Ken Silverstein says so long and thanks for all the fish:
The current GOP is truly a scary party, but if not for that it would be impossible to care about the midterm elections. When you’re reduced to rooting for soulless hacks like the current Senate majority leader—and he’s typical of today’s Democrats—you’ve lost something fundamental at the core of your humanity.
So as you can tell from all this, I just no longer have the energy to cover Washington. I’ve loved working for Harper’s, but, as I told Mediabistro, “Washington and Washington politics has worn me down. Every time I write a story I feel like I wrote it a year ago and five years ago and 10 years ago. Nothing ever changes here.” I frequently find myself numb to political news and, even worse, to the lifeless, conventional wisdom peddled by the Washington media. When you can read an entire column by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz and never once feel the urge to cut out your own heart with a dull knife, you know that you no longer have the sense of outrage that is essential to reporting from our nation’s capital.
Read the whole thing.
arguingwithsignposts
I stopped reading right. about. here:
.
Corner Stone
Who is this fucking firebagger?
Zifnab
@arguingwithsignposts: Perhaps you’d prefer “wasted opportunity”.
But if you aren’t feeling something of a let-down since his triumphant ascendancy to office back in January ’09, perhaps you’ve been reading about a difference presidency than me.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, you really only have to look as far as his stance on state secrets and overseas assassinations. I’m not seeing a huge difference between the Obama and the Bush DoJ, with the possible exception of less Regency graduates in the ranks.
Davis X. Machina
I don’t think someone who spends a decade both running with the rabbits and hunting with the hounds announcing he’s winded qualifies as interesting, or news, or interesting news.
Brachiator
@arguingwithsignposts:
I bowed out at this line:
F
@arguingwithsignposts
so then I guess you were able to read this part:
.
just stirring things up
JMY
How can anyone say his presidency has been a failure or disappointment and it’s only year two? Can we at least give the man a full term before we start with the “Obama’s a failure” bullshit. Bush took 8 years to fuck up the country & we can’t give this president a one term.
arguingwithsignposts
@Zifnab:
Perhaps “by any measure” isn’t clear enough for you. I grant he’s been disappointing in a number of respects. But “by any measure”? Really? That’s firebagger dogmatism there, and it’s bullshit, I don’t care if it’s someone from Harpers’ or Peter Daou or whoever doing their GBCW walk.
Good riddance to his unicorn pony ass, I say.
Jewish Steel
Dude, if you write for Harper’s chances are good you wrote it last month.
There is a lot to like about that mag but the relentless monotony of pissy scolding and tut-tuting makes me never consider renewing my subscription.
tkogrumpy
I personally find this very depressing. Here is a guy who is, unlike me, in a position to know what he is talking about, and his thinking parallels my own. I would much prefer to believe that I am wrong about my country.
meh
a big meh from me. While it is disappointing to not get all the yummy deserts you want at every meal, this presidency is by no means a failure and/or disappointment. That’s beltway fatigue talking. After a while of listening to the same disingenuous douchebags spewing the same nonsensical drivel day in and day out while being told that it’s relevant and fresh, you start to go a bit mad. He is speaking from the viewpoint of a guy that is checking out of the hotel and telling the staff the place sucks on the way out. They are all the same – honestly though, I’m a bit piqued that he was able to suck Cole in. Usually he just sort of shrugs and gives the finger to the whole Obama is terrible meme.
MattR
@Brachiator: Are you actually gonna argue that Obama does not govern as a “fairly conventional insider”?
Markk
yeah, but they should’ve got rid off that boring wuss Harry Reid like Rove got rid off Lott.
and hes right about the economic team. at least clinton had Robert Reich.
JenJen
Could’ve written it my damned self. Brilliant.
If Ken Silverstein had been watching “Morning Joe” today, replete with Scarborough-Noonan-Barnicle wisdom, I fear he may have pulled the trigger.
Punchy
Sounds Jooish. So I’m assuming that he owns the Beltway media, unless Dirty Sanchez was lying.
Davis X. Machina
@Markk:
Who felt compelled to bail in protest after Clinton’s welfare ‘reform’.
arguingwithsignposts
@Markk: Reich was labor secretary. Obama does occasionally listen to Volcker, whom you might have heard of. Oh, and Larry Summers – Clinton secy of treasury first.
Corner Stone
@Davis X. Machina:
I’m unclear on how to interpret this rejoinder.
Jim, Foolish LIteralist
I don’t know that I disagree with this statement, I think it’s the Inside that has changed, the Center has moved right, and David Broder (my hobbyhorse)– Howard Kurtz, David Gregory, Bob Schieffer, insert the Villager of your choice– has moved along with it. It’s like in the Bush years, we kept seeing glimmers of hope from Snowe, Lugar, Warner, Specter, Hagel, even some less usual suspects; we kept telling ourselves (at least I did, and I don’t think I was alone, I suspect even those Villagers I named thought the same) that finally, the partisan ice was going to break these people were going to call the crazy, naked Emperor-Princeling out for the destructive, cancerous force that he was. I think Obama thought that some of these people would stop feeding the crazy once loyalty to Bush-Cheney-Rove was no longer necessary to live. Warner and Hagel ran away, Specter switched parties (out of pointless ambition) Snowe crumbled (ditto), I suspect Lugar will follow Warner and Hagel soon. And David Broder will continue to call on Democrats to find some way to reason with an unreasonable group of psychos, and Gregory and Jake and all the little Russerts will follow along. And Claire McCaskill and Jim Webb and half a dozen other Senators and a couple dozen Congressional Blue Dogs will echo the Broderites. You don’t need to look any farther than Broder’s recent column on “The Man Who PIcked Palin Will Save Us!” column to see how bad the rot is.
arguingwithsignposts
Silverstein seems to be rewriting history here. Clinton governed as much through centrism as anything, and it wasn’t because of “weak leadership” or “timidity.” Does he not even get the entire DLC thing?
EFroh
I love Harper’s and I’ll miss Ken Silverstein. My only issue with the magazine is that it doesn’t have a Kindle edition.
Silverstein sounds almost clinically depressed in that blog post. I hope he’s getting help, besides getting a new job.
Michael
@MattR:
The guy is conservatively progressive, which is exactly my speed.
Lev
I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party is FDR. Every time a new Democratic President enters the Oval Office, liberals assume he’s going to be another FDR. And it never happens because FDR’s first term was a once-in-forever event–a brilliant politician who came to office at an extremely opportune time to change things and who matched the moment perfectly. Had Roosevelt been elected in 1928 or 1936 he would not have been nearly as successful.
What we liberals need to do is to come up with a better yardstick for judging Democratic Presidents, and I think I’ve got one: second-term Bill Clinton. First-term Clinton was amateurish and a bit bumbling, but second-term Clinton was good at winning fights with the Republicans on the budget, SCHIP, etc., including the impeachment fight, which was the first time the right wing lost a battle that big. The economy was doing great, etc. I’d say that’s a good benchmark for what a Democratic President should do, and I think it’s a decent median. I think JFK slips a little below due to a lack of domestic accomplishments, LBJ exceeds despite Vietnam, Carter doesn’t make it but Obama does, at least so far. Obviously all of them have their pros and cons, the situations are different and so forth, but at least it’s a realistic metric. Comparing every Dem president to FDR is like comparing every basketball player to Michael Jordan.
Or you could go the FDL route and spend your whole life angry at whoever’s in charge. I know which option appeals to me.
Captain Haddock
@Brachiator:
I find it hard to disagree with the lines that follow:
slag
Damn. I honestly thought the sense of outrage one gets from the likes of Howard Kurtz could never be lost. This news is…disconcerting.
arguingwithsignposts
@Captain Haddock: To be fair, how many straight party-line “no” votes did Clinton have to deal with. The stimulus got gutted at least partly to try to pick off some GOP votes (all that tax cut horseshit).
FSM, I wish people would just acknowledge the level of batshit-insanity that is infecting the brains of at least one side of the legislative chambers.
Butch
I looked at the article a little differently; I was a reporter on Capitol Hill for a while. It should have felt like I had attained a lifelong goal, but I hated it and hated Washington DC. Now I’m a hermit in the Rockies and much happier.
Davis X. Machina
@Lev: Winning a war does wonders. FDR wasn’t “FDR” till sometime in the mid-40’s. Before then he was just FDR.
Lev
@Captain Haddock: It’s not that hard to disagree with it. Summers (to his eternal discredit) championed bank deregulation, though pretty much everyone in Congress voted for it, so it’s not like you can pin it solely on him. And Geithner is a career civil servant. I would have preferred a more populist touch to economic policy myself myself, but it’s not like his economic team ever included Lloyd Blankfein, Bob Rubin, and all of those guys, which is what that sentence seems to indicate. Plus, whither Volcker and Jared Bernstein?
Standard FDL hyperbole.
MattR
@Butch: I looked at it as an indictment of the entire Village. I don’t even think the criticisms of Obama were directed at Obama. It was more a commentary on how things don’t/can’t change.
FlipYrWhig
@Lev: I’m with Lev. If Ken Silverstein is feeling like deja vu, it’s partly because people like Ken Silverstein are intent on making it feel like deja vu. The Nation pummeled Clinton for 8 consecutive years, and liberal discontent with Clinton clung to Gore like a miasma, giving rise to the outbreak of “they’re just the same”-ism we’re still paying for. Either Obama is just like Clinton…
Or a lot of liberals tend to feel dissatisfied whenever there’s a Democrat in the White House. I was too young to see the same thing happen to Carter, but I gather it did; and my parents were some of the people who _made_ it happen to Johnson; and it’s probably only because Kennedy got shot that it didn’t also happen to him.
JMY
@Lev: You beat me to it. Don’t forget Goolsbee, as well. Geithner and Summers get bad reps also because of that relationship with Rubin during the Clinton years. I’m still reminded of when Geithner was at a Congressional hearing and whoever it was kept referring to him as a Wall Street banker or something like that, and he repeatedly said that he never worked on Wall Street.
fasteddie9318
@Lev:
Second-Term Clinton also signed into law the carnival of pleasures that was Gramm-Leach-Bliley, so…bit of a mixed bag there. Can’t blame him for NAFTA, though, that was First-Term Clinton.
Blue Neponset
I feel Silverstein’s pain. It is hard to stay excited about the Democrats when they are just the lesser of two evils.
FlipYrWhig
@EFroh:
Isn’t Ken Silverstein BFF with Alexander Cockburn? If so, I think he can put up with a lot of bullshit and aggravation.
Captain Haddock
@arguingwithsignposts:
Anyone could have told them they weren’t getting those GOP votes, so why compromise in advance? The GOP would never, ever squander a majority like that.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@F:
If he takes the attitude that Clinton sucked (which I don’t agree with, but can see where he’s coming from), shouldn’t he at least admit that Obama has done better, at least on legislation?
