A Letter to a Whiny Young Democrat Progressive.
This:
See what happens when you wallow in hollow disappointment, trudging all over your liberal arts campus and refusing to vote in a rather important mid-term election, all because your pet issues and nubile ego weren’t immediately serviced by a mesmerizing guy named Barack Obama just after he sucked you into his web of fuzzyhappy promises a mere two years ago, back when you were knee-high to a shiny liberal ideology?
Well, now you know. This is what happens: The U.S. House of Representatives, the most insufferable gaggle of political mongrels this side of, well, the rest of Congress, reverts to GOP control like a brain tumor reverts to a more aggressive form of cancer, and everything gets bleaker and sadder and, frankly, a whole lot nastier.
What happens is: Many kinds of fragmented, muddled, but still constructive Democratic progress might get stopped quite nearly dead, and even a few pieces of legislation we actually did gain get slapped around, threatened, stomped on the head like a scientist at a Rand Paul rally. Happy now?
::ducks and covers::
My liver hurts, I have to finish a motion for summary judgment tonight, and also, my liver hurts.
~Angry Liver Lady out!~
(H/T Danielle!)
MattR
Because I refuse to actually pay attention to the mainstream coverage of the election I don’t know if they have released the data, but did the exit polls show a huge drop in youth voting? Were there any other interesting pieces of data I should care about?
fourlegsgood
In my neck of the woods, many students failed to vote because they didn’t understand that they had to go to their fucking precinct on election day.
Idiots.
Frank
All I can say, is good one. I just threw my sponge brick at my monitor while laughing.
We’ll see what happens. Obama is a smart man and likes putting the GOP in catch 22 situations. Hopefully we’ll survive the fallout.
Martin
Well, all in all, I’m pretty pleased with the outcome. I’m of the view that in spite of the House, good things are coming if people would just quit fucking whining, blaming each other, and get back to it.
JGabriel
I confess, I’m not seeing how haranguing young adults, like the disappointed parents they avoid calling, really helps us get out their vote.
.
Hunter Gathers
Bully pulpit, better communication, public option, real progressives, more executive orders, damned bipartisanship, sell outs, betrayals, bus throwing under, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Meanwhile, at the Legion of Doom…..
fourlegsgood
@MattR: Yes. It did. By more than 10 percentage points.
The old, angry “get off my lawn” white people turned out in droves. Youth (the under 30’s) not so much.
They’ll have no one to blame but themselves when the goopers start trying to take THEIR social security and their student loans aways from them. Oh, and continue to off-shore their jobs.
NR
Sure. Blame the voters. Don’t blame the party and the president whose milquetoast corporatism didn’t give them a reason to turn out.
Why don’t you keep on with that attitude and see how far it gets you in 2012?
Dave C
@NR:
If you didn’t vote, you’re not a voter. And as a youngish citizen (27) who did vote in this and every election since I’ve been eligible, I do partially blame those who could have voted but didn’t.
Yutsano
@NR:
Uhhh…yeah I’m blaming the voters. More importantly, I’m blaming those who AREN’T voting even more. We’ve had thirty years of destructive economic and social policies and you’re pissed because Obama didn’t change it all NAOW!!1!one!. Unicorns are for fantasy movies and breakfast cereal boxes, we need solutions that involve everyone, including old folks and Republicans.
General Stuck
You are the bees knees ABL.
I learned that phrase from a commenter here a while ago, and was assured it was a compliment.
MikeJ
Can I post the same response in two threads in a row?
You mean he should have done things like cut the middlemen out of student loans? Perhaps he should have allowed kids to stay on their parents insurance until they were 26?
suzanne
Bullshit. It’s a fucking civic duty. If I needed to be “inspired” in order to engage on an essential level in society, I’d sit around in my PJs all day masturbating and watching game shows.
We all have a reason.
jl
Democratic voters who didn’t vote because they are pissy over their hopes and dreams remaining unfulfilled should be criticized and lectured.
But I agree with NR. Turnout is a problem in US elections, and more of a problem in Democrats, an even more of a problem in some of Obama’s key constituencies in 2008. The party leadership should have known this might be a problem from the day they took office. Actually, they should have started thinking about it soon after they won the election.
The youth vote turns out when it is enthusiastic about a cause, and dies away when it is not. They got numbers on this stuff and you can watch the swings from midterm to midterm.
@Suzanne: but people win elections by what people actually do, not what they should do. So Obama and the party leadership should have worried more about how to make people actually do what they should: actually turn out to vote.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@NR: Ah ha. The Point appears to have eluded you.
Also in the category of “appears to have eluded you”: The possibility that ABL might be fully capable of recognizing the limitations of this current government and yet still can see clear as day where the attitude of declaring that one didn’t have “a reason to turn out” got us, right here in 2010.
It got us the fucking House in fucking GOP hands. Et voila! And… scene.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@MikeJ: Heh. Yes, that might have helped. Too bad no one thought to do that, or anything….
Zifnab
You know, you say that as though the only people who voted for Obama in ’08 were under 30. The Democratic waves of ’06 and ’08 were won with a substantial number of independents and disaffected conservatives. Swing voters. You remember those guys, right? They turned out in droves to protest President Bush and the shitty GOP controlled Congress. It wasn’t just the youth vote, and it was a movement that had been building steam since Kerry and ’04.
The Democrats had a mandate built up over 8 years – to end the wars, to address the economy, and to prosecute the Bush administration – and they failed to fulfill it. And when Citizen’s United came down, the Democrats didn’t rush to stop the gusher of undocumented corporate cash that flooded the election cycle.
So blaming 20-somethings who are still learning how to get politically motivated because the multi-billion dollar GOP political machine finally found traction seem – to me at least – a bit fucking absurd.
Suffern ACE
@suzanne: Is it Drew Carey or Alec Trebec that would inspire that behavior.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
Also, by the way, ABL? This. Motherfucking THIS!
Martin
@NR:
Well, don’t you paint the compelling picture for people to go vote? Tell us, what was Sarah Palin’s pitch to young Democrats?
DPirate
Just like a democrat to blame others on their side. That’s what the democrats do. They blame blue-dogs and Lieberman and Feingold and Kennedy, in-between blaming their opposition, of course, because they’ve apparently decided beforehand that everyone but their own sorry selves is to blame.
Cute rant, like children are cute when they hold their breath and turn blue.
jwb
@JGabriel: This. I really don’t quite get this rant. So he thinks the kids are whiny and lazy? For sake of argument, let’s grant the premise: a whiny, lazy kid is going to respond to this dressing down exactly how? ok, that doesn’t work. so let’s presume that he’s pretending that the kids are whiny and lazy in order to motivate them. The kids are going to respond to this dressing down exactly how? still not working. ok, he needs a scapegoat on which to hang this election, the youth apparently didn’t vote and seem a good target, so let’s rant on them. ok, he feels better but this is going to help us get out the youth vote exactly how? still not working. I get the disappointment. At some level I even get the rage, but ranting at potential supporters may not be the most effective way of motivating them. For many, it will probably have the opposite effect. Just saying.
morzer
@Martin:
If I have to quit fucking, I shall denounce you, sir, as unAmerican before the House Special Committee.
Seriously, until young people and indeed Americans of all stripes learn that instant stuff is never good for you and that a real life takes work, well, we shall continue to elect a bunch of corrupt, self-pleasing fucknutters on a regular basis. Also too, the GOP.
Calouste
@General Stuck:
Yep, ABL is the dog’s bollocks.
Yutsano
@suzanne:
As a very happily gay man, I still found that eerily stimulating. I think wifey’s bisexualness is starting to rub off some. I think I need some Dawg attention stat.
Brian J
@Martin:
Get back to what?
If it’s trying to take back the House, win additional senate seats, win governorships, and so on, I agree. It’s always easy to talk, but it’s less easy to actually do something. As soon as it’s appropriate, we should think about 2012. (I don’t know when that is, but I’d venture to say it’s no earlier than January of this year.) I hate to sound like some sort of life coach here, but there’s nothing to be gained by approaching 2012 as if we are scared or nothing can be accomplished.
Joseph Nobles
In January, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul will have the power to filibuster.
NR
@Martin: Maybe you slept through last night, but the election is over and the “clap louder” side lost.
Maybe you should start thinking about how you’re going to motivate people to turn out for you in 2012, because as we’ve just seen, “We suck ever-so-slightly less than the other guys” isn’t going to do the trick.
jwb
@morzer: Do you have any data on why the youth didn’t turn out?
Calouste
@MikeJ:
You can repost that in every single thread. You could be Balloon-Juice’s very own Cato the Elder.
Bob Loblaw
Wait, I thought it didn’t matter what these totally racist white kids ended up doing because the super base black voters would totally have their President’s back? But they didn’t turn out in 2008 numbers either!
