might wake a few people up.
And eemom is quite right about this, as well: those of us who are active progressives are going to vote. I keep hearing anecdotal reports of those whacky progressives who think the Republicans should win power so that the country will finally learn its lesson, but I’ve never met one in person yet. Hell, I’m as disillusioned as the next guy, but I’m still volunteering for a nearby House reelection campaign (my own House member, Ms. Pelosi, doesn’t need any help from me) and Barbara Boxer’s campaign. I’d be helping Jerry Brown too, but I’ve only got a limited amount of time, and his campaign promises (NO NEW TAXES! NO NEW FEES! WE WILL FIX THE BUDGET SHORTFALL ON THE BACKS OF THE POOR AND THE UNIONS!) don’t exactly inspire me.
A whole lot of people have had their lives get dramatically worse under the Democrats. And they don’t see things getting better because things aren’t getting better. Never mind whose fault it is, we all know that, but if you expect the American electorate to keep that in mind for two years, you’re one hell of an optimist.
These are the people you have to get to the polling places. Short of rounding them up at gunpoint, I don’t see a lot from the Dems that is going to do that.
kormgar
The sad thing is, all the Democrats needed to do to close the intensity gap was investigate the lawbreaking of the past decade and bring it all out into the open.
TooManyJens
@kormgar: I really wish that were true, but it’s not. It wouldn’t create jobs.
Cacti
@FlipYrWhig:
I don’t think this one can be overstated. Obama brought out a lot of voters who were excited about HIM. Casual voters aren’t jumping out of their seats saying, “Hooray, let’s go vote for Russ Feingold!”.
That’s why team Obama’s midterm strategy has become an outreach out to Obama voters, rather than Democratic lifers.
MBunge
@Citizen Alan: Your position is that the best course of action for Obama is always to preemptively capitulate on issue after issue because there’s no hope of overcoming Republican obstruction
That’s not my position. I don’t think that’s anybody’s position.
My position is that Obama doing it his way actually succeeded. He’s gotten a lot of stuff done, including health care reform that at least 2 generations of liberals had failed to achieve. I think when you criticize success, you’d better have more to say than “He didn’t try hard enough to get me my pony!”
Mike
Brachiator
@Citizen Alan:
Bullshit. I don’t care whether you or anyone else thinks that Obama is the worst president ever.
The only question worth asking is whether you think it necessary to stop the Republicans and the Tea Party crowd?
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
The sad thing is how very wrong you are about this.
Paula
@Adam Lang:
But isn’t this situation same as it ever was? The hilarious/annoying thing is that there are some people who think this situation is an entirely new thing, that Obama’s election was, by itself, going to make the process easier and therefore believe that tweaking of policy is somehow the silver bullet that magically gets everyone to vote progressive. Never mind that the enthusiasm gap has different explanations depending on where you are and who you hang with.
Elie
@General Stuck:
Yes, yes, yes
Joe Buck: This is YOUR government. No one is going to GIVE you what you want — you had better go out and work for it…
..And this chick O’Donnel doesnt scare you to death? Really?
what.is.wrong.with.you?
eemom
@kormgar:
What color is the sky on your planet?
AnotherBruce
@Allan:
Then you might be making an erroneous assumption. That “progressives” (hate that word) who don’t approve of Obama would not turn out to vote. Unless I see some evidence of that I wouldn’t assume it.
El Cid
@lol: There’s something wrong with that graph if you look at the actual numbers in the cells.
Russ Feingold’s name is down there with Blanche Lincoln, but his actual ranking is much higher.
I don’t know what’s wrong with the sorting.
Let’s take, for example, the % liberal vote on “Crucial” legislation, lifetime in the Senate.
Blanche Lincoln is rated at 69% in that category. (Rounding.)
Feingold, on the other hand, is rated at 88%.
That puts Feingold equivalent on that measure rating (give or take a point) with Debbie Stabenow, Tom Udall, Barbara Mikulski, and even just shy of Patrick Leahy.
That would seem to me to be an important rating category.
Whichever category (column head) you choose, the ranking sort appears to be screwed up.
So as far as I can tell, it would be totally inaccurate to use that chart from Progressive Punch to rank Russ Feingold with Blanche Lincoln.
Did I miss something.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Elie: O’Donnell doesn’t scare me. Ken Buck scares me. Carly Fiorina scares me. Pat Toomey scares me. Marco Rubio Scares me. Mark Kirk scares me…..
El Cid
@El Cid: I did miss something.
They are only ranking based on their measure of progressive voting on crucial legislation for 2009-2010.
I’d kind of think that a lifetime record might outweigh that, but, okay.
kormgar
@TooManyJens:
It wouldn’t do a damn thing to help the economy. But then, I never claimed that it would. We are talking about the activist base of the Democratic party being demoralized.
kormgar
@Midnight Marauder:
What’s especially sad is that you actually think that counts as a rebuttal.
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
Then, by all means, please go on to explain how President Obama launching full-throated investigations into the torture regime of the Bush Administration would have fired up “the activist base” of the Democratic Party and the millions of other disaffected voters, while still maintaining a landscape favorable to effectively governing.
ricky
Dipso Dimsum is screaming about the “intensity gap” as if that is a real thing. Guess he lost his virginity as a teen to a Soccer Mom…or was that his previous pollster?
Its the economy stupid. Even Carville was right once.
kormgar
@eemom:
Care to elaborate. If you wish to make a rebuttal, please do. But don’t attempt wit. You’re just not particularly any good at it.
I’m also guessing that you haven’t been involved with many Democratic activists in your area. That’s fine. But rather than attempt your feeble little jokes, you might want to get out there and talk with the folks who, two years ago, spent the months leading up to the election walking neighborhoods, talking with potential voters, and working the phone banks.
The biggest disappointment that I keep hearing about the democrats revolves around their failure to return this country to a nation of laws, their cowardice in the face of the greatest moral crisis this nation has faced in a century.
You can scoff and laugh if you must, hiding your face behind your fan as you giggle at the unruly peasants who wish to see torturers punished.
ricky
@kormgar:
Hey Mr. or Ms. Activist Base. You need to see someone put in jail to activate your behind? You ain’t much of an activist.
You sure aren’t much of a base.
Omnes Omnibus
538 still has Feingold with a 67% chance of winning.
Edward G. Talbot
late to the comment party, but John, the progressives are going to show up and vote. Everyone talks like the firedog lake crew and the Obama bashers are the ones who are causing the enthusiasm gap, but that’s ridiculous.
The democrats and indys who are staying home are not the kind you ever see on blogs. We could spend forever discussing WHY, but I’m certain the economy is near the top of the list, and voters are never happy when they guys they voted for get in and things get (temporarily) worse.
We can blame the shrill left for several things, and possibly even acknowledge that they have hurt the perception of democrats a bit nationally. But the idea that progressives should be chastised for the enthusiasm gap is silly. It’s the vast middle that’s staying home. and “don’t vote for repubs” isn’t a compelling way to get them to turn out.
kormgar
@Midnight Marauder:
Is that a serious question?
OK, perhaps you have not been paying attention over the past two years, but the political rhetoric and outrage on the right wing has been to maximum for the past two years. I’m honestly amazed that you failed to notice this. Then again, based on your comments in this thread, maybe it’s not that surprising.
Why do I bring this up? Well, Obama has been attempting to govern from the center but is being opposed as if he were governing as a radical leftist. So from the perspective of Republican opposition, a move to restore the rule of law could not possibly increase Republican opposition. They’ve already pegged the dial at 10.
On the other hand, the activists who campaigned for Obama in ’08 are demoralized for a number of reasons. Chief among these is the complete lack not only of accountability, but even investigation following eight years of what appears to have been the most lawless and corrupt administration in the history of the nation. That has proven to be a very bitter pill for many of them to swallow. Combine that with the apparent continuation of some of the most egregious Bush abuses and you have a perfect recipe for the alienation of your activist base.
So what does that mean in an election? It means that suddenly that army of volunteers that you were counting on to knock on doors, man phone banks, and encourage people to vote didn’t bother to show up.
gnomedad
My take is Ironic Posturing Syndrome. The teabaggers claim to think “Bush was just as bad”, but will vote Republican in droves. The ironists on the left are more sincere, and sit out elections or vote for Nader.
ricky
@Edward G. Talbot:
Since you arrived late ( as did I) ponder this thought. How
much comparison have you seen in the polls between this “ethusiasm gap” or “intensity gap” and previous gaps
in mid terms? Hell, I cannot ever recall this “gap” being measured, much less named. In the past I heard the fall off in Democratic mid term votes attributed to things like the tendency of younger and less affluent voters only to vote in large numbers in Presidential years.
kormgar
@ricky:
I’ve been manning the fucking phones for a month now trying to convince undecided voters to show up to the polls.
So yeah, I think I qualify.
What have you done?
But honestly. If you think that accountability is irrelevant, that the rule of law is a luxury, and that torturers shouldn’t even be investigated then I have no interest in anything you have to say.
And if you think that the people who do care about those things are irrelevant, that the volunteers who worked their asses off two years ago should just accept that the nation they believe in no longer exists, then I can only pity you.
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
I’m going to be blunt with you. If this is what it takes for these “activists” to engage in their basic civic duties, then they really aren’t activists at all. Which leads me to my next point:
The people you are describing, who would be so mortally wounded over the lack of accountability regarding torture that they would sit out an election, are few and far between. They are not the base of anything, and they do not have great strength or importance in their numbers because their numbers do not exist. You would have done better if the issue you chose was immigration or systemic unemployment, because there are actually large scale constituencies invested in improving the status quo in those areas.
But there is no large scale constituency in this country fighting for accountability on torture. That movement doesn’t exist in any meaningful form.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@kormgar:
Okay. How many of those undecided voters have brought up investigating, much less prosecuting, Bush, Cheney et al?
Citizen Alan
@MBunge:
But we’re not talking about “bad mouthing his own policies” here, are we? We’re talking about using the bully pulpit to explain to the people that Obama wanted to do more but was hamstrung by the Republicans. Or are you now saying that the suboptimal stimulus and the watered down HCR bill were what Obama actually wanted and not what was forced on him by the GOP and the Blue Dogs?
@Adam Lang:
I know exactly one, but he’s not a progressive. He’s a radical Anarcho-Libertarian who considers both parties to be divisions of the same fascist uberparty who merely disagree on the best way to prop up “the dying empire.” He has not yet explained how he expects to get from “Step One: Install the craziest people you can in government” to “Step Three: Profit!” to me convincingly.
Chuck Butcher
So that bullshit line managed to get 260-some comments going about an incredibly slim sliver of the electorate. If I took the horseshit dished around this seriously I’d walk away from (D) forever.
Nick
@jimBOB:
So now we’ve moved on from “it would’ve been electorally better” to “it would have been the right thing to do”
Good, so can we just accept that standing on principles wins no one elections on the left?
kormgar
@Midnight Marauder:
I don’t know you, and based on your writings, I don’t think I would like or respect you if I did. Nevertheless I am going to ask you for a favor.
Rather than wasting time making empty arguments, get on a phone bank and start reaching out to voters and volunteers.
You might help make a bit of a difference in the upcoming election.
You might also learn a bit about why the 2008 activist base is so demoralized, your petulant assertions notwithstanding.
Nick
@kormgar:
Which is why the guy who actually advocated doing this, is losing by double digits.
Or is this snark? I can’t tell anymore.
kormgar
@Nick:
Not snark at all. The opposite actually.
Instead, the Democrats chose to not pursue even the most limited investigation and instead swept much of it under the rug.
This made Feingold look both ineffective and foolish. Because hey, if his “reckless” allegations had any truth to them surely there would have been an investigation.
I think you can see where I am going with this.
Nick
@kormgar:
Liberals are morons who deserve to be punched?
Let’s say you’re ridiculous theory that Democrats are losing for not prosecuting Bush, which is like at #3554354 on the list of things Americans are concerned about, they’re going to punish one of the only guys pushing for it?!?!
Wow, they’re even bigger idiots than I thought.