Brachiator
@MattR:
Not quite what Ken Silverstein wrote. He dismissed Obama even before he was elected. And to describe Obama as an insider compared to say, Hillary Clinton, whom everyone presumed had the nomination locked up before the primaries began, is ridiculous on its face (and this is not a diss of Clinton).
He reinforces my own disappointment with the entire Beltway punditocracy, which I would dearly like to see overthrown. In some ways they are almost (note I said almost) as bad as the tea party people. None of them seem to have much of a clue about who Obama is. They only know that he doesn’t think like they do, he doesn’t give them exactly what they want, and so he must be deficient.
The other problem I have with Silverstein is his standard issue progressive fetish for “reform and transformation” without the slightest notion of how to get from dreams and principles to effective policy and legislation.
Arclite
@arguingwithsignposts:
See, I disagree with you on this, signposts. Jon Stewart encapsulated my feelings in his BillO interview:
Also, too: it wouldn’t matter to my family how wonderful a husband and father I was or how much salary I brought home if I openly screwed hookers two Fridays a month. The hookers would be all my wife could think about. And if you were to say to her, yeah but your husband is so nice and generous and he makes so much money and he watched the kids all day Sunday so you could go surfing, what would she say?
ChrisWWW
Obama’s campaign message was about bold transformation. Obama was supposed to come in and fundamentally change how Washington D.C. worked so that it looked out for us, the little guys.
Who here feels like Obama has lived up to his own campaign rhetoric?
kth
I find Harper’s politically naive of late, somewhat like The Nation has always been, though both are usually right on the merits. Silverstein’s despair is pretty hard to argue against, though, it seems like the country just gets stupider every day.
Where I would differ with Silverstein is in deferring somewhat to the pros. They know what it takes to get elected and stay elected a bit better than, say, the veterans of the Ned Lamont campaign. And if those pros advise that the crazy is too legion to be fought or met head-on, and that the wisest thing is to not rile them up intentionally, I find no basis for arguing with those pros.
This country did not become less crazy, let alone uncrazy, by virtue of Obama’s election. That just meant that the crazy was demoralized enough to lose that battle. But this is at bottom a crazy and dangerous country, and we have to fight the crazies tactically until their relative numbers thankfully begin to wane.
FlipYrWhig
@Arclite: Jon Stewart, as wonderful as he is, still gets these herpes-style flareups of his McCain ’00 fervor about common sense and ending the gridlock and cutting through the bullshit and what have you. He can see people not getting things done, knows precisely why it is they don’t get them done, and still blame both sides because he’s just kind of mad at the whole situation.
stormhit
That woe-is-me whine fest was entirely a waste of time.
Arclite
@F:
If you mean never-ending congressional investigations into presidential “misconduct” and impeachment hearings, yeah, I think it’s a foregone conclusion.
MattR
@Brachiator:
I agree that I slightly changed what Silverstein wrote. But my point in doing so was that if Obama is governing as a “fairly conventional insider” then it is hard to complain that Silverstein thought beforehand that that is how Obama would behave. I also disagree that he is calling Obama an insider in comparison to anyone else. I think Silverstein was saying that Obama was an insider just like everyone else.
HyperIon
I’d prefer “Requiem for a Lightweight” as the post title.
FlipYrWhig
@ChrisWWW: If you announce that your top priority is to get ants out of your apartment, and then your roommate keeps dropping cookie crumbs everywhere and the ants keep coming back, is it your fault for over-promising, or your roommate’s fault for being such a douchebag slob?
Hunter Gathers
Shorter Silverstein : The media sucks, I’m taking my ball and going home. And Obama sucks.
Didn’t know that Evan Bayh wrote for Harper’s under the pseudonym Ken Silverstein.
Quitter.
FlipYrWhig
@kth:
We saw ALL THE SAME BULLSHIT in the McCain rallies that later became the Tea Party. The peckerwoods were leading in the polls right up until McCain said the fundamentals of the economy were strong. That wasn’t going to go away.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
I really do think that half of our problems can be traced directly back to the punditocracy. They persist in pretending that the Republicans are honest brokers when the past 2 years have made it crystal clear that they absolutely are not. They get all excited every time a Republican says something halfway sensible in public and when said Republican promptly turns around and votes against the very same thing that s/he just endorsed, they assume the problem must have been something the Democrats did. It certainly couldn’t have been that the Republicans are lying liars who lie, oh no.
Jim
Paula
@stormhit:
Actually, it explains some of the douchebaggier shit I’ve seen from him this past summer, like his haterade on Landon Donovan/the US Men’s national soccer team going into overdrive to the point where he wrote about the Italian team as some kind of paragon of maturity.
Hope he gets help … pulling his head out of his ass.
You Don't Say
Hate to break it to him but all reporters feel this way eventually. I used to cover the technology industry and within two years I felt like I was writing the same story over and over. I still read stuff today, 10 years after I got out of the industry, and the stories all sound the same to me.
Emma
He ran as a visionary and has led as a functionary.
What the heck does this even mean? Of course he ran as a visionary — most politicians do. Then they get into office and reality strikes and she is a female of the canine persuasion. Visionin’ is easy; governin’ is hard.
I am one of those who is not exactly happy about some of Obama’s decisions on foreign policy and civil rights, but I can also see his accomplishments. Maybe I tend to cut him an extra break because I happen to like people who can stick to their guns while everyone around them is losing their minds, I don’t know. But I sure as heck am not ready to call it a loss after two bleeping years. That’s not rewriting history, that’s trying to influence her.
Mnemosyne
@MattR:
Except that, like Bill Clinton when he first arrived, Obama is not a Washington insider. He was only in the Senate for two years. He’s the kid who started school halfway through the semester who keeps getting tripped in the hallways and snickered at behind his back because he’s not One of Us.
As I’ve said before, I think the root of Obama’s problems in the Senate is that a lot of those senators had a delusion that they would be president someday, and then this weird-looking kid from Chicago leapfrogged over them and took their rightful place in line. They’re pissed off that Obama didn’t pay his dues before being elected president, and they’ve consistently undermined him from Day One.
It’s all so friggin’ high school it makes me want to scream. And Silverstein is the cheerleader who makes excuses for the football team when they pick on the nerdy kid.
(Edited for clarity so you could tell which Clinton I was talking about.)
Tom Hilton
@Zifnab:
Or perhaps we paid attention to what Obama actually said as a candidate (he has pretty much done what he promised to do) instead of projecting our own pony fantasies onto him.
ChrisWWW
@FlipYrWhig:
If you knew in advance your roommate was a dedicated cookie dropper, then maybe you shouldn’t have made those promises about ant extermination.
cat48
Tractarian
Silverstein is right– he can no longer do his job competently. He’s been sucked into the vortex of the Village that he so despises. And he proves it by parroting Kurtzian bullsh*t like “But by any measure, his presidency has been a huge disappointment.” Good riddance, Ken.
@ChrisWWW:
I swear, whenever I hear someone say something like this, I think: what are you, five years old? Did you really think that Obama was going to come in to the White House, kick the lobbyists into the Potomac, and then arm-wrestle Mitch McConnell into submission? Did you really expect that Obama would magically transform this nation into a Scandinavian-style social democracy in two years?
If you did, might I suggest that the real problem is not with Obama’s performance, but rather with your wildly unrealistic and irrational expectations?
If I had told you in 2007 that, by 2010, we’d have a universal health care framework in place, unprecedented investments in green energy had been made, and combat operations in Iraq had ended, I think any rational liberal would be happy—not ecstatic, but content given the circumstances.
Unfortunately, we’re now seeing that liberal causes are doomed in this country because most liberal supporters, like ChrisWWW, are hopelessly weak-kneed and feckless; they’ll wet themselves and turn and run at the slightest hint of a challenge, just like Reid and the other Dem politicians they claim to hate.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
@JMY:
Given that Robert Reich has been brought up in this thread, let’s remember some of the real events. Reich and Rubin have both spent much of the last decade saying that the other was right about some of the things they argued about while they were both in the Clinton administration. In particular, from one side, Reich has agreed that a stimulus was the wrong prescription for the recession that confronted us in 1993, and Rubin got that right. Rubin, on the other hand, has admitted that a lot of Reich’s worries about income inequality were correct.
For a variety of reasons, Larry Summers has gone farther than Rubin in admitting some of the policy mistakes of the 1990s. Pretending that the battle lines of 1993 are the ones still fighting, and that Reich stands apart from the others, is wrong. I agree that Geithner and Summers get a bad rep because of associations with Rubin, but it’s an even sillier argument than usually realized. Even Reich has such an association, though his fans try hard to forget that.
ChrisNYC
Strange that he’s giving up on account of the events and people he covers not living up to his expectations. Isn’t journalism supposed to be about what is actually happening (first draft of history and all), rather than what any particular journalist thinks is supposed to happen?
ChrisNYC
Deleted — double post.
Arclite
@arguingwithsignposts:
All the more reason to stop trying to placate them, but I don’t see that happening yet. Do you?
ChrisWWW
@Tom Hilton:
Honestly now, you don’t think Obama over-promised during his campaign?
Tom Hilton
@FlipYrWhig:
Exactly. I was old enough to be one of the people doing it to Carter (in fairness, I was of draft age), and having learned my lesson I still had to watch other people do it to Clinton.
So if I am sometimes a trifle heated in slamming the people who are reflexively doing the same to this President, it’s because I’ve already been through this movie twice before, and my patience with this bullshit was exhausted 15 years ago.
Wile E. Quixote
I obviously don’t have the sense of outrage that is essential to reporting from our nation’s capital because I have never read an entire column by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz and wanted to cut my heart out with a dull knife. OK, I have read entire columns by Howard Kurtz and wanted to cut his heart out with a dull knife, in fact it doesn’t even take that much, usually I can’t even read an entire paragraph written by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz without being seized by a strong desire to cut his heart out with a dull knife. The same goes for anything written by David Broder, George Will, Marc Thiessen and most columns written by Anne Applebaum and Ruth Marcus as well.
ChrisWWW
@Tractarian:
That’s all well and good, except we don’t have “universal” health care (the key word is “universal”) and we still have tens of thousands of our troops in Iraq and quite a few are still engaged in combat. One out of three aint bad I guess.
Arclite
You know, Mr. Silverstein, I think this is a cop-out. You have (had) an influential position at a nationally prominent magazine. The press is part of the problem with our current political system, and you have (had) the power to write stories and series of stories to try and fix that.
georgia pig
@Emma: Yeah, I always felt that a lot of Obama supporters were projecting a lot fantasy on him. I always perceived him as being pragmatic, hard to fluster, and can give a hell of a speech. Not all that different from Clinton, just more disciplined with a different style and demographic appeal. This is just whiny crap. This guy claims to be burnt out from 10 years in DC, but he doesn’t seem to have learned much, because he turns around and blames Obama for not changing DC overnight. Obama’s not a faith healer, he’s a politician in a country that’s kind of wigged out. Obama could be analogized to cop negotiating with a potential jumper. Sometimes the jumper jumps, no matter what you do.
minachica
Has anyone else seen this article in Dissent magazine? comparing Obama with FDR, Lincoln and Johnson? I found it a refreshing take on the constant comparisons of Obama to the liberal heroes of the past (Lincoln, FDR, Johnson).