Man, it’s almost as though there remains a built-in disparity in how every single part of the Democratic coalition views midterm election importance vs. presidential years that can’t be unwritten in a few cycles alone, especially given the brutality of the economic conditions that young and minority voters face right now. But I’m sure the guilt tripping and brow beating will totally work this time…
jwb
@Bob Loblaw: Hey, we agree on something for change. I’m not sure what to make of that.
Mayur
Oh, fuck you.
You really think that it was the mad-as-hell committed PROGRESSIVES who didn’t turn out in this election? Are you fucking insane?
I have at least a sample size of a couple hundred young committed progressives and a couple hundred TDS-fan-we-don’t-give-a-shit-but-isn’t-Obama-cool types and I’ll tell you that in that sample, it was overwhelmingly the latter who failed to turn out and vote against the teabaggers.
Stop it. This hippie-punching is getting embarrassing.
b-psycho
If voting doesn’t actually produce enough change for people, then they should consider some sort of direct action & cut out the middlemen. Represent your damn selves.
Suffern ACE
I really don’t get to hang out with a lot of young people these days, so could one of you young ones who did vote go and find a few of your young friends who didn’t and ask them why? Results to be reported back next Thursday at noon.
Brian J
@JGabriel:
There’s nothing to be gained by it besides not going crazy. It’s sort of like finally getting something off your chest by screaming at someone who has been driving you up the wall. You feel great, then feel bad, and then go back to normal.
jwb
@Mayur: The rage is strong in this one. Inchoate, but strong.
Joseph Nobles
@fourlegsgood: “The old, angry “
get off my lawnI feel guilty for passing on debt and deficits to my kids and grandkids” white people turned out in droves.”Fixed that for you. It amazes me how a Republican can blame Democrats for using scare tactics against seniors when that line came out of their mouths six times a second this election season.
Luthe
I would just like to say that *some* of us twenty-somethings voted. Of course, the fact that I read this blog means I do know exactly how crazy the other side is, which helps…
Mayur
@jwb: What the hell does that mean? Inchoate? Really? Can you actually offer me a proper refutation of my position here?
Let me be crystal clear here. Which of these two positions regarding low Democratic turnout are you willing to support?
1) A hissy fit by Hamsherites and Huffington-ites and whatever other “whiny young progressives” ABL is inventing in her post.
2) Depressed turnout among fair-weather cosmetically liberal but actually I-don’t-give-a-fuck voters, including the minority and youth contingents that pushed 2008’s (D) numbers.
morzer
@jwb:
One of the best known facts in American politics is that the youth consistently do not show up for the midterm elections. As to why – many theories have been advanced, including apathy, other things to do, lack of political awareness, disillusionment once the excitement of the presidential race is over… any and all of the above.
It would be interesting, and perhaps more valuable, to ask several other questions:
1) How did Democrats organize the youth vote last time – and did they fail to match their effort this time?
2) Are the youth aware of the significance of the midterms?
3)How directly involved were the youth in political organizing in 2008, and did that change in 2010?
4) To what extent have Democrats tried to sell youth-friendly policies, such as reform of student loans?
Chris
(shrug)
Now, now, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
But if we’re going to chuckle at stupid hippie kids failing to turn out in sufficient numbers to thwart their older, whiter, more conservative fellow Americans (sufficient numbers being: about twenty million more), I think we’re also entitled to ask the “I got this!” and “eleven-dimensional chess” Obama supporters to take some lumps too.
By the way, where was the “We’re Democrats, and we brought you better health care, better student loan deals, tax cuts, an exit strategy from war(s) (sorta), DID WE FUCKING MENTION THE TAX CUTS? YOU PEOPLE LOVE REPUBLICANS FOR GIVING YOU THAT SHIT, and an end to the Bush-Cheney axis of idiocy” messaging?
(I mean, I get that Dems couldn’t agree on a campaign message involving any of the following: gay rights, ENDA, women’s rights, EFCA, climate-change legislation, oil-spill/environmental policy, lowering unemployment, campaign finance reform, Wall Street reform (asterisk: might work; might suck down the rest of the world economy – pardon my pessimism), TARP/bailouts, actually getting out of Iraq/Afghanistan, improving civil liberties — because not only did Democrats disagree about those issues, but they also managed to do nothing on them. But really, they couldn’t’ve put up a united front to defend the semi-popular shit they did actually get done?)
Sleeper
I really wish people would drop the stupid meme that anyone disappointed with Obama was just being a naive fool for expecting instantaneous change or Utopia or a pony or for him to wave his magic wand or whatever dumb expression is kewl today. There’s a difference between demanding to be chauffeured to the Promised Land five minutes ago, and demanding that we at least set out driving in the right direction, and take the parking brake off first. Now, you can agree or disagree with the idea that we’re going the wrong way, or we’re going too slowly. Many, if not most around here, would probably disagree with it. I happen to agree with it (and yes I did go and vote for my lame Dem candidates yesterday anyway). But please stop misrepresenting what Obama’s critics on the lefty/liberal/progressive side are saying. I know you think we’re all dumb fucking children, because 90% of the posts here seem to drip with condescension for the disappointed folks, so maybe this comment is wasting my time and yours. But deliberate misrepresentation is annoying no matter which side does it.
We’re really not the ones who lost this election for the Dems. They did that all on their own. But it’s over and we should all look for ways to undo some of the GOP’s gains next time around. One of those ways is to find a way of getting people who are ordinarily apathetic about politics (which excludes all of us) to rally around the Dems and help deliver some good, liberal Dems back into power two years from now. And for my money, the best way to start doing that is to present voters with a clear and compelling choice. Embracing Blue Dogs is counter-productive for us in the long run, because they’re just not that different from Republicans. Not to people who don’t follow politics 24-7. I hope Obama, Reid, and whoever winds up leading the House Dems come around to this idea.
Martin
@Brian J: We’ve got legislators to call and write to let them know what we still expect of them. We know the tea partiers are asking them to burn the government to the ground, but we’re going to be there voting for them in 2 years.
We’re past the point of protecting our incumbents. We get a year and a half of asking them to step up and finding primary challengers for those that don’t. We don’t need to do the GOP purity shit, but lay down some realistic expectations given the state of Congress and the WH and ask them to meet them. If the expectation is that you expect to see them on TV defending what they’ve passed, that’s good enough.
We’re heading into a presidential election. The GOP is already lining up their corporate profits to fund their 2012 races. Dems are going to have to win this through a fuckton of hard work. Now’s the time to do that work. Dems made 75 million GOTV calls over the last month. There’s data to clean up. Potential candidates to line up so that every race is contested. Let’s get to it.
Violet
@Joseph Nobles:
Fixed your fix. Those people don’t feel guilty about something as vague as debt their kids and grandkids might have. That’s those kids’ faults. And the kids should stay off the lawn.
MikeJ
@Mayur:
Unfinished. Like the kind of argument that would come from somebody still In prep school, like Choate.
I’ll leave before humorless etymologists beat me to death.
suzanne
@Yutsano:
Hey, sitting around in PJs masturbating and watching game shows is a turn-on for everyone.
Right?
Martin
@NR: You’re the one claiming that, not me. I think the Dems did a great job the last 2 years. Sure, there are disappointments, but they completely transformed the public’s relationship with health care. They enacted long-term entitlement cost reduction, and long term deficit reduction. If you’d take the time to drop your talking points and actually see what they did and understand it, you might realize just what’s been done here.
AB
I don’t suppose it’s worth pointing out that shit like this doesn’t actually make young voters vote? It’s just a tantrum.
mclaren
Shorter Mark Morford:
jwb
@Mayur: Inchoate rage—rage taking form but so overwhelming and full of venom that neither its source nor its target was particularly clear. If you read what I wrote above, you’ll see that I would opt more for (2) over (1); but I doubt that it is either productive or accurate to call (2) “I don’t give a fuck” voters. The fact that you classify them thus suggests that you are looking for a scapegoat every bit as much as those you rage against.
General Stuck
Shit, no one was a bigger stoner than I was back in the day. I didn’t follow politics much, but when election time came around, something in my spaced out self put the bong down, got up off the couch, and made it to the voting booth. Every time for presidential elections, though a little spotty for midterms. There wasn’t someone on my teevee inspiring me, mostly because I didn’t have a teevee, and no where were there rock and roll lyrics to get fired up to vote. Just did it.
Sentient Puddle
@Suffern ACE: Unfortunately, just about all my friends voted, so I got nothing. But if I were to take a guess, it’d look something like this…
Young people just haven’t experienced many elections, so the sting of losing hits deeper when they haven’t experienced a win. I’m basing this off my first two elections, 2002 and 2004. Day after election day ’04, I had a real sense of “Why am I even fucking bothering with politics?”
Maybe that doesn’t quite jive with ’06 and ’08, but when the discourse is all about how much of a disappointment Obama has been, then it starts to feel like these elections aren’t much better than losses, aye?
jwb
@morzer: I agree, and I’m sorry if my query came off as a challenge. Your statement just made me think that perhaps you’d seen some actual statistics from this election.
ondioline
CLAP HARDER, INGRATES!