Citizen Alan
@Midnight Marauder:
Are you seriously suggesting that investigations into the torture regime would have made the political landscape worse?!? How?!? They already filibuster everything!! If we had those full-throated investigations you and Obama are so terrified of, maybe it would have put the Republicans on the defensive and given the few remaining moderates cover to join the Democrats on more issues. Or maybe not. I don’t know. For me, the political calculus of the issue is outweighed by the knowledge that, nearly two years after Bush left office, we remain a lawless banana republic where accountability for malfeasance up to and including war crimes is an alien concept,
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
Right. Because you are the only person who has phone banked, canvassed a neighborhood, and volunteered for a campaign this election season? The ignorance of your assumptions is astounding. That you would think, just because someone called bullshit on your little fantasy that the reason the Democratic Party is doing so poorly this election is because they didn’t go after Bush and Cheney on torture, they must somehow be as apathetic and disengaged as the fabled “Democratic activist base” you kept referencing is pathetic.
As I asked you before, show me where the constituency is clamoring for investigations and accountability on the Bush/Cheney torture regime. Point out their marches, their rallys, their organized campaigns to bring mainstream attention to the issue, the politicians who have joined them as advocates for their cause. But you can’t point out any of those examples because they don’t fucking exist. And instead, you make nonsensical arguments like this to explain the oh-so disaffected and demoralized “2008 activist base”:
Do you seriously believe Republican wouldn’t circle the wagons even more if President Obama were talking about prosecuting them for war crimes? In this political environment, you don’t think it’s possible for them to get more unhinged? For crying out loud, look at how unglued they’re becoming over tax cuts! I mean, I struggle with how anyone who was a serious observer of politics in this country right now could say in all resolve that war crimes “could not possibly increase Republican opposition.” That is one of the dumbest statements I’ve heard in quite some time.
kormgar
I think I’m done. I came here to rant a tiny bit but I am simply shocked by the attitude on display.
If you are perfectly happy to live in a nation where the rule of law only applies to the little people, you can go chase yourself up a tree.
kormgar
@Nick:
OK. My apologies. I thought I was speaking with an intelligent and rational individual. My mistake.
Let me put it in words that you can understand. The US is no longer a nation of laws. One of the few people who stood up to this lawlessness was betrayed by his party and made to look foolish.
This has led to an enthusiasm gap in which the insane crazy people are excited to go to the polls, but the people who actually care about the state of the nation are demoralized.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@kormgar: That’s stupid and dishonest. You didn’t say “I think Bush et all should be investigated and prosecuted”. I think that and I suspect most people here do, too. You said Dems would be winning if Obama said that. You can offer no evidence, or even a coherent argument to back that up. So now you’re shifting to a cheap and dishonest smear and running away. And the firebaggers wonder why we don’t all bow down before their awesome righteousness.
kormgar
@Midnight Marauder:
Short of armed rebellion, it really isn’t possible for the Republican opposition to be any stronger.
Did you forget to set your alarm and just slept through the past two years.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@kormgar: and in a probably futile attempt to keep you honest, here’s exactly what you said
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@Citizen Alan:
> nearly two years after Bush left office, we remain a
> lawless banana republic where accountability for
> malfeasance up to and including war crimes is an
> alien concept
Citizen Alan and kormgar, a brief FYI: balloonbaggers do not understand, respect or condone the concepts of “morality” or “a nation of laws, not of men”.
kormgar
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Allright. If you are going to accuse me of being stupid and dishonest you should do two things first.
Number one, you should actually read what I wrote.
Number two, when you quote me, you should ensure that what you attribute to me matches what I actually wrote.
Midnight Marauder
@Citizen Alan:
Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m saying.
And, like you point out, those aren’t war crimes.
Let’s clear up something right now. If I had my druthers, I would go after every single one of those bastards from now until the day they die. I am firmly in the camp who is disappointed by the Obama Administration’s actions on civil liberties and dealing with the Bush Administration’s torture regime. I would LOVE for them to be better on this issue.
But I also know that when President Obama came into office, he made a cold political calculation that passing the foundation of Universal Health Care in this country was more important than going after his predecessors for war crimes in an already fractious environment. And while it’s disappointing and disheartening, I get why he made that decision and I accept it. But I also know that if the citizenry in this country were as outraged about torture being committed in their names as some people around here like to pretend, then the issue would have more resonance in Washington D.C.
Look, I think this is a bit hyperbolic, but I understand the sentiment and I agree with it. I think it’s disgusting that there’s no accountability in this country for constructing an international torture network, but I’m also aware that it’s not some kind of new phenomenon. It’s not like this country’s history has the greatest track record in holding our leaders accountable for egregious crimes. In a way, it’s not all that different from the manner in how a large segment of this country didn’t want to gratuitously punish the Confederacy after the Civil War, as opposed to eradicating them completely.
klondike
You’re yelling at the wrong people. I dare say that the voting rate among the denizens of left-blogistan will be north of 85% and no matter what they say about Obama, Rahm, Steny, Summers or Geithner they won’t be pulling the lever for Hairy-Hand O’Donnell or any of her pals. They also aren’t sitting on their hands, imho, or closing their wallets.
The people who make up the enthusiasm gap “don’t live here” in the blogosphere and most of them don’t even visit. They’re off living their lives. Without noticeable assistance from national Democrats – like Krugmans bigger stim, or Howard Dean’s proposal for lowering the medicare enrollment age – these people see no reason to repeat the hopey exercise of 2008. THAT’S WHY THOSE THINGS WERE IMPORTANT.
Think of the 200 people in my linkedin contact list. If the polling is correct, the 50 fools among them will undoubtedly race to be first in line at the polls this year, while some 100 of the 150 sober realists will waffle and ultimately decide it ain’t worth it.
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
Yes, it is. It’s called “not voting and giving them a majority.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@kormgar: @Jim, Foolish Literalist:
is not the same as
or
The first one is an assertion without evidence, the second and third are, to use a firebaggers favorite whine, strawmen. No one said the things you are accusing us of thinking, because you’re a dishonest asshole. And I notice you didn’t answer my question about how many undecided voters (of the many thousands you’ve talked to, I’m sure) have brought up the issue you claim would be a game-changer. I guess I’ll give you half points for not lying, again.
You ain’t particularly smart, are ya?
kormgar
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yes I know what I wrote.
I also wrote
“If you are perfectly happy to live in a nation where the rule of law only applies to the little people, you can go chase yourself up a tree.”
Now, a review of your posting history in this thread leads me to believe that your reading comprehension skills may not be up to par. So, my apologies for taxing you.
But if you reread that statement you might notice a funny word in front of it. The word is “if”, and among other things, can denote a hypothetical sentence.
Implicit in many of the responses to my post was that the respondents did not consider the lack of investigation into lawlessness to be a serious issue. This also opens the very significant possibility that those same people don’t consider the lawlessness itself to have been a serious issue.
As far as the honesty issue goes…um…what the fuck are you talking about. Seriously.
Citizen Alan
@Uncle Clarence Thomas:
Yeah. I’m getting that.
JC
I have to say, the thing to get worked up about is the fact that Feingold might lose.
Only as a ‘sidebar’, very accurate comment though, is the fact that it doesn’t have much to do with Obama not taking a ‘more’ progressive stance.
Everyone wants to act as if they ‘know’ why the democrats are going to lose.
I don’t know, though I have, what I believe, are some good reasons.
1. 9.5% unemployment.
so, then there is the inevitable “there should have been a greater stimulus!! Wahh!!!”
True, and I agree. Is that Obama’s fault though? could this have gotten through the Congress?
Maybe – but I simply don’t know. When you’ve got 20 or so Dem reps saying “extend the tax cuts for the millionaires”, and 5 or so Dem Senators saying the same thing, makes me think the vote counting for the stimulus might have been pretty good.
and then the ‘political argument’ saying – ‘we wanted a stronger stimulus, but we couldn’t get it’, is then a judgment that is seen as a POLITICAL LOSER.
Makes sense – but could have been a bad argument.
thing is, Obama has been ON FIRE in a lot of his recent speeches. Saying EXACTLY WHAT we, AS PROGRESSIVES, want him to say.
Which brings us to the 2nd reason:
2. Media don’t report accurately, on pretty much anything, and overwhelm the President’s message, with their drama and horserace based reporting.
True.
3. Needs repeating – the Republicans ‘oppose oppose oppose’ strategy, both in 1994, and now, have borne fruit. Former President Clinton reminded us on Face the Nation, that the 1993 budget plan – which the Republicans uniformly opposed at the time (sound familiar?) is what REALLY set the stage, for trending back to a more balanced budget. And yet, a lot of those democrats that did the right thing, and voted for that package, were voted out of office, the next year.
And it is looking to be a repeat this year.
So, what do we do when the Republican continue to f*ck up the economy, democrats get elected to fix things, and do, to the degree that they can be ‘fixed’, and then get voted out of office, for doing the fixing?
It’s a thankless job, but I guess someone has to do it?
kormgar
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
>You ain’t particularly smart, are ya?
Well, I’m smarter than you.
For one thing, I understand the difference between an initial statement and a subsequent response.
You see, when individuals carry out conversations, the first person says one thing, then the second says something in else, and then the first person says something new in response to the second person’s response.
That’s called a dialog, and it’s a major means of communication.
Here’s the funny thing, that first statement and the later response may not be identical. In fact, depending on the response made by the second person, they may be entirely different. Isn’t that amazing. We change what we say based on what the other person says.
Once again, that is called com-mun-i-ca-tion. Say it out loud. Now once again. There you go.
Now stop acting like a jackass.
KT
@Nick:
and
It’s a negotiation. Not an auction. The Republicans aren’t going to see your public option and raise to single payer. This should have been clear to anyone who watched the stimulus fight. Need a trillion? You’d better go in demanding three or four.
So no, they didn’t really try for a public option. They said they’d like to have one and then they let the Republican noise machine tear them to pieces for three months.
Trying for the public option would have been announcing on Day 1 that we were going to get single payer and, if need be, he’d do away with the filibuster or pass it through reconciliation or whatever it took.
The reason people blame them for capitulating is because they give up without a fight. They have yet to fight for anything. They announce something they hope the Republicans won’t go too nuts over and then cower while people like Palin, Newt and Rush set the tone of the dialogue.
There was no health care fight. If the Republicans wanted health care they’d attach single payer to some war funding bill and then browbeat the Democrats into voting for it by asking why they hate troops and want the terrorists to win.
Nick
@kormgar:
I know the feeling
Let me restate my question; people are punishing the one person fighting for their issue because no one else in the party backed him up? Yeah, that’s rational.
kormgar
@Citizen Alan:
Yeah, me too.
I don’t comment here all that often, but I have never ever seen this level of…well..I don’t want to be impolite.
Aw fuck it.
Venality.
I have never witnessed this level of venality at Balloon Juice before. It saddens me.
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
So…what then? You’re saying that you weren’t actually describing anyone in this thread?
No one is arguing this.
Nick
@klondike:
I’m assuming those 100 have jobs and aren’t old enough to qualify for Medicare anyway even if the age was lowered to 55, so I don’t really see how doing those things would get them to the polls either.
4jkb4ia
It may be a related topic that you cannot win any baseball games if you cannot score any runs. (Chris Volstad gets to look like Cy Young today)
Feingold made at least $435,000 in his moneybomb. This is not Christine O’Donnell levels but SSP seemed to think it was OK. This is a moneybomb which Glennzilla participated in saying that he would do this for very few other politicians. The national people who understand and appreciate what Feingold stands for and the voters in Wisconsin who have to drag themselves to the polls and vote for him are two different groups of people. By the same token, even if John gets some more “manic progressives” to feel guilty, if they do not live in Wisconsin this has limited utility.
(I felt very hollow inside seeing that tweet)
ahmed sekou toure's corpse
Of course you have to vote. You have to vote because that way the state gets to do whatever it wants and say, “But you voted for them!” Your futile pointless vote provides the state with its last shreds of legitimacy as it flouts your rights.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Backtrack fail
No, nothing of the sort was “implicit”. They were responding to your, again, baseless assertion that those investigations would have an impact on the mid-term elections. You projected this opinion onto them and their responses because you’re a sanctimonious, dishonest person who can’t win an argument.