Jim, Foolish LIteralist
@Emma:
It makes perfect sense if you think the President governs alone, by will and force of personality, ignoring things like the Constitution, an unchecked demagoguery arrayed against him and a corrupt and incompetent media that both sees itself and is largely seen (too often by Democrats) as a neutral referee.
Stewart seems to be working overtime to prove that his rally–and I think it’s going to his head–isn’t just the anti-Beck joke it started as. I’ve always preferred Stewart to Colbert, but the way these twin rallies are shaping up, Satire is kicking the ass of earnestness.
Sharl
Regarding this post, Glennzilla tweets:
__
Tom Hilton
@ChrisWWW: Relative to the standard for campaigns, which universally assumes more control over events than the position actually entails? Not at all.
Obama never said he had a magic wand; it was the Velma whatevers of America who chose to believe he did. He always said it would be difficult, and circumstances (from the depth of the economic crisis to the oil spill to the outbreak of mass teatard insanity) have made it a lot more so than anyone could have expected when he ran. And even so, he has accomplished most of what he said he would do.
And yet lots of people seem to share your attitude–and the reason is that, as Ezra points out, people don’t listen. Instead of matching up what Obama has done (and tried to do) against what he said he would do, they match the former against their own hazy, vague sense that he would Make. Everything. Better. Which is just lazy, childish bullshit.
valdivia
oh biting my tongue. biting my tongue…….
Paula
@Sharl: lol. predictable.
Tractarian
@ChrisWWW:
Read it again, smarty. Here, I’ll highlight the relevant parts:
Listen, you have the right to be disappointed with Obama’s performance. You have the right to call him the worst president of all time, if you want. But if you voted for Obama thinking he was going to pull every last soldier out of Iraq and institute Medicare-for-all or something in the first two years of his term, again, I must insist that the problem is 100% with YOU, not Obama’s performance
Paula
@valdivia:
This has the potential to get real good, right?
Getting ready for the collective ego-gasm of Silverstein, GG, and John Cole … and probably Jane Hamsher, too.
Tom Hilton
@Sharl: Glenn Greenwald is just never happy unless he’s attacking (and misrepresenting the views of) liberals who just aren’t pure enough for him. That he uses the phrase ‘epistemic closure’ in doing so is just the cherry of unintended irony on his sundae of sneering hypocrisy.
Triassic Sands
I refuse to read anything written by Howard Kurtz — I ran out of both dull knives and hearts.
Tractarian
I have to say, though the firebagger phenomenon isn’t such a bad thing, electorally speaking for 2012. I mean, Obama’s being constantly hammered from the right; so, as long as he is also being hammered by the left, the low-information majority of voters will take that as a cue that Obama must be doing something right.
And there’s more than a modicum of truth in that.
Jim, Foolish LIteralist
@Mnemosyne:
Two words: Evan Bayh, and he didn’t even wait for Day One. Bayh has been short-listed for every Veep spot since 2000, and I think he thought he had finally made it with HRC, and then he would follow her, one way or the other. He’s been told since he arrived in Washington that he’s an up-and-comer, mostly because of this phony “deficit hawk” status, now he’s taking his ball and going home.
Bayh illustrates another essential part of the troubles with Blue Dogs: He’s a moron.
ETA: Yet another way Evan Bayh illustrates the problems with the Senate: He is, as I understand it, far more conservative than his father on issues like taxes and budget. Probably 80% of the Beltway establishment, pols, pundits and lobbyists, take it as a simple expression of fact to say Reagan was right about taxes.
General Stuck
@ChrisWWW: Do you really think universal health care means 100 percent coverage for everyone? And presnits promises are not, or shouldn’t be viewed by adults as something he can or will perform by himself, except those things related to his CiC powers. Where what he said, or promised on Iraq, was to withdraw from Iraq in a responsible way. Not every single troop in 18 months, but ending formal combat operation. The time line was already set per a status of forces agreement with the Iraqis. And his promise was to follow it and he has kept it thus far. The remainder of US troops will be completely gone according to that SOF;s agreement.
People like you and others view a dem president as some kind of white knight savior riding to the rescue single handedly, and enforce upon them absolutist standards from campaign rhetoric like it is some kind of blood oath. All or nothing, or it’s fail. You go back in history, and will be hard pressed to find any president who has more faithfully tried to fulfill his campaign promises, than Obama. Some are still in the works, some were done with compromise in a democracy where the minority has a say, and all of those efforts to fulfill what Obama promised to try, has been opposed nearly 100 percent by the GOP. Get real.
Comrade Kevin
@ChrisWWW:
Of course, that’s not what he actually said, now, is it?
Scott P.
@ChrisWWW:
Every politician overpromises. It has ever been so, and will ever be so.
The main point of campaign promises as far as I am concerned is it tell me what a candidate’s priorities are, it tells me what kind of country he would like to see us become. Whether we actually get any of it or not is largely out of his control.
Blue Neponset
@Tom Hilton: Perception is reality. If Obama can’t convince us childish and lazy Americans that he is doing a great job then maybe that is a problem he should address.
cat48
Paula
@Jim, Foolish LIteralist: It also makes perfect sense if you were dumb enough to believe that Obama was some kind of revolutionary figure.
Do people want prizes for discovering that a politician, is, in fact, just a politician?
Jewish Steel
@Sharl:
If that is the price I must pay to not endure the congested, sub-Situationist prose style and grating, repetitive moralizing then let my episteme remained closed.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Lev:
Not to mention that if FDR had been turned out of office after 8 years and replaced by a GOPer, much of his New Deal legacy might have been dismantled before it had a chance to settle in and become a semi-permanent part of the landscape. It is amazing what a President can accomplish when he gets 3 terms and then some, and also manages to have his successor re-elected to office so that his party and his philosophy control the WH for 20 years straight, while the opposition marinates in their sense of exile, impotence, and grievances real or imagined.
Reagan would not be the right wing icon he is today if GHB had lost the 1988 election and the Dems had immediately proceeded to dismantle his legacy. The true test of Obama’s legacy will come with what happens during and after the 2016 election, assuming he is re-elected in 2012. This is a test of patience and fortitude for progressives – but unfortunately playing the long game appeals more to folks with a small-c conservative temperament than it does to folks who are dissatisfied (to put it mildly) with the status quo.
Tom Hilton
@Blue Neponset: ‘Perception is reality’ is one of those things people say when they want to sound smart, but in this context it’s actually pretty dumb.
First of all, dissatisfaction with the President (and the Democrats in Congress) is due much more to the reality of lingering unemployment than to his failure to manage perceptions (or, to put it another way, the reality of lingering unemployment limits the extent to which managing perceptions can do any good).
And when it comes to their accomplishments, the reality of the ACA (for example) is what will have an impact on people’s lives; nobody’s granny is going to get unplugged by the perception that it includes Death Panels. Perception. Is Not. Reality.
Nick
@Lev:
FDR’s first term wasn’t even that…liberals have a fantasy idea of what it was like (none were alive at the time to witness it). It wasn’t that transformational, if it was Huey Long wouldn’t have threatened to run in ’36.
Successful Democratic Presidents get to influence history to allow for a narrative to develop that they were folk heroes. I truly believe liberals in 50 years will look at Obama the same way.
cat48
@Sharl:
I’ve come to the conclusion I don’t meet Glenzilla’s high standards of behavior; and really I’m ok with that. Not losing any sleep over it.
General Stuck
@Blue Neponset:
Obama has record high approval amongst all dems, and record disapproval, or nearly so with the republicans, and currently is around a 50 50 approval percent, maybe 45 50, which historically is quite good at this stage.
If you are referring to the internet left wing, then no, he hasn’t been perceived as doing a great job. And “childish and lazy Americans” is a perfect description of the pea sized sliver of the dem base, they represent.
Lev
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I think you’re right about Reagan, but not about FDR. Wendell Willkie was actually quite liberal on domestic policy and backed almost all of the New Deal. He was, however, extremely opposed to going to war with Europe, even though he worked with FDR on some of those issues.
As for the general principle, I think you’re right. Obama needs to get a successor into office to consolidate his victories. It’s way too soon to know anything, but I think that the rookies on the Dem side are more promising than on the Rep side. I mean, it’s people like Martin O’Malley and John Hickenlooper versus people like Thunementum and Rubio at this point, though obviously much can change.
Stillwater
John Cole recommends Ken Silverstein’s awesome good-bye piece, and his first 10 commenters illustrate “epistemic closure”
I’m usually pretty neutral on GG, but this isn’t even remotely correct. Go back and read the first ten comments. Not a single instance of epistemic closure in the bunch. One sympathetic to the point Silverstein made, one pure snark, and lots of disagreement with Silverstein over the ‘by any measure’ (or some other limiting) phrase.
ruemara
Y’all are fucking killing me. “he ran as a visionary and led as a functionary?” Oh fuck that shit. Did we elect goddamned dictator or a fricking executive leader who governs in co-ordination with an entire elected body, representing the will of a disparate people? Fuck this twit. You give over control of your government to money, send a 50% insane batch of noodles, fail to learn anything, fail to read anything, fail to do the goddamned math for your fucking $30 tax cut and then bitch that Obama isn’t the goddamned transcendent master who gives us the new progressive golden age, mostly by himself. I’m sorry this dude can’t shovel anymore bullshit, but as a member of the media, he’s complaining about the swill he’s a part of. And fuck his whine-ass anti-Obama bullshit to.
Tractarian
@Blue Neponset:
Nope. It’s YOUR fault and YOUR problem that you had unrealistic expectations about what Obama could accomplish in his first two years of his first term.
There’s nothing anyone could say, now, to change the fact that you had irrational and delusional expectations to begin with.
Sharl
{…Stops by with stack of applications for Glennzilla Fan Club, dodges airborne shoes and ripened fruit, beats hasty retreat…}
ChrisWWW
@Tractarian and @General Stuck:
It’s kind of funny that Obama’s headline accomplishments require so much parsing to understand.