GregB
By the way, in the event of a terrorist attack lets not forget to repeat the old Dick Cheney line.
If the GOP wins, there’s a chance we’ll be hit and hit hard.
Just Some Fuckhead
@NR:
Exit polls indicated that voters agreed Democrats suck slightly less than Republicans. But they still voted ’em down. So, yeah, I’m interested in the new strategery too.
Wallace
I have a hard time believing the premise of this post is accurate. You don’t vote for Democrats or Republicans, generally. You can only vote for the candidates on your local ballot. And I have a hard time believing that, for the most part, politically motivated progressives didn’t show up and vote for the Democrat on their ballot. I’m generally annoyed at how ineffective Democrats have been, but I still showed up and voted for Colleen Hanabusa. And I don’t think Russ Feingold, for instance, lost because young progressives in Wisconsin decided not to vote to protest Obama.
There’s a lot of anxiety about the economy and jobs among young people. And for those who aren’t politically partisan, the Democrats haven’t given them a lot of reason to show up and vote for them. You’ve got morons on one side, and the other side keeps explaining how even a majority isn’t sufficient to get anything done. That doesn’t motivate turn out among those who aren’t inclined to identify themselves with either party.
mclaren
@jl:
Depends. Turnout varies hugely by age cohort. From age 50 to 80, the turnout is a reliable 65%. to 75% From age 18 to 25, the turnout for even thrilling hope-and-change elections like 2008 hardly ever goes above 50%, and for midterm elections the turnout for age 18-25 voters drops to a miserable 35%.
That’s unconscionable.
If young people hate the way the system works, VOTE IN MIDTERM ELECTIONS. Vote in a giant block. Get the turnout for 18 to 25s up to 90%, 95%, and you will change the world.
GregB
Oh yeah and Tim Kaine should be filling coffee orders at the nearest Krispy Kreme instead of running the DNC.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Martin:
Dude, this is hyperbole. We were just informed we were losing employer family coverage. Guess what kind of
options we found out we had with ACAnew relationship we have with health care?Same as the old one.
Chris
Also, about the “I want it all… AND I WANT IT NOW!” thing:
1. Obama had teams of people going around during the post-election, pre-inauguration period, spending two and a half months figuring out what to do. How the hell did they manage to underestimate the value of actually putting people into all the executive-branch and judicial positions of government? We all know Republicans threatened to filibuster everyone, but is the proper answer to that really not even maximizing the nominations for positions? And would anyone like to argue the ratio of recess appointments to empty, president-gets-to-appoint-people positions is over 1:10, or even 1:100? (I’m not even going to ask how the “Let’s not piss off the Republicans!” strategy went.)
2. When you run for and get elected president, you only get four years (you might, of course, get four more, but there’re few guarantees). That four years happens to be punctuated by a midterm election. It’s conventional, common wisdom that the president’s party loses seats in those elections, which means that the time to get shit done is during Year 1 and Year 2, because Year 3 and Year 4 are consumed by campaigning and your opponents accusing you of doing everything with a political purpose. So, exactly how unreasonable was it to hope that Obama might do (or hell, fight for) close to half the stuff he, um, *campaigned* on claiming to want to do, if elected?
3. I probably ought to duck preemptively here, but if we’re *not* supposed to take our political leaders at their word about their priorities and values when they’re running for office, would someone like to explain how we’re supposed to tell the difference between promises-we-should-believe and promises-that’re-supposed-to-fool-*other*-people-and-not-sophisticated-folks-like-ourselves? I don’t expect them to enact everything (or even a fifth of what) they promise, but it’d be nice to calibrate my cynicism more accurately, so I don’t get disappointed when we extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich in the hopes that David Brooks will write a slightly positive column a couple months before the next election.
curious
@Joseph Nobles: have they ever explained why we shouldn’t raise taxes now to avoid passing on massive debt to future generations? because freedom?
J
As I see it, yesterday’s choice was between corporate whores and total sociopaths.
If those are your options, not pulling the lever for the corporate whores really isn’t very smart…
Martin
@Just Some Fuckhead: I’m very sorry to hear that, but it’ll come back.
JGabriel
Ben Bernanke on Quantitative Easing 2.0 (via Atrios):
Why do our leaders expect us to believe that a virtuous circle can be started and sustained by people who are clearly unvirtuous?
I don’t know whether QE2 will have much affect or not. I suspect that Krugman, Atrios, Stiglitz, Delong, et.al., are right that the effects will be minimal at best, but that is just shoddy fucking rhetoric. After the past two years, no one is going to believe any paragraph that contains both virtue and finance.
Utterly clueless.
.
Mayur
@jwb: You didn’t seriously think that I was inquiring after the dictionary definition of the word “inchoate,” did you?
My point was pretty clear, and by the way, it wasn’t about looking for a scapegoat but rather interposing a barrier between ABL, numerous other BJers, and the FUCKING SCAPEGOAT that is being constructed in the form of “whiny young democrats [progressives]” IN THE FUCKING TITLE OF THE POST!
Jeebus. You people are sad.
Suffern ACE
@Sentient Puddle: Thank you. I think that might be part of it.
jwb
@Sentient Puddle: The moment I became aware of disenchantment among the students was when Obama was given the Nobel Prize. That really, really irked many of them, which they saw as fundamentally undeserved and so unfair. That severed some sort of thread of identification and the connection never seemed as strong afterward. He was simply another politician whom they could either support or not, but he was no longer part of them. It was actually an intensely fascinating process to watch, that severing of the thread, and as it was happening in front of me in my class, I wasn’t certain what I could do in my role as teacher, since the classroom is not at all the place to have that sort of political conversation.
Suck It Up!
@Chris:
Why does there always have to be a gimmick? Does everything need a jingle or a catch phrase for people to understand what he’s done or what any politicians done? How much clearer does ” we cut taxes for 95% of Americans” need to be? Maybe Obama should consult with the makers of children shows to figure out how to get across already simple facts? Obama’s done a lot of interviews and he never fails to mention what he’s done. During the mid-term campaign he went before hundreds of college campuses (mostly through satellite) and bragged about the accomplishments that affected people their age. If these folks can’t process serious info without it being in a rap song, jingle, secretly hiding in a video game somewhere, or from someone not wearing a meat dress then we’re in serious trouble.
jwb
@Mayur: You’re the one who answered scapegoating with scapegoating. You just wanted a different scapegoat. Talk about sad.
ETA: and if you look at what I wrote above, you’ll see that I think the article ABL posted is completely wrong headed.
Martin
@JGabriel: It’s not clueless. It’s desperate. What other kind of stimulus is going to pass the House and Senate? None?
Well, hail-mary it is, then.
jl
IMHO, a bad economy meant that the incumbent party, any incumbent party, even lead by people like Reagan and Clinton, would take a big hit in the midterms. It happened this year just like it did in previous administrations.
Are there even enough disgruntled non youth ‘progressives’ in most parts of the country to make a difference in the House elections?
So, the bad economy, and I think the administration’s apparent acceptance of a very very bad labor market for up to four or more years, seemingly as a unchangeable fact of nature, the natural way of existence, was the biggest problem.
Brad DeLong has a post about this.
And interesting piece of info from Delong’s post from a recent USA Today/Gallup poll:
What should be highest priority for Congress after the election:
New stimulus: 38%
Cutting federal spending: 24%
Repealing HCR: 23%
extending Bush II tax cuts: 8%
I don’t see how muttering ‘but they didn’t have the votes’ makes any difference. The Democratic party should have been aggressively arguing for ways to get the job market going. Most of us give Obama the benefit of the doubt, but I do not see why the average voter would do that, or should do that.
Paul Krugman on the Strange Death of Expansionary Fiscal Policy
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/11/paul-krugman-on-the-strange-death-of-expansionary-fiscal-policy.html
Details of USA Today Gallup poll from:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/144164/Democrats-Favor-New-Stimulus-Republicans-Healthcare-Repeal.aspx
Suck It Up!
@jwb:
That makes no sense. It wasn’t Obama’s fault he got the nobel peace prize. Do they think he took the prize from someone else? why doesn’t that feeling translate into gotv? why allow a party that rewards people who didn’t earn or deserve their riches to take over?
Nathanael
Was this snark?
It’s not young progressives who didn’t vote, it’s young independents etc. who were too busy trying to deal with unemployment and homelessness. And they would have voted if there was some way for us progressives to really get them enthused, but thanks to the asinine policy choices, there wasn’t.
MattR
@Suck It Up!:
“Because this is America” and “Yes”. SATSQ
Just Some Fuckhead
@MikeJ:
They can’t if they have shitty employee plans available.
General Stuck
If anyone ever wanted to count the number idiots that are also democrats and liberals, the internet has provided blogs to gather them all in one place. I suppose I will include myself, as well.