Now, that’s some first class stupid there. “Is it irresponsible to speculate that people who didn’t say the things I said they did might also say these things?” Yes, it is. And dishonest.
Dr. Morpheus
@c u n d gulag:
That is so much win….
kormgar
@Nick:
Well, unfortunately human beings are not particularly rational. I wish they were, I really do. We simply have far too many cognitive blind spots.
My apologies for the gruffness of my prior tone.
In any event, my point was that the Democrats made Feingold look like an ineffective fool who allowed himself to become terribly worked up over something that clearly wasn’t important.
Now, obviously I consider the restoration of the rule of law to be of vital importance, and I consider the possibility that Feingold will lose this upcoming election to be a travesty of the highest order.
Let me put it another way. The activists who volunteered in force in ’08 are demoralized. The low-information voters who only pay attention to the latest talking points don’t have any real idea what has happened to the rule of law, but golly, they know the Feingold got himself all worked up over nothing.
Does that make it any more clear?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@kormgar:
but the things you said bore no relation to the things others said to you. You extremely dishonestly distorted what they said to you, in order to work yourself up into a righteous huff. That’s not “communication”. That’s poo-flinging.
@kormgar:
I don’t think you know what that words means.
4jkb4ia
@Resident Firebagger:
I saw at least one poll where the Democratic base is not aware that the Republicans have a good chance of taking the House.
Chuck Butcher
@JC:
I think you’re missing a 1a) here so:
1. 9.5% unemployment. while 1a) the wealthy and particularly Wall Street and The Banksters get more extremely wealthy and supported by Govt off their suffering.
kormgar
@Midnight Marauder: @Jim, Foolish Literalist:
As amusing as it has been, I think I’m done talking to you. Neither of you appear to have anything interesting or insightful to add to the conversation.
It’s been fun. Take care and don’t choke on a pretzel.
eemom
This
is the essential point that
Kazoo“kormgar” doesn’t seem to get. If Obama had made such investigations a priority, NOTHING would have gotten done — and not only would the Democratic “base” (whatever TF that means at this point) be demoralized, we’d all be jumping off cliffs en masse, because we’d be even more fucked on the economic and all other fronts than we already are.Kudos to “kormgar” for working phone banks though. I thought you actually had to be old enough to vote to do that, but maybe not.
(Kazoo was a little green guy on The Flintstones. He was from another planet.)
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
If those low information voters don’t know what happened to the rule of law, why would they know about Feingold taking a stand on the issue?
I feel pretty confident in saying that Feingold’s stance on civil liberties isn’t even in the Top 50 of talking points for low-information voters.
eemom
IOW, mommy says it’s time to stop playing on the computer and go do his homework.
kormgar
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It generally indicates a lack of ethics or moral fiber, often in the context of bribery but can have wider applications. In this context it referred to the willingness to forgo justice for political gain.
Here is an example. It would be venal of the Democrats to not restore the rule of law out of fear of electoral consequences.
Why, what do you think it means?
kormgar
@eemom:
So are you actually arguing that it would have been possible for the Republicans to have been more obstructionist than they were?
I am impressed by your mind-melting stupidity. I really am.
rootless_e
One thing for sure, nobody in the netroots media who has been working 24/7 for 2 years to explain that the entire Obama administration is just a fraud carries ANY responsibility for any enthusiasm gap. They are just entertainers, for crying out loud, or is that Rush? Sometimes I get mixed up.
kormgar
@eemom:
Um.
Did you forget your breakfast this morning. You sound cranky.
Chuck Butcher
@eemom:
And this is a fact somewhere other than in your pointy head because ….?
The loon 27%ers wouldn’t have like it?
The GOP that almost unanimously blocked or voted against everything wouldn’t have liked it?
Or what?
Oh absolutely, rule of law and civil liberties are definitely dispensible in search of … almost anything. What won’t you excuse?
4jkb4ia
@Zuzu’s Petals:
But part of why Nate has Feingold there is because all the polls have been Rasmussen polls. A PPP poll with a Dem house effect would change things.
kormgar
@rootless_e:
Just out of curiosity, who has been doing that? I’m not saying they don’t exist, but I can’t for the life of me think of who you mean. Other than PUMA’s, of course, but I don’t think they qualify as Netroots.
Personally, I gave Obama 18 months benefit of the doubt. And hell, as demoralized as I am, I still showed up and volunteered.
Citizen Alan
@Nick:
Voters are staying home in November to punish Glenn Greenwald? Who knew?
4jkb4ia
@FlipYrWhig:
Especially since Boeing and Lockheed seem to think that Gates is really going to take away the punchbowl or dilute the punch.
Paula
@rootless_e:
Well, they appreciate the logic of that reasoning when convenient, anyway. Several blog comments ago many of these same people would insist THEY WERE THE BASE THEY ARE THE BASE WE GOT OBAMA ELECTED WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN TO THEM THEY ARE SO DISAPPOINTED GODAMNIT.
Um, maybe no one listens to you because you don’t have enough numbers to make a dent, even if you are part of this mutable thing called the “base”. But that’s a faux pas to some people, because they have the self-flattering idea that insulting their lack of a constituency = insulting all progressive causes and silencing all worthy criticism. What the fuck ever.
kormgar
@Midnight Marauder:
Yes and no.
Among low information voters, they basically remember as much as the most recent compatible talking point and whatever they’ve heard that fits their ingrained cognitive biases.
The problem is, in part, one of framing. This could have been an election that centered on a triumphant Feingold who was bravely restoring honor to this nation or an ineffective one who was busy tilting windmills.
The cowardice of his fellow Democrats has left us with a Feingold who, in the eyes of the news media, wasted his effort and energy on something that was silly and irrelevant.
Shawn "Smith" Peirce
John – I’ve said this to a TON of people before, and as the former Exec. Producer for the Randi Rhodes Show, I’d say I’ve got the experience to qualify this.
Here’s the difference between a Progressive and a Liberal, in a nutshell.
A Liberal will look at all the poor, hungry, starving people in the world, and will scream, “We have to feed all the hungry people!”
A Progressive will say, “Well that’s a great idea… But which one of you A**HOLES is gonna pay for it all?”
Progressives are Liberals who understand that the world is most often run by rich, old, conservative, white men, and that – like it or not – to get anything done, you have to deal with them, often on their terms.
Progress is slow, and often in the short-term, unsatisfying.
But if someone leans to the political left, they’re not usually so myopic to think that it’s all about the short-term.
4jkb4ia
(Volstad: five-hit, complete-game shutout. His ERA is currently 4.83. Yes, John, I saw there was an open thread just now.)
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
And, again, the framing of this election was NEVER going to be centered on the restoration of the rule of law. Ever. That’s an element I think you keep overlooking. You wanted this election to be based on an issue that doesn’t have widespread national support or attention.
You were always bound to be disappointed if you believed otherwise.
General Stuck
@kormgar: OH, I get it. This is the end game to your Cheney in chains fantasy. A grateful nation turns it’s lonely eyes to you Russ? I’m sure a country in deep economic recession choosing to focus on trying the previous administration and likely losing those trials, would have been met with flowers and chocolates.
Whatever country you imagine you live in, it is not this one. A distinct majority, including rank and file dems across the country, don’t give a shit if Cheney picked up some brown people and tuned them up some. Or, skirted and outright broke the law regarding domestic spying.
The attention span of the American people extends only so far as their bank account reaches or nears zero. This is your country, like it or not. Now, that said, I fully agree there is going to need to be a reckoning of sorts with Bush era lawbreaking. There are several investigations going on quietly benieth the media radar, to first find out the facts on what happened. I suspect Obama and Holder knows the public will not be behind them, whatever course they choose to address the past. And any such frontal effort in Obama’s first term would make it his last. If you believe any different, then all I can say is you are wrong.
And I agree It can’t be left standing that an administrations top lawyers granted their approval for waterboarding that is clearly illegal by any standard. I suspect efforts to create a truth commission of sorts, or some bipartisan body not in government will be pushed in an Obama second term. And only when the economy recovers, because once it starts, then about every ounce of political oxygen will be deployed in it’s service and if there are still no jobs, the public won’t stand for it, regardless of prog fantasies to the contrary.
And yes, I do believe the republicans will be worse obstructionists with or without addressing Bush crimes. Dems only passed what they did, squeezing every single dem vote for HCR, and at most one or two repubs on most everything else. The wingnuts will have bigger minorities and maybe even majorities come this January, and you will see the mother of all obstruction then.
jimBOB
@Nick:
As a general principle? No. In some particular case? Maybe.
Kind of a silly generalization.
FlipYrWhig
@kormgar: Look, you sound well-intentioned, but you’re completely overflowing with bullshit if you think that a bunch of stuff having to do with civil liberties and opposing torture– _all of which are laudable principles_ –would have even the remotest impact on Democratic electoral chances in November 2010. You’re talking about a population that likes the Arizona border law and doesn’t want the discount clothing warehouse “mosque” built. There is NO WAY that it could be worth it to stir up a hornet’s nest among everyone who is not a principled civil libertarian in order to please the principled civil libertarians. It may be a cold calculation, but that’s the way it is.
I mean, I’m an atheist. Atheism and agnosticism are growing in the country. Obama could make us really fired up by proposing to take “In God We Trust” off American money. But I don’t really expect him to do that. And I don’t moan about how his refusal to do it is a stab in the back.
kormgar
@Midnight Marauder:
I would argue precisely the opposite.
Are you seriously arguing that ongoing public investigations into a decade of lawbreaking filled with bribery, collusion, torture, and murder would not have made the six o’clock news?
I mean, I’ll concede the possibility, but it seems a fairly remote one.
Here’s the thing, and maybe this is the root of our disagreement. Low information voters, by definition, don’t really know much about the state of the nation or the economy. For the most part, they take their cues from what they hear on TV or from their buddies.
A brave and forthright effort by the Democrats to restore this nation’s honor and integrity would have had a significant impact on the national conversation. It is impossible to predict the nature and scope of that impact, but it would have had an impact.
wasabi gasp
It’s your story and all, but that ending is a bit of a downer. Maybe you can chipper it up with a few lines about a pod blasting off, or something.
Dr. Morpheus
@jimBOB:
Um, can you provide some counter-examples where a stand on principles has won a Liberal Democrat an election/re-election?
Especially when those stands involve defending scary brown people instead of demonizing them?
So I’d argue the opposite is true.
That the rule is indeed that standing on principles wins no elections on the left for the most part
And only in some particular cases it may win an election here or there for a politician on the left.
FlipYrWhig
@kormgar:
You mean a campaign by terror-loving Democrats to destroy the nation’s security in order to settle old scores while emboldening America’s enemies? Because that’s what everyone would hear, day after day after day after day after day.
And then people like you would say, “Why is Obama spending so much time on these torture investigations, when (climate change | the economy | gay rights | punishing bankers) is such a pressing issue? If only he would listen to me and emphasize my new priority, I’d be happy.”
kormgar
@General Stuck:
Let me put it in simpler terms.
By not “wasting energy” on investigating the crimes of the last regime, the Democrats have ceded the initiative to the Republicans.
Instead of constantly reminding voters of the corruption, failures, and lawlessness of the last Republican regime, they have allowed Republicans to refocus the national conversation on purported Democratic failures.
Had the economy miraculously turned around, this would have been fine. But in the absence of a growing economy, the ruling party needs to be able to make a compelling argument to the voters. Arguing that “the other guys are worse” when their worst crimes didn’t even merit an investigation is pretty weak.
kormgar
@FlipYrWhig:
That is exactly what Fox News would say, but it is not significantly different than what they say anyways.
FlipYrWhig
@kormgar: Except that you’d be giving people more reasons to believe it. Are you old enough to remember Iran/contra? There were hearings to stick it to clueless Reagan’s illegal foreign policy. And the guiltiest bastard of them all, Oliver North, ended up being lionized as a hero. It wouldn’t work. It might have still been _right_ and _gratifying_, but it would not have worked in an electoral context.