A) Universal health care framework = not universal and not in effect yet
B) End of formal combat operations in Iraq = U.S. troops still fighting and dying in Iraq, just not “formally”
Jim, Foolish LIteralist
On perception and reality: I was reading an article about how Obama is losing swing voters, last Sunday’s WaPo, I think. In the second paragraph, they quoted a woman as saying she voted for Obama, but now she thinks he “overreached”. Of course they did not follow up to mention how he overreached, but his woman has no doubt heard Very Serious People ask, with Great Concern in their voices, if Obama has over-reached. And that nice old man who looks like my favorite history teacher, he came right out and said so, and all the other Very Serious People nodded, Very Seriously. And they wouldn’t be on TV if they didn’t know what they were talking about. The reporter didn’t mention any follow up, and probably didn’t do so. To challenge a Heartland voter is very elitist, and reflects a liberal bias, and s/he had the hook for what s/he had already decided, consciously or unconsciously, would be the subtext of the story.
Blue Neponset
@Tom Hilton: Your ACA comment actually proves my wicked intelligent point.
ACA is actually quite popular when you ask people about its individual components but in reality ACA is quite unpopular because people perceive it to be something it is not.
Do you need me to dumb it down any further?
Nick
@ChrisWWW:
Governing is messy and complicated. Why does this come as a shock to people?
valdivia
@Paula:
yep. But also too. I have inside info and can’t.share.it.
arguingwithsignposts
@Arclite:
re: “bi-partisanship.” One thing I think that Obama is “struggling” with regarding the Republicans in the Congress is that he really did start in the Senate with a different frame of reference. Yes, the Republicans were dicks like they are now, but there was the waning light of some centrist ‘pubs, and hell, Obama even worked with Tom fuckin’ Coburn on some stuff.
So it’s highly possible that he figured as a member of the Senate, he could come into the WH and work across the aisle.
It’s also good (word that rhymes with “proptricks”) for him to seem willing to work with assholes like those in the GOP caucus. Maybe not for progressives, but for the avg. voter, it damned sure is.
And, late to respond, but your husband-sleeping-with-hookers analogy is so full of fail wrt the context of Silverstein’s “by any measure” statement. If you provide a comfortable existence for your family, that’s one measure by which you’re not a “huge” disappointment.
Blue Neponset
@Tractarian: What were my unrealistic expectations of Obama?
ChrisWWW
@Tractarian:
Ever stop and think that so many people had high hopes for Obama because Obama promised Hope, Change, and a fundamental break with Dubya’s policies?
Tom Hilton
@ruemara: This is pretty much the rant I was trying to restrain myself from making.
;-)
Paula
@F:
What shits me is about this excerpt is that you’d think a person who appears to be a relatively well-educated and thoughtful adult would take this as a learning experience that it’s not enough to have all this and sit back on your heels and expect change.
Silverstein, as a reporter, isn’t necessarily required to be on the front lines of whatever movement he endorses. But this sorry, self-pitying piece of navel-gazery indicates that he really thought he was “doing something”, and is tired enough to “stop doing it”. At which point, I have to go: what? you thought exposing corruption, stagnation, and lies was something that was going to be over for you eventually as a journalist? Why were you even in the business to begin with?
Tractarian
@ChrisWWW:
I do find it kind of funny that you are having so much trouble grasping the meaning of “universal health care framework.” (Hint: it doesn’t mean that 100% of the population instantly gets health insurance!). I also find it kind of amusing that you apparently think Obama promised to pull every single U.S. troop out of Iraq in his first two years.
But I generally try to avoid laughing at a person’s ignorance. It’s just tacky.
General Stuck
@ChrisWWW:
Only an idiot would expect a major HC overhaul to immediately and completely go into effect, and that 95 percent coverage initially is unacceptably short of a perfect 100 percent. And the idiocy goes double for accomplishing what no other politician or presnit has done, though many have tried for the past 100 years.
Not very many, and formal combat is what he promised, not never another shot fired, even for self defense. If you don’t understand it, then something may be wrong with you. And I am sure there is.
Paula
@valdivia: DAMMIT. wanna know. But I won’t pester you. ;)
valdivia
@Tom Hilton:
yes me too.
seconding @ruemara also.
Tractarian
Oh my word, I’m really sorry I wasted my time with you. You’re clearly either a spoof, or a pre-teen who hasn’t really “blossomed” intellectually yet.
Nick
@ChrisWWW:
Yes, we’re are aware people had unrealistic hopes because they were projecting their own desires on buzzwords.
But you’re going to sit here and tell me Obama is not fundamentally different than Bush despite fighting for dozens of issues Bush would’ve been against from ending tax cuts to better healthcare to Wall St. regulations to figuring out a way out of war rather than in it, why? Because he oked the military to kill an American citizen known to be supporting the enemy? That’s not a Bush thing, that’s a fucking George Washington thing.
“I’m upset because Obama is doing this one thing Bush also did (and every other President) and thus, he’s a disappointment despite the 45 other things he’s doing different from Bush”
Stillwater
@General Stuck: Only an idiot would expect…
Way to stay classy Stuck. With an insult like that, how could he not agree with you?
Blue Neponset
@General Stuck: I am actually talking about the American people as a whole. They are set to hand the Democrats the biggest defeat in a long long time.
My hope for Obama was that he would be able to use the bully pulpit to give Congressional Dems cover while they passed our agenda. Instead we got to talk about death panels for six weeks and we had to water down the stimulus with a bunch of tax cuts. The President needs to do much better in this area.
ChrisWWW
@Nick:
It’s messy and complicated when you’re trying to put lipstick on a pig. I’m sorry if I can’t get all excited about Obama’s accomplishments in Iraq and on health care when:
1) Health care costs are still going to spiral out of control
2) We’re still going to have tens of thousands of troops in Iraq indefinitely
3) Our involvement in Afghanistan is escalating for unobtainable goals
4) Our civil liberties have been run through the paper shredder a second time
5) Unemployment is at ~9% and nothing is being done. (Obama, thanks for backing Bernanke for another term!)
General Stuck
@Stillwater: go to hell.
how classy was that?
valdivia
@Paula:
dying, really dying to share. but really can’t.
suffice it to say that a lot of what people said on this thread (along the lines of ruemara and tom hilton and you) is right on the money.
slag
@Stillwater: I have to agree with you on that. I went and looked at the first ten because that statement didn’t jive with my impressions. If you ignore several of the first ten comments, you may get somewhere near the ballpark of accuracy there.
Someone’s trying to create a narrative and not let the facts get in the way. We already have a media for that. We don’t need our liberal media doing the same.
Nick
@Blue Neponset:
Ever thing Congressional Dems don’t want to pass his agenda? I mean he’s been using the “bully pulpit” on tax cuts and Congress still did nothing
Thats not the President’s fault, that’s the MEDIA’s fault.
General Stuck
@Blue Neponset:
Maybe, maybe not. But you are doing your small part in creating enthusiasm by predicting doom before the election has even happened. Maybe if you did a little research on past elections like this one, you would understand that big losses for the party and presnit in power are actually normal. How big, we just don’t know yet. But hand wringing on a blog for Obama to DO SOMETHING isn’t likely to help.
arguingwithsignposts
@Sharl:
As the proud Frist Commenter on this here thread, I wear my epistemic closure badge with honor since it’s given by a purist such as GG.
Now if only our Dear Leader will give me my magical Unicorn Pony ™ I can die happy.
/obot snark
cat48
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Lev:
IMHO when we look for comparisons by which to judge Obama, FDR is the wrong Roosevelt anyway. TR’s admin had to deal with a Congress and a political climate much more like that of today than did FDR. And so far, Obama’s admin is showing a lot of similarities to TR’s 1st term, including the venom with which his critics decry his centrism and opportunism.
Hopefully we can skip over the whole massive party splitting that puts the opposition into power bit from 1912.
Nick
@ChrisWWW: Well you know what dude, it’s hard to get excited when you always look at the negative side of EVERYTHING
You COULD look at it as
1.) Thousands of people who needed healthcare got it
2.) Children with preexisting conditions will no longer be thrown off insurance
3.) College graduates who can’t find jobs with benefits (most of them now) can stay on their parents plan for a few more years, allowing them to take jobs without benefits to gain enough experience to get a good one with benefits by the time they’re 26
4.) We’re not fighting Iran, all combat troops are out of Iraq, and as Bob Woodward pointed out, the President WANTS to end the war in Afghanistan and is arguing for it.
5.) The unemployment rate may be 9%, but it was 10.1% a year ago and we went from losing 700,000+ jobs a month to gaining 100,000 or so.
It’s stuff like this that makes me, and those in power, ignore people like you, because it doesn’t matter what he did, or what Congress did, you’d find the fly in the ointment because that’s how you people are.
And no, replacing Ben Bernake would not solve the unemployment problem.
ChrisWWW
@Nick:
He’s different than Bush, yes. But he needs to be more different if we’re going to turn this country around. Obama is every bit as content with selling us out to moneyed interests as Bush was, he’s just putting a gentler face on the swindle.
Blue Neponset
@Nick: Fault is irrelevant. If the President can’t get his message heard then he is failing at his job and should try some other methods. I like what Obama has been saying the last couple of weeks, but it seems like a little too late. Hopefully I am wrong about that.
Stillwater
@slag: Like I said, I’m usually pretty agnostic on all the GG love/hate, but this seemed way outa left field – like he was determined to see something that wasn’t there. The irony (or inaccuracy) of the ‘epistemic closure’ comment is that most of those first ten people actually read at least part of the article.
Mnemosyne
@ChrisWWW:
Unless “indefinitely” now means “end of 2011,” I’m not sure where you’re getting this from. I know a lot of people seem to think that the fact that the initial pullout of combat troops happened on schedule somehow proves that the rest of the pullout is never going to happen, but I’m not sure where that comes from, either. The Iraqis want us out, we’ve set a schedule, and we’ve stuck to the schedule. What is the basis for your belief that we’re going to break our agreement with Iraq?
liberal
@Nick:
(a) The gain is extremely anemic comparatively.
(b The gain is not enough to keep up with population growth.
Nick
@ChrisWWW:
You can’t say “He’s different than Bush” in your first sentence and then contradict it later in the paragraph. I mean make up your mind, is he like Bush, or isn’t he?
.
liberal
@Stillwater:
You mean good old Corner Stone? I don’t think that someone who’s scanning the comments quickly, who isn’t familiar with CS’s posting, is necessarily going to be able to come to that conclusion quickly.
I was, though, and I laughed at his/her comment.
Tom Hilton
@Blue Neponset: Sadly, calling your own comment ‘intelligent’ doesn’t make it so. Also, it reeks of desperation.
So the ACA is not hugely popular. So…what? The fact that, after a multi-hundred-million dollar anti-HCR propaganda campaign conducted during an ugly and painfully drawn-out legislative process, and before many of the really popular features kick in, the ACA has an approval of ‘only’ 40-some percent means…the President is a failure for not waving his wand and making it more popular?
Seriously: if you have any point at all, you haven’t made it.
Nick
@liberal:
it’s a gain, it’s a gain done with no cooperation from the opposition (which rarely, if ever, occurs in our political history) minimal cooperation from moderates in our own party, and a toxic media environment.