Violet
@Suck It Up!:
Because we have very short attention spans and a gimmick catches people’s attention. It’s basic marketing. Judge it all you like and work to change it, but right now that’s the game. Play to win.
As a general rule yes. See above, short attention spans. That’s why soundbites work. It’s why messaging works. It’s why “Hope and Change” and Yes We Can!” worked in 2008. Not everyone needs the jingle or soundbite, but those that don’t need it are probably already voting. You’re trying to get the other people’s attention. A jingle or catch phrase helps.
Bnut
If there was really a liberal MSM conspiracy, articles like this would never get published. Can’t you see some intern at the Limbaugh Snake Oil and Enemas Show reading that article and getting so worked up he has to take a cold shower before informing some producer. This producer then takes it to Rush, who can either say “The Dems are concerned the Twittertards are losing faith! Be on the lookout for an increase in Youth Activation Squads of Indoctrination!” Or how about, “Hey Middle American young adults who I can reach easily and manipulate. The scary SF gay-hippie-pot-MSM thinks you suck. WE can give you that easy gratification. Here’s you Army signing bonus!” I could so do Rush’s job.
Suffern ACE
@jwb: Did you get any sense that that trip to grab the Olympics that came up short was also a bit of a disconnector for them? (Personally, I thought it was a bit foolish to use the bully pulpit that way.)
Mayur
So why engage on this level then anyway if you were refuting the point made in ABL’s post?
Brian J
@NR:
If we don’t show up, someone worse certainly wins. It sucks to have to compromise, but if politics is like climbing a mountain, you don’t go right back down to the bottom because you don’t hit the top the first time.
Hunter Gathers
@Suck It Up!: Most people have the attention span of a gnat.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to check my e-mail, Facebook, MySpace (does anyone still use that?), 67 other blogs, flip through 984 TV channels, write 1215 text messages, walk the dog and burp the baby, every 15 minutes or so. What were we talking about again?
Kryptik
That was a horrible fucking article, if only because it was frontloaded with gratuitous shitkicking of youth voters before it actually got to the point of the thing. If not for the first few paragraphs, which I get were as much catharsis as anything, it might have been a nice thing. As is…kind of a fucking turnoff for a major news paper op-ed, and if you really wanted to get into the heads of politically active youths? Spending 5 paragraphs telling them how much they suck before finally conceding that that it wasn’t ALL their fault and there were plenty of fuck ups to be had in the election is not the way to do it.
And fuck all, I fucking understand the apathy now. I’ve been pretty damn politically tuned since the 2000 election made me seethe long enough to actually follow this shit. But like I mentioned before, it really does feel more and more like the country just can’t suffer a Dem or a Liberal to live, much less govern. It feels like Dems only get elected as a means to help people forget that Republicans are fuckups just in time to vote them in again a couple years later, because hey, at least they’re not fucking dirty anti-American hippie fucking liberals.
It just feels so fucking fixed that I can’t fucking muster any enthusiasm anymore. It feels like having my head banged against a wall for 10 hours straight and then being kicked the nuts by the neighbors for making too much noise while the fuckers slamming my head into the wall get invited for milk and cookies. I can’t feel anything but pain from the whole process anymore, and I mean that literally now. The whole thing literally makes my head throb and physically drains me, because everything I see, everything I read, everything I watch ends up bringing me to the big picture that ‘You dont’ fucking matter, because you’re a liberal, which means America fucking hates you and will never take you seriously ever.’
Suffern ACE
@Chris: I think that number 3 is also a topic worth exploring, since I get the sense that a lot of people, especially young voters, haven’t decided yet whether to be cynical supporters or believers just yet.
PeakVT
Blame the voters. Don’t blame the party and the president whose milquetoast corporatism…
Both are to blame. Even if Obama has done a lousy job (debatable) that doesn’t mean voters should sit at home sucking on their thumbs on election day. At the end of the process, somebody is going to end up with their hands on the levers of government power. Voters should always show up whether or not their fee-fees have been hurt.
morzer
@jwb:
I do know that the youth turnout dropped quite a bit relative to 2008 (voters under 30 dropped from 18% of the electorate to 11%) – but in line with what was expected going by previous electoral cycles.
I don’t know if anyone on the Democrats’ side has considered surveying young voters and trying to figure out what made the difference, and what would have motivated non-voters to turn out. I’d have thought it was a fairly sensible thing to do, and probably not hugely expensive. That said, African Americans also made up a lower proportion of the electorate relative to 2008 by 3%.
Some of this is due to the fact that older voters turn out more reliably, which skews the electorate towards the whiter end of the scale as well, as much as the relative failure of younger people to turn out.
An overall survey:
http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2010/11/a_wave_with_an_undertow_but_no.php
A data point on youth turnout:
http://www.civicyouth.org/youth-turnout-about-20-comparable-to-recent-midterm-years/
jwb
@Suck It Up!: It made no sense to me either, and, when they asked me about it, that’s what I told them as well (although I tried to say as little as possible, because I really didn’t want to be discussing this sort of political issue in the first place). In any case, I’m just reporting what I observed in the class and that it really seemed to change how those students thought about Obama. There were about 15 students, masters level (ages from 22-25), so not a large sample size and they are obviously a little older than undergrads, but I’m convinced it was not an unusual reaction.
JGabriel
@Martin:
No, I get that. I was describing the rhetoric Bernanke’s using to sell QE2 as clueless. Virtuous circle my fucking ass.
There’s got to be less insulting ways to sell QE2 — essentially another handout/cheap loan to the banks and financiers who got us into this mess — than invoking virtue.
.
Yutsano
@Bnut:
There is not enough brain bleach in existence to remove that mental image from my cerebral cortex. I shall be submitting my therapy bills to thee forthwith.
@suzanne:
Keep talking like that and you just might get a fake-marriage proposal from a bisexual tattooed Taiwanese chick who teases out a mean beehive.
Angry Black Lady
@Mayur: when does the shelf-life of “hippy punching” expire?
talk about embarrassing.
nope. nowhere did i say that.
yes. duh.
Morbo
Related?
Bob Loblaw
@jwb:
See, I would argue that that’s very perceptive. It’s hard to watch how intensely smug and cynical that whole process (and by extension, foreign relations in general) really is firsthand. It was very condescending to Americans as a whole, and Obama himself, to celebrate his election internationally by treating the ideally prestigious award like a pat on the head. And then to see the acceptance speech he gave serve as a defense of his failed Afghanistan policies under the just war doctrine…I don’t know, not good times.
Martin
@jl:
The ways to get the job market going are wholly unacceptable to the media and to Republicans – and are questionable to a fair number of Democrats. The last 30 years have been all about finance. Lots of wealth building, not so much broad, meaningful economic expansion.
Introducing a real plan to get the job market going would look completely foreign to most people, and paying for it would require tax increases, and lots of them. There’s no willpower for that. Fuck, even Reagan passed tax increases in 82, when unemployment was at 11%. Nobody seriously gives a fuck about jobs – it’s all about wealth preservation. They complain about it, but they’re not willing to do a damn thing to get there.
jwb
@Suffern ACE: No, they didn’t mention anything about that. What was so odd about the Nobel prize thing, besides the conversation itself, was that they were so eager to want to talk about it. They basically forced me to have a discussion about it—and I never talk about that kind of politics in class.
Mayur
@jwb: BTW, bullshit. You made the incredibly dumbass point that (a) calling category 2 “I don’t give a fuck” voters was somehow “scapegoating” them. It wasn’t. It was merely pointing out the facts on the ground; namely, that if one is to blame that demographic for anything, it is APATHY and not some sort of super-progressivism that caused them to tank their own side’s prospects. Additionally, you’re being exceptionally obtuse if you think that they THEMSELVES don’t use the “I don’t give a fuck” frame. Try reading threads on relatively non-political fora like Slashdot or Boingboing or Fark about people’s reasons for hating the Rs or attending the Rally to Restore Sanity or what-have-you. These are people who proudly admit that they couldn’t care less what happens in the polity. And yes, they are the precise people to blame in these sorts of elections. Your definition of “scapegoat” to mean “principal actor” is a bit non-traditional.
Angry Black Lady
@jwb: what students are those? not black students, i reckon.
Joe Buck
95% of the House Progressive Caucus survived. Fewer than half of the Blue Dogs did. And many of the losing Blue Dogs ran commercials about how much they opposed Barack Obama. Why would you expect people who were motivated to vote by Obama to come out and vote for people who oppose him? Even those who voted for the Democrats’ signature bills got all apologetic and wimpy about it. There’s something in the American legal system called stipulation, where if the prosecutor and the defense agree that something is a fact, the court just considers it a fact and moves on. In many House races, the Democrat stipulated that the health care reform bill was wrong, the bank bailout was wrong, the GM bailout was wrong, and Nancy Pelosi is too liberal. And for some reason, young people weren’t enthused about voting for such people.