ETA: And that was before the media all took the express train to Crazytown. In 2010 Oliver North would probably have ended up the frontrunner for president.
General Stuck
@kormgar: LOL, you still won’t accept, with regards at least to Bush lawbreaking on the national security front, that Americans, or most of them, actually care. They do not. And all the wingnuts have to do is pull the we did to protect you card. It’s fucked up, but also reality. And focusing on that rather than addressing what Americans do want addressed, a better economy that produces jobs, would have been a true disaster at this point.
Dems are stuck with the meme of the other guys are worse, because they are, and that worseness is unfortunately, politically, and policy wise, and message wise, the reason why it is going to take more than 2 years to turn around the past 30 of GOP failed governance, especially regarding economc policy.
KT
@kormgar:
DNC Democrats reek of fear. They are never brave and they are never forthright. They do not stand on principle. Ever.
Everything they do is based on the political calculations of people who’ve spent the past 30 years losing elections. And God forbid someone like a Howard Dean comes along, shows a little spine, and actually helps get some Democrats elected, he’s quickly relegated to the fringe.
4jkb4ia
Fragments of thought–Voters go out there and they pick the person who is, or seems, marginally better, year after year. But that person who really is marginally better than the alternatives could be Ben Nelson whom everything has to go through for his party to take advantage of the opportunities they have. And then the voters stay home to punish their congresscritter when they are really punishing Ben Nelson whom they cannot vote against.
I think if Obama had done anything to investigate torture not only would it have been the right thing but it would have gotten the base fired up. They would have seen that Obama was trying to do what was absolutely right. Although bmaz expressed scorn for the idea of a truth commission, all the time that I wasted watching the FCIC has made me more sympathetic to this idea. The FCIC may not find out everything that happened, and I think all the financial bloggers wrote them off, but they have a constituency among
the public that is desperate to know what happened. A truth commission would have shown the public on C-SPAN some of the things that happened even if the ACLU knew everything that came out in the hearings. And the public could see how the Republican commissioners behaved–if they were trying to get at the truth or had a conscience or whatever.
kormgar
@FlipYrWhig:
Yeah, I remember Iran-Contra. Thanks for making me feel old. Of course, Iran-Contra was small potatoes compared to what appears to have happened over the course of the aughts.
FlipYrWhig
@kormgar: I remember I/c too; I’m pushing 40. But that was much closer to the Watergate/Church committee era where everyday people were more concerned about spying and cloak-and-dagger stuff… and North still just gutted it out and completely turned the tables. 25 years later and here we are. I don’t have any faith that prosecuting Bush-era war crimes and civil liberties violations would redound to the benefit of Democrats or, for that matter, just plain human decency.
kormgar
@General Stuck:
People do not care about things that they do not know about. They also do not care about things when people that they trust tell them that they are unimportant.
But you are making some assumptions that are based on the national conversation that we have had, not necessarily on the one that we would have had.
I’ve explained this already. To mimic your style for a moment, LOL for not having the slightest clue about how opinions are formed or shaped.
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
Sure, they would have made the news, but how would the story have been framed? You are out of your mind if you think the traditional media would have run with a narrative proclaiming the valiant Democrats are seeking to return this nation to the rule of law if they had opened up torture investigations (besides the one that General Stuck references as unfolding in the background right now). This is the same media that greeted news they had been used in a Pentagon propaganda program with a blanket of silence on the issue. The story would have been yet another episode of “Democrats accuse Republicans of torture and violating international treaties; Republicans say Democrats are “playing politics” with national security.”
Then you are grossly unfamiliar with how the American traditional media operates.
Low information voters may not know the root causes of their economic pain, but they know that something isn’t right and it needs to be fixed ASAP. And those talking heads they take their cues from aren’t invested in any way, shape, or form in investigating their cocktail party buddies for war crimes. So to rely on them to inform low-information voters is to essentially throw in the towel before the fight begins.
No, it’s not impossible to predict. They would have struggled to complete even a fraction of the accomplishments and successes they put up over the last two years. It’s really not hard to see how this plays out.
kormgar
@FlipYrWhig:
Personally, I think that the restoration of the rule of law should trump any political considerations.
I just happen to also believe that it could have a significant positive political impact. It is also possible that the net impact would have been negative, but honestly…
We’re talking torture and murder of innocent men, women, and children. A torture and murder that, by the accounts of professional interrogators, didn’t even produce actionable intelligence. That would have taken some serious work to spin that in Republican favor. But, yeah. It’s easy to think of ways the Democrats could have shot themselves in the mouth over it.
FlipYrWhig
@4jkb4ia:
I don’t believe that. He came right out and issued that order to close Guantanamo, which people liked just well enough to stop complaining about Rick Warren taking part in the inaugural festivities for like 17 consecutive seconds. “The base,” meaning the people who proliferate online to second-guess Obama, always has a reason _not_ to be fired up. The media change but the dissatisfied activist wing is always like that, and it’s been that way for Democratic presidents since Johnson at least.
kormgar
@Midnight Marauder:
OK, once again. The Republicans have been maxing out their obstructionism for the entire time Obama has been in office. There is quite literally nothing that the Republicans could have done to derail Obama that they did not do.
You can argue that investigations would have unified the Republican opposition, but that opposition was already unified. You could argue that it would have resulted in bitter opposition by every Republican to any legislation attempted by the Democrats, but that’s exactly what they did anyways. You could argue that it would have resulted in apocalyptic and dangerous rhetoric by right-wing pundits and politicians alike that demonized Democrats as Nazis and Communists and traitors who sought the ultimate destruction of the US, but again, they did that anyway.
FlipYrWhig
@kormgar:
At the hearing: “I’m not saying there weren’t excesses, and those I regret. But our cause was just, and my partners and I wanted nothing more than to keep the good citizens of America safe in a harsh and cruel world.”
In the right-wing media: “Who cares about a bunch of terrorists? Oh, sure, that one guy may not have been guilty, but you know what they’re like, they’d kill all of us if they had the chance.”
FlipYrWhig
@kormgar: I think you’re not taking into account the conservative Democrats. There’s no pleasing Republicans; they’re obstructionists and just plain reprehensible. But there are conservative Democrats you need to please in order to keep “Democrats” afloat. And that’s who defects or at least drags their feet on all of these issues — or they threaten to.
I mean, if Democrats in Congress can’t even agree on how to transfer suspected terrorists to a maximum security prison in the US because it means “bringing terrorists to America,” I can’t see how there would ever be enough support to make happen what you want to have happen.
kormgar
@FlipYrWhig:
I know. I have learned to never underestimate the Democrat’s ability to seize defeat from the jaws of victory.
Although I remain convinced that investigations would have improved the Democrat’s electoral prospects (probably), I also believe that they should have happened even if they would have hurt the Democrats politically.
And speaking to the thread in general, I get that low-information voters do not care about the issue. That is not surprising. It’s actually the predicted result of the Democrats not pursuing investigations and the media not picking up the slack. People don’t magically care about things that they haven’t heard of. They need to learn the facts, and if the facts can be attached to an emotional frame that invokes outrage at lawlessness and a desire for justice, all the better.
Elections are not won by looking at what the electorate cares about a year prior to an election. They are won by determining out what the electorate could care about, finding a way to frame it so that it benefits your side, and then ensuring that the electorate cares passionately about it come election day.
Oh well. It’s too late now.
Cain
@Zifnab:
It was made harder by grandstanding Democrats. We had a fucking majority in both houses. For all the grandstanding those assholes did they are getting kicked out and replaced by teabaggers. They paid the cost.
I mean we couldn’t even get Guantanomo closed becaues of the goddam congress. Yes, the administration has failed in some levels, i wish they had a better strategy, but ultimately it was the Senate that failed us all.
cain
General Stuck
@kormgar:
Right. The American people are going to rally behind truth justice and the American way and putting Dick Cheney behind bars. I really do wished it were so, and if we didn’t desperately need universal health care, and some modest reregulation of the finance world, and saving the auto industry, and….. the rest of the laundry list of things to fix, I would agree with you. I think it is paramount that there be some public reckoning on what Bush et al did at some point. It there isn’t, I will consider Obama as failed in that arena.
But I also agree with his doing the bread and butter things first. And when is the last time a current American president has charged and tried the former for ANYTHING, much less crimes against humanity? Think about it. We as a culture have no experience with that, and the reason is we do tend, as a people, to look forward, not backwards. But enshrining torture in the national psyche is a bridge to far to completely look away from, so I agree it must be addressed, just not now, nor with any expectation it will help the dem brand. We only do the right thing as a country, when doing the wrong thing cannot be rationalized any longer, and usually long since it should have been done. ie slavery, civil rights, and a number of items still in the works.
Wolverines! and all that.
Cain
@eemom:
I read somewhere that the stimulus money hasn’t all been spent yet. So shouldn’t we be spending this money and get some of these projects going?
cain
4jkb4ia
@FlipYrWhig:
No, I mean the base as in the people who didn’t hold their nose voting for him in 2008. Firebaggers vs. Obamabots would not be such a knock-down, drag-out fight if they were not both elements of the base. Even if Firebaggers are skeptical about blind partisanship, don’t support every Democratic candidate, and don’t run blogs dedicated to electing Democrats, some Democrats can pass their ideological tests.
Giving out your intent to close Guantanamo is one step. Another step would be closing the secret prisons. Yet another step would be to make sure that everyone who you don’t have enough evidence to hold has a country who will take them. Admittedly by this line of reasoning if Obama tried to prosecute someone and the jury failed to convict them, this would simply make the base even more depressed. Also Congress would not have been the branch of government responsible for said prosecution.
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
No, it’s not, and that’s what you really are failing to grasp, that a large population in this country, fundamentally, does not care about this issue. They just don’t care, at all, in any respect whatsoever. And at no point in time has any poll come out demonstrating the opposite of this. You seem to be unable to accept that a large swath of your fellow citizens are not at all outraged by the crimes committed in their name, and that there’s really not all that much you can do to get them to care when the economy and employment prospects are so miserable right now.
If you want a specific example of this apathy, look at how many more stories have come out this year about the egregious abuses at Guantanamo and then examine the impact that had on citizens in this country calling and imploring the congressional representatives to finally move to close Gitmo and transfer the prisoners out of there. If you’ll note, in this case, there were Democrats who were pushing for Gitmo to be closed until they ran into a roadblock of their fellow Democrats preventing them from doing so. So how do you explain that kind of result in your formulation that the reason low-information voters don’t care about the issue is that Democrats haven’t pushed it hard enough?
Newsflash: They have been spinning such things in a favorable manner to them for years now. I’m sure you are more than aware of this type of rhetoric:
There are plenty of bills that have passed the Senate because we were able to pull the necessary 1-3 Republican votes to get it done due to assholes like Ben Nelson and Lieberman.
That doesn’t happen if you are investigating war crimes.
kormgar
@Midnight Marauder:
We clearly have a fundamental disagreement on this issue.
I belong to the camp that views public opinion as something that can be shaped and molded. Opinion polls are useful guideposts for what the public cares about today, but are not necessarily useful guideposts to what they will care about tomorrow, or what they might be convinced to care about in the future.
You appear to disagree. That’s fine.
We are clearly going around in circles and are no closer to agreement. But hey, at least we’re not insulting each other nearly as much.
Plus, there’s the bonus that our exchanges have largely avoided the semi-literate asshattery of eemom and Jim the Literalist. That was just ugly. I feel bad for briefly lumping you together with those two. Sorry about that.
Nick
@4jkb4ia:
and the other 80% of the country?
Nick
@kormgar:
Then maybe we can’t be a democracy anymore, democracy only works when the public is rational.
kormgar
@Nick:
30% would have gone every bit as insane as they went anyways.
My take is that the response of the rest would have largely depended on messaging, framing, and how well the investigations went.
General Stuck
I didn’t vote for Obama to be a hero of any sort. I voted for him to be a competent president, and deeply believe, as the first black president, it is way unfair to heap onto his shoulders the epic task of not only trying Bush and Cheney and their Kapos for war crimes, and making right the moral abuses of his white, very white, predecessors and in effect, trying the entire Republican party by extension, or half the country.