You guys just don’t know how to put things in perspective. I suspect because you don’t want to,
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Tom Hilton:
I feel this too at times. Is there a generational split between Obots and firebaggers, as a function of who remembers the Carter admin and who is too young for that?
I can see how folks who remember Clinton but not Carter watch Obama at work and are thinking “Oh noes, here we go again…” whereas those of us old enough to remember Carter react more along the lines of “plus ca change…”. The old saying seems to apply here: once is an accident, twice is coincidence, and three times means somebody is trying to send you a message.
Tractarian
@cat48:
Sounds bad, but Obama didn’t have much choice in the matter. See, the Joint Chiefs were a little skeptical about Obama’s plan to use his magical transport-ray to instantly beam all those troops home as soon as combat ops ended. Something about the technology not being perfected yet.
But you’re right, here we are two years into Obama’s term and there are still troops in Iraq. Might as well just call him George W. Obama.
WyldPirate
[email protected]@
This is not the goddamned problem with Obama. His problem is that he negotiates like a fucking bitch-ass pussy that is afraid of losing a fight and concedes not before getting his ass kicked, but before the first punch is thrown.
At least LBJ started out trying to get the moon, the stars and the entire goddamned universe. Obama, hell, he gives it all away and then grovels trying to get the Rethugs on board.
Fuck Obama and his goddamned pragmatism. People are pissed–especially the liberal “professional left”–because he’s not walking the goddamned walk that he talked during his fucking campaign. On top of that, he has the goddamned gall to ridicule the very people who worked so hard to get him elected.
The sorry motherfucker deserves to get his ass stomped in the midterms just as he will deserve getting his ass stomped in 2012.
The US is is like the town drunk staggering down the street now. It’s gotta hit rock bottom before it can sober up and kick the habit. For the country , to do this is going to take at least one more raging destructive, drunken term of Rethuglican criminality.
In the meanwhile, if you don’t have some land or space that you can grow some food on or have some sort of practical skill that will be essential for mere survival, it would be a good idea to acquire some land or friends that have both the land and the skills. It’s going to get fucking ugly in the next decade.
Chuck Butcher
I think it is important to view Obama outside Congressional behavior because Congress is a separate branch but, and it is a huge but, the DOJ is Obama’s baby and the national stage has been available to him right along.
You get the Congress you vote for and this is what has been voted for. I made the point during the Primaries of 08 that bipartisanship was a chimera – that the “R”s who survived 06 and the coming 08 elections would be more conservative and ideological as a group – thanks to the bloodletting in the swing districts taking out the moderates. They would not be people you could work with. If the campaign rhetoric was designed to make the GOP look bad in advance it failed due to lack of follow through because any pro should have been able to see this coming.
I don’t know that the Bully Pulpit could have affected the outcomes legislatively, I do suspect that it could have affected the level of discontent and could have helped move the discussion leftward instead of the right among the citizenry.
You see around here an attitude of surrender to the right, it’s all we can get so it’s good. It isn’t good, it is all we could get and thanks to that surrender it is how it will continue to be. Blaming Obama for the failures of Congress is silly, but simply kowtowing to what Congress is willing to do is also silly. You have to keep making your argument if you want it heard, otherwise the only thing noticed is the white flag.
Media and politicians do what they do because it works for them, and it works for them because we keep surrendering to them – we let it happen with a whimper. Would you like to explain the right drift in comparison to people’s personal views? It does not match, both annecdotally and by polling, but it certainly works politically.
Nick
@Blue Neponset:
It’s not his job to get his message heard, its his job to govern the country, it’s the media’s job to get the message out there. Your exonerating the media of their responsibility.
NotNick
@Nick
Maybe you shouldn’t make such disingenuous arguments. That’s a pretty nice way to derail @ChrisWWW’s argument though, huh?
Maybe you should address the substance of the argument instead of trying to win on semantics.
General Stuck
@ChrisWWW:
Now, we haven’t reached 12-31-2011 yet, so it is too early to judge whether Obama will keep true to this, but the only way it would be extended would be if he Iraqi’s requested a delay.
Buy it is also false to flatly claim US troops will be in Iraq indefintely because you cannot read the future, and so far obama has kept his word.
Newsflash. Nobody gives a shit whether you are “all excited” or not. Jeebus you firebaggers are high maintenance.
liberal
@Mnemosyne:
Probably a majority do, but I find it hard to believe that all factions want us out.
Can’t speak for the other commenter, but things are slowly going downhill in Iraq, and if we pulled out completely, they’ll go downhill even faster (unless surrounding countries agree to some kind of stabilization pact). Not that that means we shouldn’t pull out, of course, given that things are probably going to go to hell in a handbasket anyway no matter how long we wait, if history is any guide.
ChrisWWW
@Tractarian and @General Stuck:
Sorry, I don’t buy into your political Newspeak.
The health care law does make some solid improvements to the system, no doubt. But I’m not going to pretend it’s universal, and neither should you.
Obama has drawn down our involvement in Iraq, but it’s far from over. So let’s not pretend it is. OK?
bobbob
What’s Harper’s? This guy has spent how many years in Washington and still blames Democrats for everything? I can’t believe you even posted this stupid stuff.
miketherevelator
liberal
@ChrisWWW:
You omitted
(C) Treasury apparently slowly giving away the store vis-a-vis AIG. Not to mention other aspects of the bankster bailout.
Blue Neponset
@Tom Hilton: I think you don’t want to understand my point.
Tom Hilton
@slag:
Greenwald’s standard MO…but because so much of the lefty blogosphere buys into that narrative, they don’t call him out for it the way they do Kurtz or Broder or Brooks or Friedman.
People who are very good at seeing the unstated assumptions of others aren’t necessarily any good at identifying their own.
Nick
@ChrisWWW:
No one is saying the health care system is fixed and we’re done in Iraq. What we’re saying is we’ve made some progress and that’s what progressives should be celebrating, PROGRESS, it’s even in the name PROGRESSive.
You seem to admit there’s been progress, but you’re still not happy. If the health care law made solid improvements in the system, why is it so terrible to celebrate those, applaud those, while at the same time working for the next step. Why is it so bad for us to celebrate and applaud the drawdown while working on the next step.
This is about progress, not final solutions.
ChrisWWW
@General Stuck:
I don’t want the Republicans to win this year, or in 2012, or ever again. Believe me.
At the same time, these weak tea accomplishments shrouded in doubletalk isn’t convincing. The average voter isn’t foolish enough to believe our involvement in the Iraq War is over, and they aren’t foolish enough to believe our health care problems are fixed.
General Stuck
@ChrisWWW:
Nice goalpost move. You came here declaring obama had broken his campaign promises, and were proved wrong. None of us said it “was over”, nor pretended it, and now you have the temerity to throw up this straw man to cover for your initial bullshit claim. this ain’t Daily Kos.
liberal
@arguingwithsignposts:
The evidence since 1994 is, overwhelmingly, that it’s impossible to work with the Republicans.
Nick
@liberal:
This isn’t even true.
arguingwithsignposts
@Blue Neponset:
Of all the things that burn me up about the constant attacks on Obama, this has got to be one of the worst.
The man delivers an address to the nation every fucking week on Saturday. He speaks constantly around the nation (including during the health care fight last summer), he’s had press conferences, his press secretary is out there every fucking day taking questions from the stupid WH Press Corpse.
The WH.gov web site (and other government sites) have loads of information about ACA and other Obama initiatives. His cabinet people are out often talking on the bobblehead shows. The WH is even on Twitter, FFS! He was on the Fucking View!
Seriously, what the fuck other methods would you prefer? Should he personally call every fucking person in America and ask them if they have any questions they’d like answered?
Tom Hilton
@Blue Neponset: Don’t blame the reader for your own failure either in formulating a coherent point, or in articulating it (it’s not clear which is the case here).
liberal
@Nick:
LOL! Rightfully pointing out that job growth is negative when you take into account the fact the population is growing isn’t putting things into perspective?
I should listen to you, of course, since you’re the finance journalist or whatever who has the knowledge to state in the comments here that Japan suffered from a nasty bout of inflation after its real estate bubble burst.
Tom Hilton
@arguingwithsignposts: Well, he could always try indoctrinating schoolchildren.
[/snark]
liberal
@Nick:
Of course it seems to be true, if you follow the series of changes in the terms. Which I’m sure you’re not.
Nick
@ChrisWWW:
That’s good, because we’re not trying to make them believe either. We’re trying to convince them we made progress and need to make more.
Jeez, if every two years our elections are going to referendums on whether or not we’ve fixed every problem on Earth, no one is ever going to get anywhere
Blue Neponset
@arguingwithsignposts: Yes. He should call everyone.
@Tom Hilton: Please tell me what you think my point is and I will try and correct you I think you are wrong. Thank you.
liberal
@General Stuck:
ISTR at least one comment in this blog that celebrated it as being over.
General Stuck
@ChrisWWW:
The only thing the average voter cares about with Iraq is that there are few body bags coming home with dead soldiers in them. To date, that number is 54, and will go lower. The military will not be performing routine patrols like before, where most soldiers got killed, nor in the dangerous cities.
It is ideologues who care about absolutism of us getting out of there, and I agree, as soon as possible because we never should have went. But I also believe, it would add insult to injury if we just up and pulled out immediately and left Iraq to it’s own devices, after going in and destroying it as an epic act of immorality. When December 2011 comes, unless there are great reasons to delay our total troop departure, I will expect Obama to honor the agreement, and expect he will, but will holler loudly if he doesn’t.
cat48
@Tractarian:
That wasn’t a complaint. I just looked it up because someone on here kept saying “there’s tens of thousands of troops in Iraq” I forgot to bring their attention to it.
I’m good w/Obama. What complaints I have are mild in the grand scheme of things. The bitter complaining about him effects me more sometimes because I lived thru the civil rights movement which makes him pretty special to me. You know, things like calling him “Choclate Carter”! Just nonsensical and very, very hateful. The man is nothing like Carter.
General Stuck
@liberal:
Well bully for you liberal.
Nick
@liberal:
No, it’s not, because you neglect to point out the improvement from where we were. It’s like if there’s a flood and we pump all the water out and you say we’re a failure because the ground is still damp. It’s like saying FDR was a failure because we still had double digit unemployment in 1934.
Nick
@liberal:
The combat mission, not the involvement. It’s ok to celebrate progress, really it is.
arguingwithsignposts
@Blue Neponset:
Assuming approx. 150 million phones (for 300 million citizens), and 10 minutes per call, that’s 1.5 billion minutes, or 25 million hours of phone calls. Since there are 525,600 minutes in a year (thanks “Rent”) he’ll be calling for a looong time past his second term.