I voted, always have, always will. And in my state (California) we Dems did pretty well (sorry about your $140 million, Meg). But people are hurting and they took it out on incumbents.
jwb
@Mayur: Because the rage was strong in your post, and inchoate.
Brian J
@GregB:
I wonder if Howard Dean would come back. If nothing else, it’d be a nice boost to base enthusiasm.
Angry Black Lady
@Mayur: the title of the post is the title of the article with slight modifications. settle down.
Mayur
@jwb: Really, just stop it. My rage was pretty darn coherent, packaged, and delivered accordingly. But thank you for confirming my desire to get the fuck out of this country. Enjoy it for the rest of your lives.
curious
@morzer: election day should be a national holiday if the electorate is to ever reflect the voting age population. goodbye, columbus (day).
FlipYrWhig
@jwb:
Um, I don’t mean this in a bad way, but your students are _really_ peculiar. It’s like that Seinfeld episode where Elaine has a fight with her writer boyfriend over punctuation.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Martin: When Martin??
Mnemosyne
@Chris:
Yes, I’m sure that the federal employees who can now get benefits for their same-sex partners think that “nothing” was done on gay rights. As do the gay people who can now visit their sick partners in the hospital, the women who can successfully sue for back pay thanks to the Lily Ledbetter Act (one of the very first things Obama signed, BTW), the auto workers who still have jobs thanks to the bailout, the 100K troops who have left Iraq.
Funny, that’s kind of a long list when absolutely nothing was done about any of those issues like you claim. Almost like you ignored reality so you could maintain your whiny sense of injury, innit?
Mayur
@Angry Black Lady: In case you weren’t clear, NONE OF THAT IS FUNNY.
Really now? You need to recognize when your audience is actually not only capable of getting the joke, but seeing it for being weak.
NR
@jl:
Under FDR, the Democrats gained seats in the 1934 midterm election, at the height of the Great Depression.
Fight for the people, and the people will fight for you. Fight for Wall Street and corporate CEOs…. Not so much.
jwb
@Bob Loblaw: I never found out what the students thought of the acceptance speech, since that occurred well afterward.
Kryptik
@curious:
Much as I would agree with that, the problem is that it ends up dropping three federal holidays on November, which means it’s likely never going to happen.
It needs to in order to actually give people the time and excuse to vote, but it won’t happen.
morzer
@jwb:
It seems very unlikely to me that the Nobel prize would have turned off a significant number of young voters, or had much effect either way. I simply do not believe that young people as a group really cared very much unless they had another reason to dislike Obama. The students I knew at the time seemed to generally regard it as somewhat amusing, but did not blame Obama for it, much less see him as “another politician” because of it. It was simply another of the mildly strange things that just happen.
Angry Black Lady
@Mayur: i didn’t know you were the only member of the “audience” here, but now that you’ve stated your point in ALL CAPS, i see the error of my ways.
morzer
@NR:
But the Democrats lost seats big time in 1942, when the economy was reviving!
Martin
@JGabriel:
You either sell or you don’t sell. Everyone knows it’s largely crap – even Bernanke knows it’s crap. You have to put the best face on it that you can. Some of their opposition is literally and seriously think the 16th amendment should be repealed and the IRS abolished. And they will fight for that idea with every fiber of their being.
If you guys want the Dems to market their ideas, then help them market them – even if they’re not the best possible idea. You give money, you make calls, but when they try and market you say ‘gah, this is insulting!’? Come on.
General Stuck
@Angry Black Lady:
wounded progressive tears are the sweetest tasting, I’ve heard.
GregB
By the way. Does anyone have the vote totals? I mean total national turnout. I also want to have a comparison of votes for Obama in 2008 versus the votes for the GOP in 2010.
Voice of the people push-back and all.
Yutsano
@Kryptik: I don’t know if this is trying to set a precedent, but as a federal employee if I asked my manager I could have up to two hours of leave time to vote. Since I live in a (mostly) mail-in state it wasn’t necessary, but I’m surprised that hasn’t been picked up on in the private sector.
Hunter Gathers
@Morbo: You are God for posting that.
jwb
@Angry Black Lady: No, not black students.
morzer
@curious:
Columbus Day, better known as “Syphilis, Smallpox and Slaughter the Natives Day”.
j/k
Mayur
@Angry Black Lady: Oh charming. Do you actually have, say, anything substantive to contribute?
“i didn’t know you were the only member of the “audience” here…”
This, BTW, is a Republican-level strawman. I’m sorry if I didn’t use italics like everyone else here, but I’m lazy with the formatting.
Fuck off. Would you like that in caps as well?
Mnemosyne
@Joe Buck:
Ding ding ding. Who the hell was giving advice to those Blue Dogs, Mark Penn?
The administration talked about their accomplishments over and over again during this election season, until Obama and Biden literally lost their voices bragging about them. But when the Blue Dogs decided to run against their own party and talk about how they were going to block any additional progress, the cause was pretty much lost. If Democrats don’t support their fellow Democrats, you’re not going to be able to convince voters to support them, either.
There’s also the fact that turnout for young voters and minority (AA/Latino) voters was only down a couple of percentage points, but turnout for 65+ voters surged by 20 percent. I don’t really think that the angry old white people who turned out in droves this year were there because they didn’t think health insurance reform went far enough or because they wanted DADT repeal passed. They turned out because the president is a
nig…sociaIist mooslim who wants to turn the US into Zimbabwe.At this point, the people I really want to point and laugh at are the ones who kept trying to claim that we’re a “post-racial” nation, because it’s awfully clear that we ain’t.
General Stuck
@morzer:
I thought that was Thanksgiving Day
Bnut
@Morbo:
I skimmed that article. It’s fucking laughable that people at the Exile would lambaste Gen X/Y for being too cool for school and blah blah blah. Wasn’t that Mark Ames and Matt Taibis whole shtick, before they got rich for throwing horse semen in Moscow newsrooms?
jl
@Martin:
My responses below:
“The ways to get the job market going are wholly unacceptable to the media and to Republicans – and are questionable to a fair number of Democrats.”
Good, that means pushing such ideas hard would be a good idea.
“The last 30 years have been all about finance. Lots of wealth building, not so much broad, meaningful economic expansion.”
If your point is that Obama agrees with that approach, then obviously he would not try, just pretend to try (but he doing a crummy job of pretending if that is the case). I am assuming that Obama does agree with it.
“Introducing a real plan to get the job market going would look completely foreign to most people,”
I disagree. You print money. You set up programs for people to do pretty much any kind of job that is socially useful and not being done. You announce where people go to sign up. People with no jobs arrive. You verify that they more or less do the job. You give them the money.
“and paying for it would require tax increases, and lots of them.”
Not in the short run, over one or two election cycles.
“There’s no willpower for that. Fuck, even Reagan passed tax increases in 82, when unemployment was at 11%. Nobody seriously gives a fuck about jobs – it’s all about wealth preservation. They complain about it, but they’re not willing to do a damn thing to get there.”
There you lost me. You saying that ordinary people without jobs don’t care about jobs? Or that people like Obama do not care about jobs? If the latter, he needs to care enough about them to keep control of Congress and get a second term.
The behavior of Obama and the Washington Consensus Democratic establishment puzzle me. The GOP at least realizes that ordinary voters need to be maintained and kept in good repair, in order to keep power, like any useful tool such a hoe or shovel, until they are no longer needed and can be thrown away.
I have to go, but will check back later to see your response.
FlipYrWhig
@Joe Buck:
This I find interesting.
But let’s bear in mind, before blaming young people:
(1) don’t young people have a tendency to skip the midterm elections, presumably because they tune in to presidential politics but don’t particularly care about local and state level politics? Wasn’t this cycle pretty much according to form?
(Apologies if the statistics have been posted somewhere and I missed them. These long threads are hell on my primitive browser. I feel like I need to punch a stack of Hollerith cards to make this stupid thing run…)
(2) Just to bother JSF a bit more, shouldn’t we also take a moment to blame old people for their fearfulness, xenophobia, and ingratitude? If Obamarama ’08 was contingent on young people and people of color, isn’t Boehner Jams ’10 equally contingent on old people and people of colorlessness? This has the ring of a counterrevolution.
Suffern ACE
@morzer: We’re dealing with a small set of students in a master’s program. I don’t know what they are becoming masters of, but perhaps to a subset of kids studying this unknown subject, the nobel prize is not supposed to be mildly amusing. For all we know, all 15 of his students voted, as most post-collegiate people do.
morzer
@Angry Black Lady:
I reckon Angry Insane Black Lady has a certain ring to it.
Just sayin’.
(Of course, as a non-audience I recognize that my views don’t count.)
jwb
@FlipYrWhig: See Bob Loblaw’s comment above, not about the speech, but the first part about seeing the cynicism in action. That’s the best I could make of it. It was like the idealism just collapsed and, as I said, they lost the thread of identification. This does not mean that they stopped supporting Obama, but simply that the nature of the relationship seemed to change.