That is how it would be received by the media and country, and any illusions to the contrary should be quashed in the mind of liberal idealists.
I do hope with a second term, he will address it publically, in some way, but GWB will never see the inside of a jail cell, so get over that dream. And I won’t judge Obama’s presidency in toto as failure if he doesn’t. Let the next white man or women clean up after their race’s overly entitled republican felons. It is quite a load Obama carries just sitting in the White House while black.
4jkb4ia
@Nick:
OK, I think I addressed this, but if you are talking about Democrats losing because of an enthusiasm gap then you want to do things to maintain the enthusiasm of the people who voted for you because they believed in you, not because they didn’t trust McCain or Sarah Palin. And this might be more than 20 percent.
Nick
@kormgar:
Sure it would have, and the public would have responded by saying “why should we care about these people? when are they going to fix the country?”
Good God, you people in your bubble. AMERICANS DON’T CARE ABOUT WHO WE TORTURE AND MURDER!
Chuck Butcher
I”m a tad confused as to how the DOJ becomes Congress. Congress legislates, DOJ prosecutes, SCOTUS rules on law. What the hell does the Senate have to do with shit? Except excuses?
And no, I don’t think Americans give a shit, either.
kormgar
@Nick:
Democracy has more to do with individuals responding to what they perceive as their self-interest. But yeah, pure Democracy doesn’t work. I thought that was established ages ago.
That’s one of the reasons that the US has a constitution, and is why it limits and restricts the potentially fickle whims of the majority.
In any case, humans aren’t rational, at least by the classical definitions of reason. We are pretty smart and have some truly impressive brains, but we also have some amazing cognitive biases and blindspots that can severely distort our reason.
Here’s a fun example. Imagine a typical partisan who holds a strong belief. Let’s say they encounter irrefutable evidence that undermines that belief. Here’s where it gets fun. The act of rejecting that evidence out of hand will typically result in the release of pleasurable endorphins.
So yeah, we’re not all that rational.
That doesn’t mean we can’t make good decisions, just that the classical conception of rationality isn’t a particularly useful model for electorates.
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
And I’m telling you people have not cared and will not care so long as they can’t find a fucking job or they’re living paycheck to paycheck. They didn’t care when it was actively happening under Bush, they didn’t really care all that much when Obama announced he was closing Gitmo, and they still don’t care all that much now that things have come to a complete standstill on the issue. And moreover, there is no salient force that exists currently to change public opinion in any substantial way.
So long as you avoid making gross assumptions about the level of civic engagement of the people you are conversing with, we are fine.
kormgar
@Nick:
Nick, don’t simultaneously scream about what you think people will care about and accuse another person of living in a bubble.
People’s opinions are shaped by the world around them, and the right levers can radically reshape their priorities. I find it simply shocking that you do not know this.
Do yourself a favor and learn about this stuff. It’s far more fun than accusing others of living in bubbles.
Seriously.
kormgar
@Midnight Marauder:
“So long as you avoid making gross assumptions about the level of civic engagement of the people you are conversing with, we are fine”
OK, but in fairness, that was a response to this:
“I’m going to be blunt with you. If this is what it takes for these “activists” to engage in their basic civic duties, then they really aren’t activists at all.”
Let’s just leave it in the past, OK.
You insulted me, I insulted you. Let’s move on.
FlipYrWhig
@Chuck Butcher:
I can easily imagine Senators calling up the DOJ and bitching about how if they go through with X they will raise holy hell on this issue, “…and you can tell the president I’m not going along with the next thing like this he wants me to put my ass on the line over, either.” Then, if you’re Holder, you have to figure out how to react to that. I’m sure it’s not supposed to be politicized. I’m also sure that it totally is.
jimBOB
@Dr. Morpheus:
First, I’ll direct you back to my initial post, which noted that this election (like most elections) will be won or lost on economic fundamentals, not on details of policy that swing voters neither know nor care about.
If you’re looking for a stand on principle that helped Democrats electorally, I’ll give you the fight against Social Security privatization, which was a part of the 2006 wave election. On the other side of the slate, a good example of being hurt by NOT standing on principle would be the Iraq War vote, which arguably cost Kerry the presidency and certainly cost Hillary the nomination.
More generally, the way for a party to prosper longer term is to implement good policy. The GOP got clobbered in 2006 and 2008 because they had made a mess of things. The Dems have been doing some good things policy-wise, but there hasn’t been enough time to the results to show. Also, the stimulus was too small. (It may not have been politically possible for it to be larger, but the fact remains that by having it be too small we came inevitably to the current looming electoral catastrophe.)
Elie
@kormgar:
So just to sum up your point of view in a nutshell, from reading your multiple comments, saying more or less the same thing: You are willing to recommend that Democrats/progressives stay home rather than vote for the Democrats. This is punishment for Obama’s lack of adequate support for coming down on torture carried out in the Bush administration. On balance, that we end up tortured by having Republicans back in control of Congress somehow doesnt feel kinda counterproductive? Like, putting them back in control would somehow result in a good outcome for all of us, this country, the world?
Wow. If that is what you are actually trying to say after all the gnashing of teeth about Obama being the advocate for torture and the truly absolutely despicable murder of the innocents, gets somehow mitigated in your argument by making sure that Obama (not us?) pays for it by having a Republican congress?
kormgar
@Elie:
Paula
@jimBOB:
This is a dumb thread, and I’m dumb for participating, but this is the kind of de-contextualized and specious logic of … blog progressives.
1) 2004 is different from 2008, given that the public hadn’t yet had years of both Iraq and Afghanistan going bad in the nightly news
2) Primaries are different from GE, so I have hard time trying to understand Kerry GE flop, which also included Rove’s manhandling of so-called Values Voters and the still-common idea that it was Bush’s duty to get us out of the war he led us into, solely as a reflection of his failure to come up with a coherent position on Iraq. As for Clinton’s primary failure … oh my gawd there were so many more fucking problems with her candidacy than her position on the war. Furthermore, I feel like if the Iraq war vote was such a scandalous thing, you think it would have hurt John Edwards more (especially among the FDL/Dkos set). But it didn’t, because the Iraq war was one of many sets of data by which these candidates were judged.
3) It’s relatively common for people to refer to Katrina Aug 2005 as the watershed moment for dissatisfaction with Bush and his Republican cabal. You can disagree with how much impact the event itself had, but it’s a valid dividing line between the state of the Republican party in regards to the “public welfare”. There’s also the collapse of Lehmann Bros in Sept 2008 and the financial meltdown immediately there after, so it’s hard to attribute Obama’s “win” against the pro-war McCain solely on his desire to get us out of Iraq.
So, between 2004 and 2008 is a rather wide gulf of history and ideological shifts, subtle and not. So … your comment that Kerry and Clinton lost because of their pro-Iraq war vote is … definitely arguable.
I’ll give you social security, though. So … 1 example in the time of recent Democratic majorities. Bravo.
John Bird
There’s only so many times I can explain myself anywhere about this:
1) If you don’t understand the enthusiasm gap, talk to younger Democrats. Bring up health insurance and gay marriage. Ask what they were concerned about in the 2008 campaign. You soon will understand.
2) I agree that it would be silly to say you’re not a progressive. The argument worth having is over other issues, such as whether progressives repeatedly voting for candidates who oppose gay marriage or pot legalization is the right tactic to achieve progressive goals.
3) Of course the Republicans would be terrible and worse than the Democrats. See 1) if you want to understand why this isn’t very convincing to many people.
4) I agree with what I assume is your larger point here, which is that it’s really silly to assume national trends based on single Senate races. But I’d assume that many people who would be leery of voting for, say, Elaine Marshall (I live in NC) would be happy to vote for Russ Feingold if he was their senator.
5) Me, personally? I’ll vote for the Democrats because I am frightened of the Republicans. I vote straight ticket Democrat every year and have no love for the Democratic Party apparatus. North Carolina will do that to you. But it’s not a strong argument to offer; it’s nebulous and it doesn’t motivate enthusiasm.
Chuck Butcher
@FlipYrWhig:
A senator call up and says what? In a criminal investigation? That would create serious difficulties if such a thing could be proven.
Politicized? Well, no shit – a decision to not pursue illegal acts by employees of the federal govt and ordered by members of the fed govt could probably be characterized as political. Ya think?
No I don’t think it is a political winner as such, I’m real unimpressed with Americans’ interest in civil liberties and that includes this commentariate, see 2nd A. I don’t give a shit what side of L/R you stand, civil liberties are what they are and you’re what you are in that regard.
I do admit a bit of surprise at the number of torture appologists coming to bat around here – but they are what they are. No, the caveate of “but, but” means nothing.
General Stuck
@John Bird:
It may or may not motivate enthusiasm, but it is not nebulous. this is zero sum. It will either be the one thing or the other. No quasi, nebulae, nor cosmic dust. You either have a republican, or a democrat to choose to represent you.
Of course, it would have been nice if obama and dems had passed HCR, or some financial market regs, but you go to the polls with the successes you have, not the ones you have but don’t have enough sense to know it.
jimBOB
@Paula:
Any election will involve a large confluence of events and factors, and so asserting that any one of them would singlehandedly swung the outcome is usually debatable. What I think isn’t debatable is that the war vote (at the time seen by consultants and politicians across the spectrum as “safe”) ended up hurting both Kerry and Clinton. IMHO Clinton, who started the primary season as an overwhelming favorite, might well have beat back obscure young Senator Obama if the stench of that vote hadn’t been hanging round her. YMMV.
Paula
@jimBOB:
Yeah, I would say my mileage for that reasoning varies from yours. Like, crossing several state borders, even.
jimBOB
@Paula:
I don’t think I ever did that. Nothing in my comment even mentioned the 2008 GE.
FlipYrWhig
@Chuck Butcher:
Yes, everyone loves torture. It’s not that some of us think that _other people_ don’t much care about torture as one reason why it’s not likely to be a factor in current politics. It’s that we love it so much, unlike you, the one person left brave and principled enough to take a stand against torture and mutilation.
Paula
@jimBOB:
So why are you comparing a GE to a primary, in 2 different election cycles, with 2 different candidates? If you’re going to extrapolate like that about 2 democrats, then allow me to extrapolate exactly what you’re implying about their respective opposition candidates in the same cycle because I’m assuming you think the “right” Democratic position on Iraq should be properly balanced against the Republican one and that “enthusiasm” about the Iraq War vote is an obvious catalyst for the Democratic voting bloc.
In which, case, if you’re NOT thinking about what the opposition was like in each case, then that’s your gap in logic.
kormgar
@FlipYrWhig:
Yeah, that’s going to demonstrate that you’re not a torture apologist. Mock the folks who maintain that it is a major issue that the Democrats should have confronted, one that might even have fired up the base.
Real smooth.
Chuck Butcher
@FlipYrWhig:
Pah, no – you just make excuses and that makes you … what? An apologist.
jimBOB
@Paula:
I was asked by Dr. Morpheus to give examples of Democrats benefiting electorally by taking a stand on principle. For some reason you think the distinction between GE and primaries is somehow germane to this, even though there was nothing about it in the original question. My simple point was that both Kerry and Clinton would have been in a stronger electoral position later on as a result of voting differently on that particular vote, which I think is true. Whether they would have won is a different question, which I acknowledge is debatable.
I have no idea what you are getting at with balancing Democratic vs. Republican Iraq positions.
Update: I see you edited. My point WRT Hillary in 2008 is that 2008 was a nearly can’t-lose year for the Democratic presidential nominee. If Hillary had got the nomination she would almost certainly be president today and not Secretary of State. So losing the nomination on account if the war vote was more important than what that vote would have meant to Republicans in the GE.
LiberalTarian
@FlipYrWhig: Hm, read it again, don’t get that. Feingold is one of my favorites, I’d vote for him for life, but it is quite possible that Feingold is getting blazed for leading the good progressive fight without support from the rest of Congress and the WH. If you never win anything but elections, well, eventually you’ll lose the elections, too.