General Stuck
@ChrisWWW:
Good for you. Then carry on with the Obama FAIL blather that will surely ramp up the dem enthusiasm to go vote, that you claim is Obama’s fault it isn’t there. Maybe you and some other should look in the mirror to find the problem.
ChrisWWW
@Nick:
It’s a margins vs. core dilemma. Obama has done the right thing at the margins. He’s made health care a little more sane, he’s made our foreign policy a little more sane, etc.
But at the core we’re still left with the same problems we had 2-3 years ago. We’re bankrupting ourselves in wars overseas. The bankers are still gambling with government insured money. Health care is still going to bankrupt the country. Joe Lieberman is still allowed to caucus with the Democrats. Etc.
liberal
@JMY:
Just because he’s never worked on WS doesn’t mean he’s not captive to WS interests, especially considering he was head of the NY Fed.
liberal
@ChrisWWW:
Very well put—that’s the way I feel about Obama.
John N
The problem as I see it is this: The Dems in general suffer from a “rhetoric gap.” In other words, many seem afraid or unwilling to make the argument for the philosophy that underlies liberal politics: that, far from being “the problem,” government is actually a necessary and important and helpful/positive influence in many people’s lives. This argument needs to be made in order to expand what is legislatively possibile. It wont happen immediately, of course, but over time, you can move public opinion on specific items toward liberal positions by changing the public philosophy toward government itself, as the conservatives have been doing for the last 30 years. Personally, it is disappointing for me to see Obama, who has such fine rhetorical skills, not be more focused on this as a party strategy. Essentially, if you make more people liberals by activating them politically around the philosophy that good government is important, then what is not politically possible now may become so in the future. That’s what I want to see.
Blue Neponset
@arguingwithsignposts: I was just trolling you man. You seem more interested in getting pissed about straw man arguments than actually reading what I wrote. Have a great day!
liberal
@Nick:
Except for the fact that a simple renaming doesn’t actually make “the combat mission is over” so.
I suppose your self-awareness is so low you don’t even see that you’re illustrating your opponents’ points.
Nick
@ChrisWWW: Dude, look, you can’t say he’s made X and Y more sane and then say X and Y are the same as 2-3 years ago. You’re contradicting yourself. If he’s made them more sane, then we don’t have ALL the same core problems we had 2-3 years ago.
General Stuck
@liberal: But aren’t you a communist?
Nick
@liberal:
Well it’s good thing he also pulled out 50,000+ combat troops so it wasn’t just a simple renaming.
God, you’re so desperate to not be forced to accept things have changed and progress has been made that you lie and contradict yourselves. It’s pathetic.
arguingwithsignposts
@Blue Neponset:
I get pissed when people say the president isn’t trying to get his message out, which was a strawman argument you erected with your earlier comment.
Irrelevant assholes like McCain get to show up almost every Sunday to diss the president’s initiatives (not to mention the other GOP “leadership” assholes) and rarely get called on it. The so-called liberal media do a bang-up job of standing in the way of the president “getting his message out.” I don’t look at that as a failure of him as a president, fwiw.
And if you were being snarky when you said “If the President can’t get his message heard then he is failing at his job and should try some other methods” then my apologies. I will take my snarkometer into the shop. If not, then what I said above stands.
valdivia
@cat48:
exactly! thank you for saying this.
Andrew F.
@Nick: WTF will Obama’s “liberal” narrative be? That he was able to pass healthcare reform and financial reform while managing to entrench and expand the corrupt power of the healthcare and financial industries? Inspiring!
Mnemosyne
@liberal:
We have a legally binding agreement with Iraq to leave at the end of 2011. We can’t change that agreement unilaterally. The fact that things are getting worse in Iraq is, frankly, no longer any of our business now that the Iraqis have asked us to leave and we’ve agreed to do so.
I really don’t get this automatic assumption that the fact that we’ve stuck to all of the other deadlines in the SOFA is proof positive that we will miss the December 2011 deadline. Can you explain your reasons for thinking that?
Mnemosyne
@liberal:
Yes, because she had just gotten word that she had family members coming home thanks to the withdrawal. Why must you be such an asshole about people who were excited to get a phone call that their relative was coming home from Iraq alive and well? If someone was happy that they got a phone call from Haiti saying that their cousin had survived the earthquake, would you also insist that there was no reason for them to be happy because thousands of other unrelated people had died?
General Stuck
@Mnemosyne:
I didn’t know what he was talking about, having missed or forgotten the incident in reference. Your spanking of li’ll liberal was needed and well performed, per your usual skills in this area.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Yes. SATSQ
agrippa
I am not disappointed in Obama. is there a logical reasn that I should be? if there is, please provide one.
Rome was not built in a day, and I do not get a birthday party every day. Why would anyone expect all these problems to be solved in a Chicago minute? I do not.
Perhaps I am an “obama bot”? No. I was not born yesterday.
I do not have a problem with Obama. he has more sense than most of the commentariat and most of the political calss.
liberal
@Wile E. Quixote:
Heh.
Tom Hilton
@Blue Neponset: You appeared to be making the banal and substanceless meta-argument that the President is a failure because he/his policies/Congress aren’t more popular than they are.
Given your self-proclaimed intelligence, though, it seems unlikely that you’d be making such a brain-dead argument–especially after it’s been shot down so many times in this very thread. So if you’re saying something else, feel free to take another stab at articulating it.
liberal
@Mnemosyne:
You mean to tell me that that was the only such comment?
Furthermore, piss off with your outrage.
liberal
@Mnemosyne:
Because considering things as a whole, if I had to lay major money down, I would rather bet that we will still have combat troops (in the broad sense, not the “we’ll define them away” sense) in Iraq then.
And I’m not saying that just to piss on Obama. It’s very difficult to get out of a war/occupation, particularly for democracies.
liberal
@Nick:
LOL.
Yes, the “combat mission” is over, because we define it to be so, by fiat.
The level of self-parody here is deafening.
Tom Hilton
@cat48:
Yes, me too. On Election night I was really missing my parents (who had worked in civil rights in Mississippi in the mid-’60s), wishing they had lived to see this happen. Whatever we all think about his presidency (which is too young to judge, having another 6 years to run), nothing can change the fact that his election was in itself a transformative event.
Mnemosyne
@liberal:
Go back and check the thread. There was one person who was declaring that the war was over because her relatives were coming home and she got pissed on by people like you who insisted that if 2/3rds of the troops had been withdrawn, that was exactly the same as doing nothing at all.
IOW, you would prefer to ignore reality and the facts so you can hang onto your cynicism. Terrific. I’m guessing that if there are 10 Americans left in Bagdhad after 2011, you’ll still be here insisting that you were totally right and the US never left.
FlipYrWhig
I think it’s totally fine to feel let down or whatever.
(It’s clearly a pattern: liberals want politics to be more liberal and are disappointed that it isn’t; and no one has yet come up with the way to correct that; so a divide emerges between “given that the system is broken, get the best deal you can” and “taking the best deal you can is only shoring up the broken system, so make a bigger show of fighting it.”)
What irks the fuck out of me is the declaration that being an uncompromising progressive is not just better ideologically but also an easy electoral winner, because voters want to see “contrasts” and they want to see “fight,” and not seeing those things make them turn against Democrats. I don’t think that works very often. But by repeating it enough, the progressive blogosphere has come up with a whole theory that Democrats _actively_ refuse to take up this obviously winning strategy because they’re like boxers taking a dive.
And it goes right to the criticism of Obama: he doesn’t fight hard enough, he compromises too readily, etc. Why does that matter? Well, because fighting harder and refusing to compromise would help him win, you see, and because he doesn’t do them, he obviously doesn’t want to win, and the reason he doesn’t want to win is something about “corporatism.” Because he doesn’t adopt this style, it _must mean_ that Obama isn’t even trying, because he’s been bought off, never really meant it, it’s all a scam, and whatnot.
It’s tedious, and I think it’s a very strange view of how politics works, and it’s a way of getting yourself off the hook of trying to figure out how to push American politics leftwards in an effective, tangible way.
Chuck Butcher
In recent speeches the Pres has made reference to change taking time and needing to stay focussed on it. If I could ask him personally I’d ask why this has waited until there looked to be a Democratic disaster in the offing? That, and what the focus is?
No kidding on the focus, does somebody here know what the public is to take the focus as being?
General Stuck
@liberal:
No you idiot. The term “mission” has very specific meaning in the military. In soldier slang, it means they won’t be going out looking for the shit, or patrolling regularly to seek out an enemy and destroy it. The only time this will occur will be because the Iraqis need help in a particular battle or area, and specific anti terrorism actions. It is a big deal, and sea change from the former “combat mission” to non combat/support one.
Nick
@liberal:
No, you idiot, that’s how the military defines it, based on what missions troops are sent on, and how many/what regiments and brigades are there.
For example, we’re technically still at war with North Korea by your definition, the “combat mission” has been over since 1953.
Nick
@Chuck Butcher:
He’s been saying this since day one. Geez.
Chuck Butcher
@FlipYrWhig:
Well it certainly is, and since you wrote this script for yourself it isn’t particularly odd that it works the way you’d have it work.
You propose that the entire discussion revolves around throwing yourself on your sword, yup – pretty dumb. Keeping the argument going regardless of votes is another thing, you may take what the votes will allow, but letting it go at that is another thing entirely.
I happen to like Sen Wyden and we’re on first name basis and I’ve told him in person that I don’t think there is any evidence that the GOP has honest dealers, despite their supposed support for things he’s proposed. One thing happened, that may have no relationship to that conversation, is that he took some real lead in discussions about things the “R”s were blocking. The discussion stayed in play despite apparent votes and that counts. I’m disappointed it didn’t stay in play continuously.
Tom Hilton
@FlipYrWhig:
You’ve put your finger on why I was so bugged by segments Rachel Maddow (whom I respect and admire
and have naughty thoughts about) has run recently: she absolutely buys into that unproven (and often unspoken) assumption, and so in her view any Democrat who isn’t proudly embracing the leftiest positions isn’t even trying.There is certainly an argument for particular, limited applications of this view: on the Bush tax cuts, for example, it really would have been a winning issue on the national level (as well as a progressive move) if Democrats had taken up two separate votes on the under- and over-$250K cuts. To generalize beyond those limited cases, though, is untenable.
Brachiator
@Captain Haddock:
I think that this is the kind of boilerplate nonsense that some liberal pundits spew. They are always looking for the bad guy or the sellout.
First of all, I think that Obama is by nature cautious. I don’t think this is the same as timidity, but your mileage may vary. Nor does this by definition lead to bad choices. It ain’t bold vs cautious, but effective vs dumbass. Bush wasn’t timid, but he was a stooge.
Treasury emphasized stabilizing financial markets. No sane economist, not even Krugman, disagreed with this.