Martin
@Just Some Fuckhead: 2014, most likely. Don’t get me wrong – I really am sorry, and that really does suck. But employers were dropping coverage steadily prior to ACA, so there’s no assurance that it wouldn’t have been dropped anyway.
The health care market has been steadily heading in one direction for 2 decades. Doing nothing and declaring ‘oh, well, it’ll fix itself’ is madness. Yeah, ACA might have created a short term problem for you, but it’s solved long term problems for others (I know – small consolation, when you’re on the shitty end of the equation) and there’s more and more yet to come.
jl
@NR: thanks for that counterexample. I was talking about recent electoral history when the Democrats did NOT fight so much as FDR or Truman did.
What you said was exactly the point I was trying to make, but you said it much better.
And FDR’s first New Deal did not work that well, and could be accused of being too ‘corporate’ a lot of it was counterproductive stuff like restricting supply, including food supply, when people were going hungry.
The point is that FDR forcefully made clear he was never going to stop trying to help the people without jobs. And when something did not work he immediately started advocating, and trying to pass, another approach.
morzer
@Suffern ACE:
As I see it, if you asked people why they didn’t vote, or perhaps “rejected” Obama and Evil Soc.ial.ism, the likelihood of 1% of them mentioning the Nobel prize seems pretty remote. Even the GOP have not spent time on it for months. Call me naive, but I rather suspect that jobs, the economy, and fear-mongering by the GOP would take precedence. Still, it is just possible that Americans have the Swedish Academy much on their minds, and feared that Obama was about to sell them out on the Swedish Fish issue.
FWIW, the students I knew and know are Masters and PhD students.
jwb
@morzer: It wasn’t an issue of liking and disliking per se, more, as I said, an issue of identification. My own reaction was more like the students you know, bemusement. My students’ reaction was quite different. That’s why it struck me so much and has stayed with me.
Odie Hugh Manatee
The manic progressives have been in full swing over at the Great Orange Satan…lol! All Obama and the Democrats had to do was everything the manic progressives wanted and every single one of us would have a new unicorn.
While the accuracy of their circular firing squad is awesome and it’s something to note for its merciless accuracy, somehow, even though their fire is aimed towards the other side of their circle, they always end up putting a bullet in their own foot.
Unerringly. Accurate. To the foot.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne:
When it comes to Blue Dogs, this kind of stuff isn’t simply a matter of cynical political tactics, I’ve come to believe. They genuinely believe it. They genuinely feel that their role in the government is to check liberal extremism on the one hand and conservative extremism on the other. It didn’t work out too well for them this time, but it had been working for many cycles in a row before that.
curious
@Kryptik: true. but i see the holiday as one of the few passable things that could improve democratic prospects in 2012 (in addition to just plain making sense). passing decent policies and then counting on people who want to vote the bums out every two years does not seem to be panning out that well.
i would also love to see how republicans would demonize the issue. a job-killer? a slippery slope to soZialism? somehow abortifacient? they could really shine here.
Mnemosyne
@jwb:
In other words, the underground band they loved got their first #1 album.
Sorry, but that’s what it sounds like. I’m guessing that the word “sellout” came up more than once.
Bnut
A meme is born like the Circle of Life in the Lion King. The media (who actually much resembles Rafiki) lumbers his poop encrusted monkey butt up a rock and holds aloft the fresh meme, still moist from its journey out the gullet of David Brooks. The trembling animals of the savanna react instantly, bowing their heads in respect to the glorious meme, fervently twittering and blogging to appease the new meme-king.
morzer
@jl:
Yes, but you forget that FDR lost a lot of seats in 1942, which according to the fighting for the people theory really should not have happened, since he was pretty solidly past his corporate phase by then and the economy was doing quite well.
fasteddie9318
@jwb:
So the Nobel Committee gives a (probably undeserved) Peace Prize to Obama, and your students blame…Obama? I could understand if they were pissed off by his “hey, thanks for this Peace Prize, now let me regale you with the true joys of war” acceptance speech, but they were pissed at him over something over which he had no control? No wonder we’ve handed the keys to the country back to the inmates of Arkham Asylum.
Kryptik
@jwb:
My cynicism isn’t about Obama persay, but the whole process, the whole discourse, the whole national public mindset that seems to have the deck eternally stacked against folks I agree with. The kind of mindset that prompts the country to give Dems two years of actual power to do shit, throws a tantrum, and seems set to give another 10 years of power to the party that fucked things up the previous 10 years before.
It honestly feels like a fixed game, and it’s hard to get enthused about playing a game you know you can’t win. I used to think that, at worst, it might be like the Clippers vs. the Lakers. Instead, it feels like the Globetrotters vs. the Washington Generals. The show is all in making sure Dems fail spectacularly, because the Country loves it some fucking hippie punching.
JGabriel
@Martin:
Heh. Fair enough. You have: a point.
On the other hand, you gotta admit, virtuous circle IS pretty mockworthy.
.
Suffern ACE
@morzer: Didn’t we find ourselves suddenly at war in 1942? I don’t know if jobs were the issue.
Hunter Gathers
@General Stuck:
Joseph Gribble – “Do your people celebrate Thanksgiving, Mr. Redcorn?”
John Redcorn – “We did. Once.”
curious
@morzer: a joyous time, for most!
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
They probably do believe it, but that mythical DLC centrism is long gone. You can’t just co-opt Republican ideas and repackage them as Democratic ideas anymore (I’m looking at you, Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform”).
They Sister Souljah’d themselves right out the door.
Citizen Alan
@Zifnab:
This! I mean honestly, you’re telling me that mid-term voter turnout is highest among retirees who have open schedules and lots of free time and lowest among college students who are just about to start exams and who are often inexperienced with voting procedures and likely not as politically aware as they will be after they enter the job market and have to pay their own taxes? That’s unpossible.
jwb
@morzer: As I said, they weren’t saying Obama was evil, soc-ial-ist or anything like that. They weren’t even turned against Obama. They simply no longer identified with him in the same way. That’s all I’m saying. Most likely, they would have drifted away from him in any case.
fasteddie9318
@Mnemosyne:
That is exactly what it sounds like, now that I think about it. Like how my sophomore year roommate lost his shit because Green Day signed with a major label, as though they were to blame for some record company wanting to dump bags of money on their doorstep.
morzer
@Suffern ACE:
But the theory of “fighting for the people” doesn’t deal in external circumstances – which is why it’s incomplete at best and moralistic horsepucky at worst. Yes, there was a war – but wars generally help incumbents by providing an external enemy. And yet – the Democrats lost seats. So we have to ask again what is lacking in the “fighting for the people theory”.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Martin: Well in 2014, if that’s actually the case, you can crow we have a new relationship with health care. As of now, it’s pretty much bullshit.
Mnemosyne
BTW, Obama’s drubbing in these midterms is second only to — you guessed it — FDR’s drubbing in the 1938 midterms. Of the three midterm elections that FDR oversaw, he only got an increase in one of them.
morzer
@jwb:
But why should we assume this is personal with Obama, much less anything to do with the Nobel prize? Young voters don’t turn out for the midterms. This is a constant in American politics, which is why the Nobel prize theory really doesn’t have much to recommend it.
It seems a little strange to invoke a prize that has not been discussed by anyone for months when what happens is the norm for politics, and took place, moreover, in a sour economy and with rabid GOP propaganda being howled from every outlet.
jwb
@Mnemosyne: No, “sellout” was not mentioned, though “unfair” was and so was “he didn’t really earn it.” It may have opened the door to later complaints of sell out, not being progressive enough, not doing enough for youth or whatever.
FlipYrWhig
@jwb: If it’s not too much of an “outing,” where is this, roughly, and what kinds of students are you talking about? Because I have students too — undergrads at a small-ish college — and I cannot remember one person ever saying anything about the Nobel Prize other than the occasional fanboy or -girl being proud. (“Cynicism” about the Nobel Peace Prize subcommittee of the parliament of Norway? What? Who would you even blame for that? Bob Loblaw’s analysis is, I suspect, a mite jaundiced.)
Whatever, you don’t have to tell me where you are. I just find it interesting, because it’s _so_ _weird_.
Just Some Fuckhead
Here’s what we got now:
“I’ve never believed that government’s role is to create jobs or prosperity.” – President Obama in a speech in Cleveland two months ago.
ETA: Then it went into some very pretty bullshit about entrepreneurs and the ingenuity of the American people that Peggy Noonan could have written.
morzer
@Mnemosyne:
If only he hadn’t signed with that other label or won the Nobel Prize, what a statesman that FDR might have been….
Kryptik
@Mnemosyne:
FDR may have had to deal with the Business Plot…but we have Fox News and Talk Radio to deal with now.
Our chances are bleak. :/
Mnemosyne
@Citizen Alan:
Turnout among the 50+ crowd was even higher than usual for a midterm election.