If Obama *had* taken better care of Feingold, and the left’s fee fee’s as they are so often called, would Feingold be struggling so much right now? I have no idea. But still, if Feingold’s base is disillusioned, I don’t know how it became the fault of “manic progressives.” Sounds like Feingold has lost the independents–although why on earth any one would be stupid enough to vote for the GOP … well, they are stupid beyond my capacity to comprehend.
Paula
@jimBOB:
I ain’t saying anything that should be over your head, but if it is … well, I’m real sorry about that.
@jimBOB:
Oh my gawd. A “can’t lose year”. Really. Your universe sure as hell wasn’t mine.
kormgar
@LiberalTarian:
Citizen Alan
@FlipYrWhig:
In other words, the Republicans might say mean things about us, so it would be better not to do anything. Got it. You should totally put that on a bumper sticker. “We Democrats may be Gutless Cowards, but who else are you going to vote for? A Republican?”
And you honestly see no connection between the attitude of people like you and “the enthusiasm gap.” Incredible.
General Stuck
@Chuck Butcher:
like who? and how. You pump out something like this, then you need to back it up. You admit yourself the people in this country don’t care. but but.
Citizen Alan
@KT:
Uh-oh. Somebody mentioned Howard Dean! Prepare for the poo-flinging monkeys to start screeching about how that one time he yelled too loudly into a microphone and as a result Bush got reelected or some damn shit.
General Stuck
@Citizen Alan: Go away firebagger, nobody here cares that Dean screamed once years ago. Some do care that he is buffing the tea baggers bullshit lately.
jimBOB
@Paula:
There’s a book I highly recommend to you about presidential electoral dynamics – It’s Thirteen Keys to the Presidency by Allan Lichtman. The nickel version is that U.S. presidential popular vote results are generally predictable up to a year in advance of election day, by looking at a set of fundamental factors (none of which involve polling or electoral strategy). Using his “Keys” system, Lichtman has correctly predicted popular vote results in all elections since he formulated the system in the mid ’80’s. (His system also correctly retrospectively predicts all popular vote results in elections going back to the civil war.)
According to the Keys, 2008 was predicted to be a Democratic year. As indeed it was. Whoever won the Democratic primaries was almost certain to be elected.
kormgar
@General Stuck:
Well, there is the time that you wrote this little comment that you seem to have forgotten about:
General Stuck
Yep. Your apparent belief that the abolition of the rule of law in the US is just a minor little detail is a pretty decent example of torture apologetics. I mean, sure, you didn’t flat out and state that torture was groovy, oh no.
But you did lay out the foundations of an argument for why torture investigations should not have been pursued. And that is precisely what it means to be a torture apologist.
General Stuck
@kormgar: please take your “torture apologist” bullshit from people trying to point what putting the republican party on trial for war crimes would mean, and how it would play out, and shove it up your pollyanish ass. That was an insult, in case you were wondering.
Nick
@kormgar:
You really think putting people in the previous administration on trial for war crimes that people still support is going to win popular approval. You really think the American people are going to stand up and go “Oh, yes, thank you, they were criminals that we voted for, we’re sorry”
And you really think the fact that this didn’t happen is WHY Feingold is losing?
Why wouldn’t i accuse you of living in a bubble?
Elie
@kormgar:
But you give a subtle justification, you try to finesse a rationale for lack of enthusiasm rather than acknowledge that said rationale itself undermines the exact Democratic lack of enthusiasm that you just slyly think you are dispassionately reporting. In other words, bullshit.
You are exactly justifying that they sit at home and you completely underweight the impact of that….. You would have Democratic/Progressives chew off the Obama leg and have us all bleed to death for some misguided pyrrhic victory that results in equaly vile torture for our country!
In the play Marat/Sade, the revolutionary, Marat, is the advocate and implementer of wide scale violence and bloodshed to “punish” the non revolutionaries and “cleanse” the movement. It is the Marqis de Sade, the so called “sadist” who understands the cost of such pain…
Martin Gifford
John, it’s not about that.
I suspect that people don’t want to reward the deeply corrupted Democratic Party by voting for anyone who is in that party. People instinctively know that if the Democrats win, the Democrats will continue doing what they are doing. Feingold is unfortunate collateral damage – part of a bigger picture. Don’t forget, Feingold has not shouted out the obvious fact that the Obama and the Democratic Party is deeply corrupted, etc. So, to that extent, he isn’t being objective and honest.
I’m in Australia, and we had close vote because the two parties are so compromised. I think there’s a seachange going on in politics generally. Big issues like climate change, war, and the GFC are making people seek real leadership and integrity. They want a positive direction, not the negative direction of “be scared of the opposition”, etc.
General Stuck
@kormgar: torture investigations are being pursued right now, a special prosecutor is investigating what happened, so you are wrong about that. And I never said i wasn’t for dealing with it, just not now, or else I’d have to listen to you purist progs whining about why Obama didn’t pass HCR. And the notion that Obama coming out of the shute with full on put Bush in jail was going to be good for “the base” doesn’t have a clue who the base is. Now go fuck yourself with the torture apologist shit. Or back to the GOS and wank this garbage.
Paula
@jimBOB:
If you say so.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig:
Awesome. The PollyAnna Pragmatists(tm) have decided that “other people” don’t care much about torture so it obviously is irrelevant.
Nick
@Martin Gifford:
You mean the same climate change two-thirds of Americans don’t believe is real?
I see why Democrats can’t win, their “base” are anarchists…and out to lunch.
Elie
@General Stuck:
right on – buffing it pretty handily too, if I may say so…
FlipYrWhig
@Citizen Alan: How big of a motherfucking idiot do you and Chuck Butcher have to insist on being? I’m not saying WHAT I WOULD DO if I were a politician. I’m saying WHY THE DUMBSHIT DEMOCRATS do what they do.
Why are you so proud of how pure of heart you are that you refuse to acknowledge that professional Democrats DON’T SEE THE WORLD the way you do? They _really do_ cower at stupid shit, stuff you’d just brazen out because you’re cool like that. They _really do_ prefer giving tax cuts to rich people than putting themselves in a position where they can be called -ni&&er- terrorist-lovers. They _really do_ run for the hills when someone comes up with some kind of stupid attack on them for spending too much or being unAmerican.
But you’d rather just stroke it to how you aren’t willing to accept that. Well, congratu-fucking-lations. Now drop your dick, solve the issue of how to get the things you want Democrats to do past the Democrats that are actually in office now, and then get back to us.
Corner Stone
“But no the now.”
“No the now?”
“No. No the now”
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: Yes, it is completely and totally irrelevant TO POLITICS IN 2010, which is dominated by crybabies and imbeciles.
kormgar
@Nick:
I honestly cannot tell if you are serious or just trolling.
Once again, we are talking about an enthusiasm gap between the Republican base and the Democratic base. A very significant chunk of the demoralized progressive base is still shocked that this nation cannot even be bothered to investigate the torture and murder of innocent people.
Hell, the Obama administration apparently couldn’t even be bothered to put a stop to it, if the information about black sites is to believed.
Now, perhaps you belong to a group of people who believe that the rule of law is a mere triviality that is irrelevant to the Democratic party and cannot possibly factor in the enthusiasm of the base. Personally, I think that simply means that you are living in a bubble.
Now, in the specific case of Russ Feingold, we are talking about a man who championed investigation and accountability for this very issue. I understand that this may be a difficult concept for you to wrap your tiny little brain around, but when a Senator’s signature cause is roundly mocked by the rest of his party, he looks weak and ineffective to his constituents.
This is politics 101. Fuck, this is kindergarten 101.
Fine, we get it. Thinking is hard for you. We just don’t care.
If you wish to live your life as a torture apologist and make excuses for why its OK that the US is no longer a nation of laws, then go right ahead and do so. But don’t get offended when I tell you to go fuck yourself.
Chuck Butcher
@General Stuck:
Like;
Can’t because Congress…
Can’t because we’re busy…
Can’t because GOP…
Can’t because voters…
Can’t because people don’t care…
Give me a break.
BTW: 56% disapprove of torture.
“Can’t because” is excuse making, apologizing for it. The difference between “it keeps us safe” amounts to a hill of spit. This exists because it is tolerated by its advocates and the excuse makers. I’m neither Pres, a DOJ lawyer, nor in Congress so all I can do is object. I do fucking object.
I don’t know if it is a political loser or not – don’t care and doubt it would be a big object in elections.
General Stuck
@Corner Stone: You taking up stuttering now?
FlipYrWhig
@Chuck Butcher:
Yeah, and what was the approval rating for health care reform before it got mulched through the Fox-o-matic?
Citizen Alan
@FlipYrWhig:
Well personally, I don’t see much difference between someone who just luuurrves torture and someone who is personally opposed to it but who is opposed to seeing any criminal investigation into the matter for fear it may complicate one’s political agenda. I mean, I suppose there are differing levels of moral culpability, but I doubt it matters very much to the person actually getting tortured.
The cowardice shown by the Democratic Party on this subject may not leave as big a stain as it will on the GOP, but it will last every bit as long.
FlipYrWhig
@kormgar:
The “demoralized progressive base” is tiny. A very significant chunk of something tiny would still be insignificant, even if it were a very significant chunk, which it is not.
Plus, “demoralized progressives” aren’t the base.
Plus, you can’t re-moralize “demoralized progressives” in the first place because they’re _chronically_ demoralized about one thing or another, because that’s deep in their political DNA.
kormgar
@General Stuck:
Hey General Stuck.
I appreciate your attempt to insult me, I see that you worked hard and are trying your best, but I must regretfully inform you that your effort was not accepted at this time.
In order for your insult to be considered, you must first demonstrate the integrity, maturity, or intellect to be worthy of respect. Unfortunately, based on your performance to date, I simply cannot find the space for you in my ego.
I do hope you understand and wish you great success in your future insulting endeavors.
FlipYrWhig
@Citizen Alan: Yes, the Democratic party is cowardly on that subject. Torture is bad. You know it and I know it. How do you propose to fix that cowardice? Do you at least understand _why_ no one in the party is willing to make that a priority? I’ll refer you to my earlier example about taking “God” off the currency. I don’t want it to say “God” on American money. I would be very pleased to see it go. I have zero expectation that will ever happen, because there is nothing politically to be gained by any elected official ever taking up that cause.
Nick
@kormgar:
Ditto
No, not they’re not. The number of people who gives a damn about torture investigations IS PEANUTS
dan
You know what really improves people’s enthusiasm, is excuses and scolding.
“And for the life of me, I simply do not understand the enthusiasm gap, and you manic progressives” …
“Yes, I am being unfair to progressives, although seriously, wtf is a progressive?”
You trash progressives as a group that you yourself are referring to as a group that doesn’t include you and then in the next breath start whining about how the mean ol’ progressives are keeping you out of the club.
That is some seriously impressive stupidposting, right there.
dan
You know what really improves people’s enthusiasm, is excuses and scolding.
“And for the life of me, I simply do not understand the enthusiasm gap, and you manic progressives” …
“Yes, I am being unfair to progressives, although seriously, wtf is a progressive?”
You trash progressives as a group that you yourself are referring to as a group that doesn’t include you and then in the next breath start whining about how the mean ol’ progressives are keeping you out of the club.
That is some seriously impressive stupidposting, right there.
Martin Gifford
@Nick:
If 2/3 disbelieve in climate change, that’s due to bad education, bad media, and bad political leaders.
I think the Democratic Party base would be considered centrist in the sane democracies of the world.
El Cid
@FlipYrWhig: If it doesn’t say God on American currency, it won’t have any value, because without being backed by gold it has to be backed by angels.
FlipYrWhig
@Citizen Alan:
Are you saying that I am “opposed” to seeing torture investigated? Did I say that? I would enjoy that immensely. (The investigation, I mean, not the torture.) Do I also comprehend why torture is not going to get investigated? Yes, because I have a passing understanding of what American politics is like. Do you?
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig:
Man. I absolutely hate it that people like you and Stuck have somehow risen to dominate POLITICS IN 2010.