Now where I was displeased was with Obama filling administrative positions with a lot of old Clinton hands. I got nothing against these people, and many were good, but they were old guard and old blood, tired and worn out. And although I initially liked Obama’s choices for the key cabinet posts of Labor and Commerce (Hilda Solis and Gary Locke), I find these two to be under-performers.
My problem with Obama’s economic team is that they have too many theorists and historians, people concerned with avoiding another Depression (dumb because the causes and solutions of downturns don’t follow any hard pattern), and people to focused on large macro economic issues, as opposed to the pragmatic issues of getting credit into the system and getting people back to work.
Obama does not have, and desperately needs a Frances Perkins (FDR’s goal oriented Secretary of Labor). I like Elizabeth Warren, but it remains to be seen whether she can craft effective policy as well as she can astutely analyze problems.
And don’t get me started on the Democratic Congress, a hotbed of stale ideas. And if you want to talk about timid, start there.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Chuck Butcher: Curious, do you watch his speeches or his saturday posts?
Nick
@Tom Hilton:
I’m not sure it would have been because the end result would be both votes failing (or succeeding) and liberals whining that they failed (or succeeded)
Think about the options, what would happen if Republicans voted for both and they both passed? Then there would be no issue to whip Republicans on, they voted for tax cuts, all of them. They can turn around and say ‘Democrats voted to HIKE taxes”…and Democrats are left to explain why they voted for tax cuts then voted against them. When you’re explaining, you’re losing.
See, we often wonder how winning issues turned into losing ones and wonder how fucked up are Democrats to allow that to happen, but if you really look at it, it’s not hard to see it coming without the Democrats either seeing it coming or not being able to do anything about it.
It’s not that Democrats suck at messaging, it’s that Democratic messaging requires an intelligent and engaged population, while Republican messaging doesn’t.
Chuck Butcher
@Tom Hilton:
Since she was talking almost exclusively about their passed legislation and nearly passed legislation I have to wonder about the “lefiest” part of your objection. But then you have a theme to bang on, don’t you? If it is left of St Ronnie it’s plain craziness? Maybe I exaggerate in response to your exaggeration. Maybe not…
Chuck Butcher
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Um, he’s getting the message out now vs then isn’t he? That is my point.
Mnemosyne
@Tom Hilton:
Given that the Republicans would inevitably have insisted on voting on the over-$250K tax cuts first and then blocked the cuts for the under-$250K once the cuts for the rich were safely passed, that was an absolutely terrible idea and I’m relieved no one in Congress fell for it.
Nick
@Chuck Butcher:
but he hasn’t done anything differently. He always gave speeches and Saturday morning addresses.
Nick
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t think that’s how it would have played out. Republicans are ok with the tax cuts for under $250k. They would’ve held them up until the cuts for the rich passed and were signed into law by the President and THEN allowed the under $250k to pass…and in the process, win back Congress by getting the media to spread the narrative “Democrats will raise your taxes to spite the rich”
Then after winning back Congress, they make all tax cuts permanent and force the President to veto, which he wouldn’t.
but you’re right, it’s good Congress didn’t fall for it. So liberals are upset, big deal, they would’ve been upset anyway.
Chuck Butcher
@Nick:
That may be true about understanding policy, it isn’t so much regarding sound bytes.
“The GOP says ‘Class Warfare”, yes and the rich have won under them” isn’t very complicated.
Yes, there is that aspect that this doesn’t exactly involve an appeal to the intellect … and ?
Tom Hilton
@Nick: They might both have passed in the House, but in the Senate…not so much. That would have been a rare case where the 60-vote minimum would work to the Democrats’ advantage.
But let’s say both pass in the House but the Senate doesn’t take them up before the election. Democrats would still be better off than they are now, because Republicans wouldn’t have the Dems-raising-your-taxes attack they’re currently making.
I think this is basically true, although I put it another way: the only way Democrats win is by governing, and governing well.
General JAFO Willibro
@General Stuck: 50,000 troops is “not very many”?! FFS, man, in WW2 that was a couple of divisions.
Make ya a deal, general. You let me come over to your house and I’ll stick my finger in your eye 50,000 times. Then you can explain your idea of “many” to all us little pissants again.
Corner Stone
@Chuck Butcher: I’m just offering my opinion here so fwiw, but I hope you see how Nick argues.
He stakes out a position far away from what you originally post, then as you defend or expand your position he moves to the center of what you have said.
So after a couple back and forths there really isn’t anything left for him to say except repackage what you have previously said. But add extra fail to it.
Chuck Butcher
@Nick:
And you are relentlessly a clown, anyway. From watching your comments you classify as what passes for a liberal these days.
Tom Hilton
@Mnemosyne: I don’t agree, but it’s a fairly minor point; I brought this up as an exception, as one isolated case where the progressive position could at least arguably have been better politics. On the broader point (that this isn’t necessarily the case in general), I think you, Nick, and I are basically in agreement.
Nick
@Chuck Butcher:
you wouldn’t think so, but it is. I think people know Republicans protect the rich, and they’re ok with that because they want to be rich one day. All the Republicans need to do is trot out some Joe the Plumber or reframe them as “job-killing tax hikes” like Linda McMahon has been doing in Connecticut, and it isn’t such a winning issue.
“Republicans are for the rich!”
“Yes, because the rich give you jobs”
Nick
@Tom Hilton: Well that’s sorta what I meant, I never figured they’d get passed the Senate before the election anyway.
Bob Loblaw
I think the problem is what body of work are we comparing this administration to. The way I see it, most people posting here should be getting on their knees at night and thanking the almighty for George W. Bush. Because once you start extending the conversation back into the twentieth century, a lot of the Obama macro trends start looking pretty shitty. The twentieth century wasn’t some mystical Narnia realm of lore, it was ten years ago.
The only recession president in the last century with a weaker job creation record is W. That’s it, that’s the list. Even the H.W. Bush administration manages to outpace the Obama record, that’s why we’ve seen people so desperate to only talk about private job totals (which are still wholly inadequate to even tread water at this date) despite the ongoing stagnation in the public sector. Coming off a deep recession, that record simply isn’t going to cut it. That’s a genuine problem. You can’t blame the media for that one.
There are more uninsured Americans in this country right now than there have ever been. Over 50 million, in fact. And 2014 isn’t knocking on the doorstep any time soon. It’s over three years out, and until it gets here, the HIR bill shouldn’t be gaining in popularity. Because people are still suffering, and a fucking CBO score took precedence. That’s also a problem, and once again, not of the media’s creation.
Obama has been a very successful legislative President. One of the best, in fact. He is such an improvement on his predecessor as to be ridiculous when it comes to domestic issues. He has also been insufficient, and that insufficiency comes at a price. The two aren’t incompatible premises.
Nick
@Chuck Butcher:
yeah, yeah, yeah and now you and Corner Stone will go jerk each other off because I dismissed your importance.
Chuck Butcher
@Corner Stone:
I know. But I’m bored – I think I’ll give the Harley a bath, besides bugs it has 1 1/2 yr boy finger prints all over it. He’ll (grandson) spend 1/2 hr pointing, fingering, and naming some parts on the scooter, it and any toy like it is the most amazing thing in the world to him, even swinging doesn’t surpass and he loves that.
General Stuck
@General JAFO Willibro:
I was talking about the dying part. Because Americans don’t much care the number of troops in this or that country around the world, so long as they are not fighting and dying for no good reason.
Nick
@Bob Loblaw:
Dude, if it weren’t for Bush, Obama probably would’ve be President anyway. If Gore had been elected, one way or another, we’d probably have a Republican president, so if you’re comparing Obama to past presidents, keep in mind its Bush’s shitty record that put him in power in the first place.
it absolutely was of the media’s creation. The only thing they spoke about other than death panels was cost and how much HCR would add to the deficit. If they had placed lives over the deficit, we could’ve gotten away with a more expensive bill that implemented the system quicker.
FlipYrWhig
@Chuck Butcher:
I see a lot of merit in what you’re saying… from the standpoint of an activist. I absolutely agree that the function of activism is to keep the discussion going, to keep pushing even when things look bleak, never to compromise, and all that. I just don’t expect Democrats in the House, Senate, and White House to do that, because I don’t think it’s their role.
To use the comparison to the anti-abortion movement: what _they_ want is basically no abortions anywhere for any reason; what they have gotten isn’t really that, but nonetheless they get to hold up things like the Hyde Amendment and the Stupak Amendment _as victories_.
So I would want to make a distinction between declaring that, say, HCR or the Wall Street bill didn’t go far enough — almost certainly true — and declaring that HCR and the Wall Street bill are the work of ineffectual and/or bought-off wussies who either don’t know what the fuck they’re doing or know exactly what the fuck they’re doing because they hate you. That might still be true, but it sounds like shit from a PR perspective and IMHO doesn’t help you build the clout of your activist movement. Instead, I feel like the idea should be to declare long and loud that the best parts of these bills are there because of activists, and, America, you’re welcome.
My peeve against the left blogosphere is that it tends to process as much as possible as defeat and even persecution. Everything is either a crushing blow or a skimpy bone being thrown. I just don’t know why that’s such a prevalent mode among my online friends. I’m a pretty damn depressive and moody person IRL, and even I think it’s out of whack. None of us can stop it, I realize, but it’s just weird to me, and it’s so persistent, too.
Nick
@FlipYrWhig:
This is why I’m convinced a tax cuts vote would be a bad idea, because if it fails, the left would spin it as “they knew it would fail and were just trying to get us to vote for them. They have no intention of raising taxes on the rich”
Chuck Butcher
@Nick:
Your opinion of me is immaterial to me, I’d be insulted to have such a weak tea label as “liberal” hung on me so I’m not even remotely in the group you’ve aimed your ire at. There can be serious political/propaganda advantage to having an issue hang – see ACA and GOP/teatards.
But then, I’m making the mistake of addressing you in seriousness.
FlipYrWhig
@Chuck Butcher:
I think almost all problems with “messaging” among Democrats arise from a lack of imagination. It’s like they never know what to say next. Remember that Seinfeld where George Constanza was in a meeting eating shrimp and his coworker said, “Hey George, the ocean called, they’re running out of shrimp,” and George stewed about it until he had a comeback — days later — “The jerk store called, they’re all out of you”? But then the guy had a retort to that, so George was silent and then stewed and stewed some more? George is what way too many Democrats are like. They suck at comebacks. They fear that the Republicans will say, “He’ll raise your taxes!” or “We can’t afford it!” and then they just have nowhere to turn, they’re backed into a corner trying to come up with a “jerk store” line.
Nick
@Chuck Butcher:
I never said you were. I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about a group. I don’t know if you would’ve been satisfied if Democrats held a vote that failed, maybe you would’ve been, maybe you would’ve been enthused by the fight, if so, you’d be a rarity.