Unfortunately, it looks like the usual Republican strategy of panicking the old folks worked its charms once again. If the midterm numbers had been relatively normal, it probably wouldn’t have been this bad, but old scared white folks turned out in droves this year and there’s pretty much nothing Obama could have done to make them happy except stop being so goddamned black.
Citizen Alan
@mclaren:
Not necessarily. A lot of 18 to 25s, especially the ones we’re complaining about for being disengaged, just vote the way their parents always did. Once you get past the critical mass of politically active youth voters, I’d imagine you’d get a diminishing level of returns (in terms of liberal voters). Or to put it another way — I imagine turnout among College Republicans and College Democrats were both equally high.
jwb
@morzer: I mentioned it in response to someone else as to when I first became aware of students becoming disenchanted with Obama after the inauguration. It was just a story, which I find interesting, and happen to think was not peculiar to my set of students, though it may well have been. What, if anything it means, that I’m not sure, as it seems likely that whatever recognition I observed in class that day would have undoubtedly occurred at some later point.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne:
So did New Labour. Bad days for Third Ways.
morzer
@FlipYrWhig:
Ahem, Sweden, not Norway. The students feared Obama had won the prize in return for selling them short on Swedish Fish…
JGabriel
@Citizen Alan:
… and thinking about sex, a LOT?
I mean, you do remember what it was like being 19? It can tend to crowd out a lot of other thoughts.
.
Martin
@jl:
I think Obama is pretty middle-of-the-pack Democrat on that front, and not particularly dogmatic. We had a financial crisis and he brought in financial people. Half of them are now gone. Let’s see if we get more labor-focused people to replace them.
But people have given up on the notion that government would do these things. And it would have been a MUCH easier sell if Bush hadn’t put us into such a bad budgetary position.
Ordinary people without jobs don’t care about jobs. People with shitty jobs don’t care about jobs. How many seats flipped to the GOP in Michigan and Ohio? Places with high unemployment, but damnit they wanted their deficit reduction and extension of tax breaks for the wealthy. If people cared about jobs, and the kind of jobs programs that the government has done in years past, they’d be demanding tax increases. They aren’t. Even here in CA, Dems had a great day yesterday – the GOP is almost nonexistant in the state at this point. We’ve got 12% unemployment, but voters overwhelmingly voted to not raise taxes on Apple, HP, Google, Intel, Ebay, etc. All of whom are raking in massive profits and have giant cash warchests. They have more than enough money to hire, but they aren’t (some are, Apple added 12,000 jobs, but they could have added 10x that many) and so those profits are better handed back to the state to hire teachers. Voters rejected that idea. They voted for a 2/3 requirement to raise fees. They’re not willing to pay more to register their car in order to support bringing green jobs to the state. One out of 8 workers is unemployed, but they aren’t willing to do what really needs to be done to create jobs. They still think that magic is going to make it all happen.
suzanne
@Yutsano:
Bigamy. HAWT.
GS
voting, like investing, is a great way to make *some* kind of intervention into a system that affects many and can benefit yourself if you make the right vote/trade. you can’t win if you don’t play the game. and if you play, play to win. i thought this rant was entertaining. got rilke?
jwb
@FlipYrWhig: Masters students, as I mentioned; white, middle class, large public flagship university in the south.
Mnemosyne
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Hate to tell ya, JSF, but it isn’t, unless you want to live in the former Soviet Union and have the government assign you to your factory job.
The government can jump-start the economy and create government jobs, but without private sector jobs, you don’t have much.
Ironically, of course, private sector jobs have actually been increasing steadily every month by about 90K — it’s the massive layoffs of state and local government employees that’s sucking the economy under. But, hey, who needs firefighters and teachers, right, Speaker Boehner?
morzer
@JGabriel:
To be fair, students are not the only ones who think about sex.
“Sex began in nineteen sixtythree
Which was rather late for me”
As the poet sings.
ronin122
Well here’s by bullshit thoughts as a 23 year old who voted Tuesday.
1) For my age bracket in Illinois at least I noticed that those who follow politics or news in general to at least a modest extent were very likely to vote regardless of political affiliation, though Republican youth seemed a lot more likely to vote than liberal ones at lower engagement levels.
2) The idea that I needed to be “inspired” or otherwise be convinced to perform what I feel to be a civil duty is personally ridiculous. Maybe it’s because I am on the higher levels of awareness on political issues and laws passed in the USA (on that one survey quiz featured here a couple months ago I had a perfect score) but I’d be insulted if I needed someone to coddle me to convince me to get off my fat ass and take no more than a half hour (15 minutes personally) to decide who’s going to run your city, state and country for the next 2-6 years. Your Tuesday plans–note this isn’t a weekend, but middle of the fucking week–I sincerely doubt were too busy to make it to the polls, and if so then what about a month long early voting period (very fucking convenient mind you in Chicago). May not have been too enthusiastic about many of the votes I made (did straight ticket D) but I happily voted for candidates who were actually serious about governing this fucked up nation and who I knew would give me the highest chance of seeking what I want done. I’ll take 50%, 30% hell even 10% over a definite 0% any fucking day.
And it should be noted that many adults I know were very ambivalent of the major candidates here (Governor and Senate) but still took the time to vote.
3) No sense in blaming any specific person or group for yesterday as much blame is to go around, but for all the blame on impatient or ambivalent independents who turned Red, Dems who didn’t take initiative and let the Party of No control a Congress with a huge minority in both houses, or the GOP being good at being scum-fucking assholes, too good for this country’s well-being; but I refuse any deference for those who couldn’t take the effort to vote [honestly there is no legitimate reason not to vote when able at all in my opinion]. I’d like to say fuck them, they get what they deserve; I cannot do so because I unfortunately am stuck in the same pot of shit as they are. All I am going to say is that if anyone on the left/middle weren’t happy with the Democratic-led Congress, they have no right to complain in 2012 with the GOP running the House and the Senate even more incapable of making a decision (though with a split-Congress this may only apply to decisions worth a damn, as conservative bills will happily pass the House and with Blue Dogs in the Senate if the Dems won’t filibuster and/or Obama doesn’t threaten veto). They got what they asked for, and I can’t wait for them to blame the wrong people in 2012.
morzer
@jwb:
That’s pretty close to the definition of a Republican demographic, you know. White, southern, educated.
Martin
@Just Some Fuckhead: Well, you don’t. But other people do.
Here’s the bottom line, though, since you’re getting whiny:
You can still buy health insurance. The people that are benefitting from ACA haven’t had that option. You still have a choice you can exercise, and while it’ll cost you money, it’s still there. For the folks with pre-existing conditions, they were just screwed – they couldn’t buy it if they wanted, and now they’re in exactly the same situation that you’re in, and they’re thankful for it. That’s still a net win.
Bob Loblaw
@FlipYrWhig:
Cynicism about how the world just falls right back into step no matter what happens, more than any individual actor I’d assume.
I don’t know, I’m just trying to reason through an anecdote I find genuinely surprising.
FlipYrWhig
@Just Some Fuckhead: Does it still seem incriminating when you see that line in the fuller context?
Suffern ACE
@jwb: Yep. Never said it was the watershed moment for the youth of today. Just something interesting that happened that gives older folks a little chance to speculate about the lives younger folks.
FlipYrWhig
@morzer: The Peace Prize is awarded by Norway, I’m pretty sure.
morzer
@FlipYrWhig:
Just testing.
Note to self: more flu medicine, and never trust people who belong to dead political parties.
Also too: no more land wars in Asia.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Martin: Oh, that’s what you meant by we have a new relationship with health care: some people with preexisting conditions that precluded them from purchasing insurance previously can now do that (disregarding of course that insurance is not care because there’s no sense in having that argument all over again.)
Gotcha. But it still doesn’t sound like we all do in fact have a new relationship with health care. Can you just drop the bullshit and tell the truth and I’ll try not to be so whiny?
FlipYrWhig
@jwb: Sorry I missed the identifiers before. I’m in the same general area of the country dealing with conventional undergrads and don’t remember anything of the kind. The only people I remember having any kind of animated reaction to the Nobel Prize when it happened were my Republican Facebook friends.
morzer
@FlipYrWhig:
Exactly. This was a relatively short-lived GOP meme, not something that bothered Democrats in significant numbers for any length of time.
Just Some Fuckhead
@FlipYrWhig: Actually I think if you change out “investments” in the last paragraph for “vouchers”, it’s pretty standard Republican rhetoric.
ETA: But the point was simply to contrast the rhetoric of FDR with that of Obama, as should have been clear from what I originally quoted.
jwb
@morzer: You would be correct if these were undergrads, but our graduate students are not primarily from the south.