Face it man. There is no position or outcome you will not accept. As long as it furthers some amorphous political outcome you find sufficient you will rationalize the negatives away.
All in the name of political expediency.
“Holy shit! Babies are getting thrown off the overpass!!”
FYW: “Hmmm, how does this play with ‘other people’? Can we hide behind a big enough rock to escape having to do anything about it?”
Nick
@Chuck Butcher:
the lowest number since the question was first asked in 2004…while other polls say most Americans think it’s “sometimes justified”
General Stuck
@Chuck Butcher: First off, it is being investigated like I said. Second, I know you are smart enough to know that prosecutions in this country are based on and subject to all kinds of considerations. It is not black and white and public opinion matters, especially when it involves something so over arching as a battle between the two great parties of America. There are also all sorts of legal questions on procedure and evidence that go into a decision to prosecute anyone. Only in progressive fairly land does this not apply. And most of all, it is rare for any prosecutor to open a trial when he or she doesn’t think they can get a conviction.
And wanting to handle this later, and by other means rather than full on frontal assault is not apologizing for fucking torture, and neither is the timing. So get off your high horse.
kormgar
@Nick:
Do yourself a favor. Get off the Internet, go outside, experience the world. Meet some people, meet an exciting sexual partner, discover new vistas of unexplored possibility.
Then go to school, get yourself an education, learn about how the world works, maybe take some classes on political science, cognitive science, or sociology. Learn a bit about how the masses of people respond to information, news, and propaganda. Maybe discover a new passion.
But most of all, stop this now. You are embarrassing yourself. Seriously. At this point I just feel bad for you. Or at least I would feel bad for you if you weren’t apparently an apologist for torture. Because, well, I have nothing but contempt for those.
Nick
@Martin Gifford:
It also means this
isn’t true
This is not a sane democracy. When are liberals gonna get that through their heads? This a country that, probably, should be governed by a right wing military junta, and would if not for the Constitution.
Citizen Alan
@FlipYrWhig:
So in other words, we’re right back where we started. The Democrats in Congress (and the White House) are for the most part cowardly, venal, degenerate, devoid of any character and antithetical to the principles upon which this nation was supposedly based. But if those nasty progressives don’t support them wholeheartedly — not just by voting for them, but by cheering them on and keeping our dirty hippie mouths shut about their failings — then it will be our fault when the Republicans take over. And presumably, it will also be our fault when future Republicans act even worse than they did from 2000-2008, back before the Democrats conclusively showed that they would never hold the Republicans accountable for anything.
Enthusiasm gap, indeed.
Nick
@kormgar:
This is fucking hysterical coming from you.
Oh wah, because I don’t agree Russ Feingold is losing because liberals think he’s weak since he couldn’t get torture prosecuted, an issue almost none of them draw the line on, I’m now a torture apologist.
FlipYrWhig
@kormgar:
Like Jesus said about the poor, the “demoralized progressive base” will always be with us. There could have been a $2 trillion dollar stimulus, single-payer health care, nationalized investment banks, an end to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a sweeping climate/energy bill, investigations of torture, and whoever that judge was who was supposed to be so much better than Sotomayor and Kagan on the Supreme Court, and there would _still_ be complaints about something. Like the national health cards had a chip in them that made people worried about privacy or something, or the stimulus didn’t steer enough money into walkable urbanism, and also Donnie McClurkin sang at an Obama fundraiser so his commitment to gay rights is dubious. On and on and on. It’s always like that.
General Stuck
@Corner Stone: Oh fuck you corner stone, you don’t give a shit about anything buy opposing Obama, from day one. So stuff the righteous dem warrior bullshit, we know your MO, and the utter lack of substance in it.
Nick
@Citizen Alan:
and what principles were those? Freedom, justice and equality for white Anglo-Saxon men?
absolutely Tanto.
kormgar
@Nick:
You’re a torture apologist because you make arguments against the need to investigate torture.
Nick
@kormgar:
Then we’re a nation of torture apologists and Wisconsin is a state full of torture apologists and Russ Feingold is not losing because people like you think he’s weak that he couldn’t get the majority of the public to go along
Get fucking used to it Tonto.
General Stuck
@kormgar:
Lordy, we have us a precious flower here. Full of righteousness and piety of purpose. Can I pick those daisies growing out of yer ass?
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone:
What is this “accept”? Who am I to “accept” anything? I’m just a shmoe like you. I don’t act like my “accepting” something makes fuck-all of difference. Whether I “accept” the world or not, it still keeps working the same way. Changing it is tremendously hard, and it’s a deeply stupid thing to get wanktastically impatient over.
Citizen Alan
@Nick:
Wikipedia defines a “tanto” as “a fixed blade knife of Japanese origin.” Or were you trying to call me “Tonto” in which your ignorant as well as amoral.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: That’s a nice shift.
Argue your balls off about how fucking bad it is, then when called on it “Ole!” to the side and say you’re just a schmoe like all the rest of us. And ultimately blameless.
Of course we here are all schmoes. That ain’t the point and you know it.
ETA – and you know what “accept” means. Stop being a fucking douchebag. You’ve been screaming at everyone that doing anything about torture, prosecution et al is a lose lose scenario.
So don’t fucking weasel outta what you know “accept” means.
FlipYrWhig
@Citizen Alan:
Yeah, but you should see the other guys!
What makes you think that you’re a “progressive”? Because you demand things rather than accepting them, like Corner Stone? I can “demand” a lot of stuff. If I have no fucking way to realize those demands, I’m just being an insufferable narcissist.
Chuck Butcher
@FlipYrWhig:
Actually you demonstrate exactly what I find laughable and pathetic – exactly nothing like your scenario has occured, rather your approach has resulted in 30 years of increasingly right agendas to the point where (D)s look socialistic by passing essentially the 90s GOP alternative to ‘Hillarycare.’ In the face of your bullshit you expect the left to quietly kowtow to your agenda? Lick the right’s ass all you care to, it doesn’t change the fact that 30 years of your methodology has resulted in today.
I know what the political realities are and have been, and I also know what the results of the continued marginalization of the left has been. You may not be able to get the bills you want, but calling for silence from the people who’ve been pushing simply moves the argument right. That’s been the methodology for a long time and it’s worked ever so well.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: How fucking bad what is? I don’t know what you’re talking about. My gripe is that you leftier-than-thous pontificate about what you will and won’t abide, and how you’re so terribly disappointed that the world doesn’t live up to your very high standards. Your enthusiasm or lack of enthusiasm is much discussed on blogs. It is _not_ the same entity as the enthusiasm or lack of enthusiasm among liberals, or Democrats, or Obama voters. Stop acting like it is.
Chuck Butcher
@FlipYrWhig:
Actually you demonstrate exactly what I find laughable and pathetic – exactly nothing like your scenario has occured, rather your approach has resulted in 30 years of increasingly right agendas to the point where (D)s look soshalistic (FYWP) by passing essentially the 90s GOP alternative to ‘Hillarycare.’ In the face of your bullshit you expect the left to quietly kowtow to your agenda? Lick the right’s ass all you care to, it doesn’t change the fact that 30 years of your methodology has resulted in today.
I know what the political realities are and have been, and I also know what the results of the continued marginalization of the left has been. You may not be able to get the bills you want, but calling for silence from the people who’ve been pushing simply moves the argument right. That’s been the methodology for a long time and it’s worked ever so well.
Corner Stone
@General Stuck: Shorter Stuck: “I am 100% against torture!”
Except now, and except by our guys, and except by our guys going after those other guys, and except and except and except.
kormgar
@General Stuck:
Wow, was I too subtle for you? I mean, the remarkable degeneration in your cogency has been rather astonishing as this thread has continued (although, admittedly, you weren’t exactly starting from a particularly high point) but I would have thought that the message would have been obvious enough even for you.
Ah well.
Since you appear to be in a breakneck race with Nick to the gutter, I will bid you a good night as well. Although you have shown yourself to be a rather rude fool, I bear you no malice. Take good care of yourself.
General Stuck
@FlipYrWhig:
It is simply a vehicle to feel superior over others, and that is all it is. What we’ve been dealing here with for two years of needy folks trying to get personal fulfillment through politics with the purist version imagined.
General Stuck
@Corner Stone:
Shorter Corner Stone – I’m a lying sack of shit.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone:
I understand why Democrats won’t do it. Do you? So your position is that you don’t accept that Democrats won’t do it, meaning that they should, and fuck the consequences, because it’s the right thing to do? It’s pretty easy to say that when you’re some dumbfuck on the internet.
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
Point of clarification: Torture is currently being investigated by the DOJ, just not perhaps with the intial scope you would have preferred.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig:
Ha! You fucking punk bitch!
My “high standards” as you call them may somehow include NOT ACCEPTING THE USA TORTURING SOME HAPLESS MOTHERFUCKERS!
I am sick to god damned death that that position may be uncomfortable for you, and may somehow not be politic in your fragile, beautiful fucking mind.
You god damned “pragmatic” fucking clown bitch. You have been excusing this decision and this behavior all the while hiding behind fucking coward politics as if it fucking mattered.
Fuck you.
General Stuck
@kormgar:
Gracious, you sure do talk pretty.
Rose Petals to you too/
General Stuck
@Midnight Marauder: The announced scope means nothing in practical effect, other than maybe keep the wolves away from the front door. SP’s go where the evidence takes them, and I doubt the lower rung can be investigated without finding out what the upper rung was up to as well. Nobody knows where it will lead though. And I suspect we won’t till will we do.
FlipYrWhig
@Chuck Butcher: I know the distinction is lost on you because you like to play Internet Militant, but if Democrats are going to have a majority that includes conservatives, it seems kinda obvious that conservatives are going to fuck up all your best-laid plans, and throwing yourself down on the floor of the grocery store to say I Don’t Wanna! isn’t really going to make them stop fucking with you.
kormgar
@Midnight Marauder:
Sort of.
Until this thread, I hadn’t actually encountered anyone who argued that the feeble and severely limited investigation being carried out by the Justice department qualified.
But you are the third to have mentioned it.
Just so we are clear, the Justice department investigation is concerned with the possibility that some individuals may have exceeded the limits of the methods or techniques approved by the administration. This would be fine if the problem were rogue interrogators. Unfortunately, the core problem is with the orders themselves and the approved techniques. Lest we forget, we sentenced both Japanese and Nazi “interrogators” to death for milder versions of some of the approved techniques.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone:
So you don’t accept it! Whoohoo! So that means… what? What are doing about it? What are you saying about it? Who are you telling about it? Are you marching? Are you striking? Are you bombarding your Congressman with faxes and emails and camping out near his house until he faces your very strong and deeply held conviction that this! will! NOT! STAND! No. You’re gonna sit there whacking off to the idea that you have an intangible political opinion that’s identical to millions of other people’s intangible political opinions, only yours is equivalent to action because shut up that’s why.
eemom
I know that don’t feed the trolls meme never gets any traction, but seriously, it is time that the decent and sane people on this blog stop wasting their time responding to Corner Stoned. Notwithstanding his endless baiting and goading with comments like this
he has totally and consistently failed to ever articulate a single principle — not one — that he sincerely espouses, believes in, and holds to be sufficiently important that it should not be compromised “in the name of political expediency.” (except, of course, that he’s against shooting people on flotillas. We’ll give him that.)
Or to explain what, or how, anything that he holds dear is “negated” by any of the things people who — unlike him — ARE capable of arguing in good faith, have repeatedly spent their precious time trying to explain here.
This, good people, is the very Platonic essence of the concept, “troll.”
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: You know, I saw somewhere earlier where you said you were pushing 40.
So, you were alive during Nixon, albeit just a kid.
Can you imagine the you of today if you were an adult back then?
Making excuse after excuse at why we shouldn’t go after Nixon, why he shouldn’t be pressured, why “other people” didn’t think it was politically expedient to punish him.
Because I can perfectly see you making those excuses.