NR
@FlipYrWhig:
You are way too focused on the real or perceived reasons for Obama’s attitude of bipartisanship uber alles. The reasons are largely irrelevant; the results are what matter. And Obama’s fetish for bipartisanship has had real, tangible, negative results for both the Democratic party and the country as a whole.
For fuck’s sake, back during the health care debate, Chuck Grassley said “This health care reform bill is going to pull the plug on grandma,” and just a couple of days later Obama praised him and said he was negotiating in good faith. That’s just fucking stupid, whatever the reason behind it might be.
Nick
@FlipYrWhig:
Well that’s what happened in Connecticut.
Enter Dick Blumenthal saying we’re going to get rid of the Bush tax cuts that are causing such a large deficit.
Enter Linda McMahon saying “Connecticut will lose 13,000 jobs if they do that!” (totally pulling the number out of her ass)
Blumenthal’s response? we’re waiting
Sly
I normally don’t engage in such rituals of ego-stroking puffery, but can I get a list of all the Democratic elected officials I would need to insult to be considered a
“real” Democrathuman being by these self-absorbed losers?Chuck Butcher
@FlipYrWhig:
Um, they’re elected officials who need to convince voters, so yes it is their role – despite how they try to wiggle out. “This is what I want and I can’t get it but I’ll keep trying” will sell. Use your abortion example, it is part of what has kept the GOP in any kind of electoral position, considering what they’ve actually accomplished. People vote for you because you get them on your side and keep them there and that means selling yourself to them – instead of selling yourself to … oh say the latest big money business/cronyism interest.
AhabTRuler
So, has Nick made it over to the Dirty Sanchez thread yet? That one’s got him written all over it.
No?! I’m shocked, I say, shocked, boy! Now get in there and defend your position instead of dickering about in here with these children! There’s an argument that needs for adults of your caliber!
Chuck Butcher
@Sly:
On the Senate side, under a dozen – compared to essentially all the GOPers.
Nick
@Chuck Butcher:
Will it? Because that seems to be exactly what they’re saying and it’s not selling.
Chuck Butcher
@Nick:
After an entire thread of me advocating keeping the fight going you get here? gee whiz
FlipYrWhig
@Chuck Butcher:
Well, but they already have a solution to that: a whole lot of them don’t want to do progressive social policy in the first place, either for ideological reasons or because they think they’ll lose votes. Pushing someone like that towards progressivism has to come from the outside. Politicians who want to do the right thing already aren’t difficult to handle. It’s the ones who don’t feel like it that require all these complicated strategies.
I’m not sure about that. I think that’s an activist leader’s slogan, but I’m not sure it works for very many politicians. Politicians can’t run as Quixotes. I feel like they run on what they have done, and maybe on what they plan to do, but not so much on what their deeper, longer-range goals are. But you’re more in contact with actual real-live politicians.
Chuck Butcher
@Nick:
No, they’re not – they’re selling the GOP is worse. Not the same thing. I said near the end of the debate on health care that the Ds would need to run on it and they would run away from it and what have they done? Their silence does the GOP’s work for them, it says clearly that this “big issue” is something I’m afraid of and they’ve got me on it.
“In spite of the GOP we’ve done good work for Americans,” trumps – “they suck worse.” “They want you to die quickly if you get sick,” to steal Grayson’s line or at least a politer variant. “The GOP made sure this wouldn’t be great, but we did some good anyhow” is actually salable.
Chuck Butcher
@FlipYrWhig:
Pal, the GOP has done it with great success, there wouldn’t be one if they’d run on what they’ve fucking done. Really.
Nick
@Chuck Butcher: but that’s exactly what they’re running on. How can you not see that?
Only a handful of Dems are running on HCR and they’re the ones who voted against it. Everyone else is running on their records, even HCR.
FlipYrWhig
@Sly:
You can’t really go wrong with “all of them.”
OK, some exceptions: Feingold, Franken, Sherrod Brown, Raul Grijalva, Peter DeFazio, Grayson, John Lewis, Keith Ellison.
I’m not sure how many of the others would pass muster for soulfulness.
FlipYrWhig
@Chuck Butcher: I don’t think my local Republicans run on their grand plans. They seem to pretty much run on tax cuts and spiting liberal know-it-alls who want to take your guns and make you eat tofu. People like Paul and Joe Miller have a much vaster, more all-encompassing ideological vision than I feel like I’m accustomed to seeing.
ETA: Is that the same thing as “This is what I want and I can’t get it but I’ll keep trying”? I think the Christian right does that kind of thing in fundraising mailers, but I’m not sure about candidates themselves. I’m in a Republican-leaning part of Virginia, FWIW.
Nick
@Chuck Butcher:
Because they play by different sets of rules. do you really think a Republican would get the guff Grayson is getting right now for his ad?
CalD
Oh, cry me a frickin’ river. You want personality, wet kisses and warm fuzzies, buy a Labrador Retriever.
Seriously Ken, yes, please, by all means, please go. Paint, write a book, join a commune, take up organic farming, go on a walkabout, whatever you need to do to come to peace with all the myriad ways you feel the democratic party, the world, the human race have failed to live up to your standards of conduct. Just please, pretty please with sugar on top, please stop whining. I’m begging.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
Exactly. Every little step they take towards their goal is accepted and celebrated as a victory by their supporters.
I’m not really getting how people can simultaneously say, “The health insurance bill sucked and the Democrats were fools not to run on it being awesome sauce.” Hello, you just spent 9 months telling them that it sucked and you hated it! Why on earth should they be proud of and run on something that the activists vocally hate and did their best to defeat?
General Stuck
@General JAFO Willibro:
You can come over, and I will shove a midol up your sorry ass, and we will call it a day.
General JAFO Willibro
@General Stuck: You’ve really run out of everything but rage these days, haven’t ya?
General Stuck
@General JAFO Willibro:
nah, I’m just getting started.
Smiling Mortician
@Chuck Butcher:
You’re kidding, right? You have simply got to be kidding. Look, Obama campaigned on the idea that change takes time and that he can’t do it alone. It’s how he got the youth vote fired up. He didn’t start talking about it recently; he’s been making this point literally for YEARS. He said, from the very beginning of his campaign, that it was going to be hard and that there would be obstacles and disappointments along the way. The day I decided I wanted him to be the nominee was the day I first heard him eloquently explain that the race wasn’t about him — that it was about everyone who had hope that together we could make change happen, not overnight but over time. That’s where the “hope” part of the campaign came from. And he’s been making the same argument all along, in speeches, in his weekly addresses, in interviews. Jeez. Where the hell have you been?
The Raven
think a bit more sympathy for someone who did believe in “hope and change” and has decided there is little change and little hope might be in order, even if you think he is wrong. If you care about your party, you might try making the case that there is real hope and change, and if you think that case can’t be made, then need you respond at all? Mr. Silverstein’s side is the loser in this debate, can you not at least be gracious victors?
Mnemosyne
@The Raven:
It’s not so much that he (or she) is “wrong” as that they’re too impatient. After you hear the kid in the back seat wail, “Are we there yet?” for the hundredth time while you’re stuck in a traffic jam, you get a little snappy.
mclaren
@arguingwithsignposts:
Of course you did. The truth hurts.
mclaren
@JMY:
[1] Obama is worse than Bush on assassinating American citizens without charges or a trial — not even Bush tried that;
[2] Obama is worse than Bush on justifying violations of the constitution: Obama claims that U.S. citizens targeted for unconstitutional assassination without charges or a trial don’t even have the right to ask a judge to stop it because the entire process is a state secret;
[3] Obama is worse than Bush on Afghanistan. He’s ramping up the troops faster and widening the war more than Bush did;
[4] Obama is worse than Bush on crushing dissent; Bush ridiculed anyone who opposed endless war and kidnapping and torture as “a bunch of focus groups,” while Obama has sneered at them as “the professional left”;
[5] Obama is worse than Bush on health care. The Bush people merely ignored the health care crisis, while Obama has worsened it by using the ower of the IRS to force every American to buy insurance from unaccountable private companies with no cost controls, creating a gigantic abusive monopoly that not even Bush succeeded in creating;
[6] Obama is worse than Bush on Wall Street. Bush ignored the catastrophic failure of the system because he was too stupid and too ignorant to realize what it would mean, while Obama has signed off on continuing those systemic failures with the full knowledge that they’ll soon cause another meltdown more disastrous than the first one;
[7] Obama is worse than Bush because he gives people false hope. Bush told everyone what his agenda was: “The haves, and the have-mores — some people call you the elite: I call you my base.” But Obama gulls people by making noble inspiring speeches, then doing the opposite of what he talks about in his speeches…and he does it time and time again.
How much more to do you need?
Saying that we can’t claim Obama has been a disappointment after only two years is like saying you can’t call an egg rotten until you eat the whole thing.
Xanthippas
Well, I got through the first ten comments and lost my patience. Have any of you actually read Silverstein before? Never heard of anybody DougJ or John Cole don’t link to?
Silverstein isn’t a firebagger, which I guess is now what we throw out (along with a “meh”) at anybody who bothers to register disappointment with the Obama administration. He’s seen how things work inside DC, and he’s seen enough to know that quite a bit of that isn’t going to change however historic our elections are. And he’s right. That Packer column on the Senate? That’s the sort of thing Silverstein has been writing about forever. There are things that are structurally wrong with our government and democracy, and there are arguments to be made that it’s getting worse, not better, no matter who we elect.
I feel sorry for him, but I’m thankful for his hard work covering the corruption in DC on both the part of Democrats and Republicans. I applaud him for lasting as long as he has. All I’ve done is read and occasionally write a half-ass blog post about the stuff I’ve read about, and that’s all it took for me to become almost completely disillusioned with it all. I’m amazed anybody with any integrity lasts as long as he did.
The Raven
@Xanthippas: Thank you. I think I know what you mean. People who tough it out, even for a while, do a great service.
arguingwithsignposts
@mclaren:
Sorry I missed you mclaren, just so I could say: fuck off, idiot. And all the proof I need is here: @mclaren mr. “all californians are morons.”
parsimon
@Xanthippas:
Yes, this. Silverstein has done some truly gutsy, unparalleled work; I’d compare his exposes to some of what Greg Palast has done.
I was frankly pretty sobered and stunned by his sign-off.
Johnny Pez
@General Stuck:
Fixed that for ya, General.
Paula
@parsimon:
Well, I’ll answer this. It’s because Silverstein’s done such good work that the pettiness of this is so shocking, but maybe not that shocking in light of the fact that his tone seemed be a volatile this summer even in regards to petty subjects (like soccer, for god’s sakes).
But I will say that being a journalist and not being able to tough it out, and then blaming a politicians for acting like politicians and Americans for acting like the ignoramuses they are is … naive, to say the least, and not indicative of the kind of commitment and common sense that he’s shown in the past.