General Stuck
@kormgar: Are you really this dense. Do you think that Holder and Obama were going to say anything other than this to let it go on under the radar. Man, I don’t know how you can do politics taking everything at face value. You don’t know what they are investigating, nor what they will do when it’s completed./ But you are here wanking supremely how all us Obots are torture apologists, because no investigations are happening when they clearly are, and in secret, meaning you don’t know what the fuck they are investigating. So everything you have spouted here comes from a basic lie, that there are no investigations happening. Go away purity troll.
KT
@General Stuck:
Explain that? Tell me, how can picking the side that gets dumped on by absolutely everyone make you feel superior?
Honestly, the Tea Party gets more respect. At least the Republicans pretend to respect them. Hell, even Obama pretends to respect them. They’ve got some genuine grievances, even though he feels they’re a bit misplaced, but still, they’re exercising their rights and that’s something we can all be proud of.
What do the Obama people have to say about progressives? They’re f–king retards. They’re on drugs.
I fail to see how identifying with a group that’s roundly ridiculed by both sides of the spectrum is an ego boost.
Paula
@KT:
Well, as the Teabaggers and the Christian Conservatives attest to, a persecution complex and unexamined moral self-righteousness are not mutually exclusive. More likely they feed on each other.
Midnight Marauder
@kormgar:
It’s not a “sort of.” They are investigating the issue with their announced scope and most likely letting the evidence take them where it will, similarly, I would argue, as the DOJ is doing with BP in Louisiana right now. The main point is that neither of us know where this investigation will take us, so why assume the worst from the onset instead of letting things play out? Personally, I’ve always been of the belief that Obama would never seriously move on the unprecedented action of prosecuting war crimes until his second term, if he did so at all.
There’s a reason I included the caveat of the investigation not being to the scope which you prefer. But the example is cited to refute your continued insistence that torture is not currently being investigated in any way. That’s a blatant falsehood.
kormgar
@General Stuck:
Well, I did bid you a good night, but this last reply of yours represents too much concentrated stupidity to ignore. Sure, inability to write coherent sentences, your sixth grade reading level, and your generalized asshattery aside, I din’t actually think you were stupid.
I was wrong.
I am sorry that you were unaware of the strictly delineated scope of the investigation. But really, don’t blame others for your own ignorance. That’s entirely on you.
Chuck Butcher
@FlipYrWhig:
You complete and utter dumbass, I continue to try to help the electoral chances of the same people I criticize, but I do criticize them. I continue to work for Obama and I continue to criticize bullshit. I advocate, I don’t throw myself on the floor. I don’t stop pushing what I see as right to please you and Stuck and the weak kneed in authority. You call that a tantrum – I give a flying rat’s ass about your opinion of me considering your stance.
The situation exists because people like you make fucking excuses and call it explanation. No, it is wrong and it is wrong regardless of the explanations and needs to be called wrong regularly and by as many as possible or it will simply be accepted. That is your explanation, circular logic, it’s ok to ignore because it is being ignored because it’s ok to ignore, …
You cannot move an argument in your direction by saying, oh well. Arguments move in your direction because you keep the argument front and center not by saying, oh pragmatism. You take what you get and keep pushing and pushing, not oh well. I’ll take this but it’s not good enough isn’t a fucking tantrum.
I’ve been on the left long enough to know I’m not going to get what I want any time soon, likely in my lifetime. so fucking what?
CaseyL
This is what happens when Civics and Social Studies are no longer taught: people never learn at a young and impressionable age that voting isn’t an exercise in self-validation but a civic duty. (In a way, a lot like paying taxes.)
Hold your nose, if you have to, and vote. And if you have a choice between Good and Bad, then lucky lucky you. Most often, the choice is between Bad and Worse.
Maybe Obama could have done a better job pushing back against the GOP. But the penalty for him not doing so should damned well not be to give the GOP the keys to the car again.
Maybe the Democrat on your ballot is a Blue Dog whom you loathe for not supporting the President’s, or your, agenda. But if the Dems lose control of the House, or the Senate, the President’s agenda won’t even come up for a vote – and your agenda will go down the sh*tter, too. You stay home, or vote for a third party, and your hated Blue Dog is replaced with a real Republican, and what happens? The House leadership goes GOP, the committee chairs are all GOP, and Democratic bills never even come to the floor, aren’t even put on committee agendas. That happened, you know. From 2002 through 2006, that is exactly what happened.
I hope the commenters here are right, that the disgruntled, the firebaggers, and the purists, will still vote for Democrats, even if they hate doing so, because they know the alternative is just not acceptable. I find it absolutely insane to think they might do otherwise, with the memory of the 2000 election, and what its outcome did to this country, still fresh in living memory.
General Stuck
@KT: It is progressives on the internet that went over the edge with disappointment they didn’t get what they demanded, even though what was attained was clearly substantial progress. If you don’t understand that basic fact of life in a democracy, of compromise, while insisting on declaring yourselves “the base’ when clearly only a tiny sliver of it, then retard works for me.
In the beginning, I tried to explain and even comfort the disappointed. Not any more.
kormgar
@Midnight Marauder:
OK, let me be certain that I understand. You are claiming that an investigation into whether or not any interrogators exceeded the official interrogation guidelines, one which is expressly barred in the strongest possible terms from investigating the legality of the guidelines themselves, is going to break its bonds and transform into something entirely different.
Is that fair assessment?
Do you understand why an organization such as, say, the ACLU considers that position to be highly unrealistic?
Don’t get me wrong. I hope that you are write. I also hope that I’ll win the lottery without buying a ticket.
NobodySpecial
@CaseyL: No, they’re all going to go out and write in Mitch McConnell on their ballots, no matter where they are, simply to spite you and destroy your fee-fees.
And then after that, they’ll also break into your house and rape your dog. And piss on your hall carpet. Just because.
NobodySpecial
@General Stuck: Nah, you’ve been a self admitted troll from the beginning. No need to be dishonest about it now.
Chuck Butcher
This thread was generated by a bullshit statement that a tiny sliver of the electorate was going to fuck up the Democrats, that was bullshit followed by a bunch more and I think it’s reached the point of pointless to continue – see ya
General Stuck
@kormgar: God, you are thick. Investigations like this almost always start at the bottom and go up the chain of command to those who ordered this or that. Holder nor his SP is limited at all from the initial preliminary investigation announced to focus on a few cases of supposed excess. You are aware that Obama and Holder have both called waterboarding torture? That doesn’t mean they intend to frog walk Dick Cheney or Bush into jail, but it means they will learn what happened, and can make judgments from knowing what happened, for what they will do next.
General Stuck
@NobodySpecial: pathetic
kormgar
@General Stuck:
Tell you what. I’ll stop laughing at your stupidity when you provide examples of all of those “investigations like this (that) almost always start at the bottom and go up the chain of command to those who ordered this or that.”
Bonus points if you can identify any investigations that were expressly forbidden from investigating the legality of the orders that the interrogators received.
Oh, and your counter example has to beat the Abu Graib investigation. Because we all know how that turned out.
Here’s the thing that keeps falling out of that walnut brain of yours. An investigation into whether or not a private exceeded his orders, one that is not allowed to examine the legality of the orders themselves, is not going to start at the bottom and work its way up. It’s not allowed to.
This is not an investigation into whether or not war crimes were committed. This is an investigation into whether or not any grunts exceeded the limits of their orders. There is a very big difference.
I do so enjoy our talks. It’s strangely relaxing, like listening to white noise.
General Stuck
@kormgar:
Doesn’t work like that dude. You claim here that the Holder SP is “expressly forbidden” from investigating anything but the announced few cases. Show us where you get this statement. And if you can’t which you can’t explain to us how they are going to investigate the lower down guys who did the torturing beyond the Bybee memo and others, without looking at any claims they were ordered or okayed to do it from up the chain of command.
You are really too stupid to debate, who says it’s not allowed to, by what law or rule. Think of Ken Starr, think of Iran Contra, and any other initial investigation into say, organized crime where people get immunity to tell what they know about the hire ups/ This isn’t a private disobeying orders, we don’t even know who ordered who or what. but you do legal wiz, idiot.
Do you believe no one gets immunity for ratting out their superiors?
General Stuck
@kormgar:
listen dude, per Midnight Maurader and others, you got caught in a black lie that no investigations were occurring, so you try to parse your way out of it. I understand this, but it will not work here. Take your lumps and think next time before you wank.
kormgar
@General Stuck:
Aww. You couldn’t back your assertion so you got all pouty.
That’s OK, maybe the big kids will let you play with them next year.
El Cid
@Chuck Butcher: If the people on this very thread don’t change their attitudes and stop bitching about Obama and the Dems, it will be your fault if they don’t win.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah. I didn’t do anything about Afghanistan, I didn’t do anything about Iraq, I haven’t committed funds and time and effort to people who pledged to stop that, and the ongoing torture.
You’re right. I just wank myself silly because it makes me happy.
Unlike you, you pathetic clown . Who admits here that you just want politicians to STFU and get along to go along to keep political power.
You believe as long as the end is a viable political mean then it should be celebrated.
The bottom line is that even if I did nothing. Absolutely nothing in real life about these things. I would still be at least rhetorically one up on you and your kind because I spoke out against it in some forum, somewhere.
Sad little cases like you can’t even claim that much.
Because all you’ve ever said here is that you’re just fine with all that. As long as it doesn’t cost you at the polls.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@FlipYrWhig:
> So your position is that you don’t accept that
> Democrats won’t do it, meaning that they should,
> and fuck the consequences, because it’s the right
> thing to do?
If he’s not saying it, I certainly am. It is not possible for the actual long-term consequences to be worse for the country and the world than not trying to impose “the right thing to do” (in this case, the laws against torture and other war crimes) immediately.
Anything else is simply not pragmatic or practical, and the sole result will be an illusory short-term “gain” worthy only of depraved chickenshits, aka Republicants and balloonbaggers.
General Stuck
@kormgar: You mean like asserting there was no investigations when there was. That kind of backing up. And I gave you examples like Iran Contra
Then there is this, from the mouth of the holy
It’s how investigations are conducted with targetted use of immunity to find out what really happened and from what source beginning with small fish. So even Mr. Glenn agrees that “expressly forbidden” as you claim is bullshit, as was your original assertion of no investigations.
Of course, Greenwald goes on to predict the very worst scenario that it will be another Lyndie England Abu Graib, few bad apples. I find it hard to believe that Eric Holder would take this route, but the fact remains, and the point of my comment here is to clear up your bullshit that investigating higher ups cannot happen. And wouldn’t it be some kind of wonderful, if we could find out that those higher ups actually okayed exceeding their own illegal guidelines. But I suspect for now, Holder just wants to know what happened before making any decisions about what to do next, if anything.
General Stuck
Link to Salon GG article
eemom
wow. I have to admit this one will go down in some kind of Internet History. Le Defense Du Blog Troll, circa 2010.
Someday, around 2525 or so, distant generations of schoolchildren will puzzle over the 26th century equivalent of a multiple choice test, where one of the options for “What was the lamest thing ever said in a political argument since the dawn of time?” will be “Oh YEAH? Well I’m a better person than you because I said better stuff in the 400s of a comment section on a BLOG!”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some ROFLMAO to do.
General Stuck
@eemom:
If man is still alive.
General Stuck
I think corner has his self a rhetorical erection.
Corner Stone
There is absolutely nothing better. Nothing better in blog life than to see the grunting Cape Buffalo of stupidity of eemom plus the epically stupid Stuck teaming up to represent the kind of vapor lock empty brain bucket that stands in for PollyAnna Pragmatism(tm) at BJ.
All the rest here who defend authoritarianism, the police state and TPTB. Get a good fucking whiff. These are your compatriots.
General Stuck
@Corner Stone: Yer a regular blogging man’s hero. you are there Task Farce Ranger.
tee hee,
Odie Hugh Manatee
@General Stuck:
No tag team of stupid is complete without Corner Stone on it.
Martin Gifford
@Citizen Alan:
This.
zuzu
Golly.
476 comments’ worth of dick-waving about the reason for the enthusiasm gap, and it’s all speculation.
Did any of these polls *ask* anyone who said they were unenthused why that would be?