FlipYrWhig
@Just Some Fuckhead:
That sucks. I had some terrifying moments when I didn’t have health insurance. That worry about whether the emergency is serious enough to get it addressed by professionals, or whether you just need to wait and see and hope for the best…. damn.
morzer
@jwb:
The question would be how they identify politically and where they originate from.
I must say they sound utterly unlike any post-grad students that I have met with significant liberal allegiances.
Just Some Fuckhead
@FlipYrWhig: Hell, we’re only a few bad business months away from qualifying for medicaid so we won’t have to wait until 2014.
FlipYrWhig
@Just Some Fuckhead: It continues:
That’s not just standard Republican boilerplate.
It’s true that it’s not FDR-level, but FDR could triangulate against, like, actual socia1ists and communists. One of the sad developments of the 20th century was the end of the need for American capitalism to show that it could be conducted in a somewhat humane fashion, as a kind of in-your-face to the communist world. It’s been much more ruthless ever since.
Suffern ACE
@FlipYrWhig: I think Fuckhead’s experience is going to be quite common as people are dropped from these policies that go up and up in cost and are told that it is ACA that is causing the problem. That said, HAMP is another area that is really going to cause problems. In my office, I have 3 people who got caught up in that, so even the “low information voters” know that that is a problem.
Mnemosyne
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Since you didn’t present us with any of FDR’s actual rhetoric to compare Obama’s rhetoric to, it came across more as you contrasting what you imagine FDR would have said to what Obama actually said.
Comparison/contrast actually requires that we have both halves of the comparison. Just sayin’.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Suffern ACE: I never said ACA caused the problem. I simply said it offers little in the way of new solutions.
Mnemosyne
Here’s some of FDR’s rhetoric from his Fireside Chat after they shut down all of the banks in the US:
Yep, he sure stuck it to the bankers as a group and called them all out for being evil. Too bad Obama couldn’t do the exact same thing FDR did.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mnemosyne: Can you please pie me? Please? I’ll give you my email address and help you set up the filter.
jwb
@morzer: How do they break down politically? That’s a bit hard to say. I had one whackdoodle libertarian in the class, who would make McArdle proud, but I don’t recall that she participated in this particular conversation, and another who I believe is pretty conservative, usually keeps her views to herself but in this instance did let out a very snide comment during the discussion that raised my eyebrows (because it sounded like the wingnut stuff I was reading on the internet). The rest were standard issue grad student liberals, many of whom volunteered for the Obama campaign; and it was this group that seemed most upset, especially one from Chicago, a devoted supporter of Obama, who made the comment I mentioned about it being unfair.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mnemosyne: Read The Fucking Thread. The FDR quotes are there. You don’t have to find new ones for the sake of arguing.
Just Some Fuckhead
@FlipYrWhig:
Well, no, I guess it isn’t since it isn’t what you quoted before. Jesus.
Quiddity
@NR: While lower turnout by the under-30 crowd had an effect, the bulk of the Republican gains were due to how Independents voted. That is not in dispute.
But here at Balloon Juice, there is incredible vitriol directed against progressives: those that were critical of Obama and yet still voted, and those who were not particularly motivated to vote this year (which was a mistake). ABL and General Stuck are leaders in this regard. All they do is piss off potential allies.
And yet posters and commentors on this blog say Firedoglake and fellow travelers are the reason for strains within the ranks! They should look at themselves first.
Mnemosyne
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I did read it. In fact, because I wuv you so, I just scanned it again to be sure. There’s not a single quote from FDR in the whole thread except for mine. There’s a lot of paraphrasing and assurances that FDR really cared about the little guy, but not a single quote from any public speeches that the man actually made.
Alan in SF
I seriously doubt that any whiny progressives failed to vote Democratic. But of course Morford can’t blame all those people who lost their jobs and their houses because that would contradict his premise that the Democrats are doing a great job (and would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids.)
And you gay folks getting thrown out of the military and denied marriage rights — analogy to something 1950s white people would have told black people about how they need to be patient goes here.
Mnemosyne
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Aww. Now my feelings are hurt. What would you rather have stupid circular arguments about, health insurance or FDR?
Mnemosyne
@Alan in SF:
Oddly, I don’t remember Martin Luther King making vitriolic attacks on Lyndon Johnson and claiming that Johnson clearly hated black people and wasn’t trying hard enough because civil rights legislation took several months to get through Congress. Do you have links to those speeches of his?
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mnemosyne: Why don’t you put your mad wikipedia skills into action and find each actual quote to match the paraphrasing so we can see if the difference is substantial enough to turn this into a ridiculous one hundred comment thread about how FDR was actually a total progressive fraud, just like Jane Hamsher?
While yer working on that, I’m going to go to bed. I’ll check back in the morning.
mclaren
@jl:
And what are those ways, exactly?
Here’s what’s going on: 1) the middle class high wage low-education jobs got shipped overseas 30 years, so there are none of those left in America; 2) now the middle class high wage high-education jobs are getting shipped overseas, so while there are still some left, they’re disappearing fast; 3) America has a massive oversupply of PhDs and a catastrophic bubble in stratospheric college tuition costs, so if you get an advanced degree today, chances are it’s not worth much.
So what’s the solution?
Who says there is one?
I’d like someone to tell me exactly how anyone gets the “job market going” in America in 2010. Explain it to me. Retraining? Worthless, both unskilled and skilled high-wage jobs have been sucked out of the American economy by offshoring and within the next few years there’ll be nothing left. Already, if you need someone to do programming or circuit design or graphics design or manufacturing or mechanical or aeronautical engineering or robotics or anything like that, you’re going to hire someone in Asia or India to do it for you. Because they’ll do it at 1/10 the price an American engineer or programmer would charge.
So how does retraining help?
Then there’s the “more education” argument, which is foolish beyond words. If you have a B.S. degree in programming, getting a PhD won’t help you get a job, because America already produces far too many PhDs for the available job slots. In fact, getting an advanced degree actually decreases your employment prospects because it means a prospective employer would be forced to pay you more, and the employers out there are looking to pay less and they’re doing it by offshoring those high-end jobs to Chinese PhDs who are eager to work for $3 an hour.
So at the end of the day, the only real jobs left in America are going to be waitress and barista and dog groomer and WalMart stocker and xerox clerk.
Explain to me how you sustain a 2.2-trillion-dollar-a-year health care system with an economy of dog groomers making $7 an hour. Explain to me how you pay for a 1.1-trillion-dollar-a-year military with an economy of WalMart stockers. Explain to me how you maintain democracy without a middle class.
Short of shutting down free trade and erecting giant tariff barriers, I don’t see how we stop sucking all the high-wage jobs out of America to overseas. And if we do shut down free trade, forget about those iPhones and iPads and iPods and giant-screen TVs and cars (made overseas) and kitchenware (made overseas) and power tools (made overseas) and computers (made overseas) and CDs and blu-ray discs and DVDs and mp3 players and laptops and wifi routers and cheap clothes made in Guatamalan and Honduran and Haitian sweatshops and cheap shoes made in slave labor factories in coastal China and India.
Explain to me all those great ways you guys have dreamed up to “get the job market going” in America. I want to hear that. Lay it out for me. I’m waiting.
Angry Black Lady
@Mayur: says the person whose opening salvo was “Oh, fuck you” and who then proceeded to MAKE SERIOUS COMMENTS IN ALLCAPS.
if you’re going to lecture me on strawmen, you might want to review your own initial comment.
as for my “substantive contributions” try the hundreds of blog posts i’ve written. if you hadn’t noticed, i wrote the post. so, it seems, my contribution is as clear as the plain on Ann’s face. where, pray tell, are your contributions?
as for “fuck off”; you first, dear.
Suffern ACE
@Mnemosyne: If there was a way in the 50s and 60s to broadcast one’s immediate thoughts to anyone around the world, I’m sure he would have posted a few things that were counterproductive. I don’t know if the movement could have survived if he needed a blog entry three times a day for his fans.
mclaren
@FlipYrWhig:
Exactamundo. This is why capitalism is breaking down and will soon grind to a halt. Because we’ve been rocketed back to the pre-1880 days of capitalism, before Marx wrote his Manifesto.
Remember the pre-1880s days of capitalism?
No.
Triangle shirtwaist fire. Pullman strike where the police shot down unarmed strikers like dogs for daring to demand a living wage. 12-year-old girls hitched to coal carts hauling loads of coal out of coal mines, because when the girls died from overwork, they were much cheaper to replace than horses.
You think people are going to stand for that? You think in the richest nation on earth, the average middle class wage earner is going to accept making Mumbai wages of fifty cents per hour so they can compete with workers in Mumbai…which means people in America living like workers in Mumbai in huts with no plumbing and no electricity and no running water and dirt floors?
You think Americans are going to stand for that in a 14 trillion dollar a year economy?
Capitalism is broken and it’s not repairable. Either something else takes its place, or this country burns to the ground.
Angry Black Lady
@morzer: your views are doubly discounted if you are a person of colors.
@jwb: this has been my problem with the “obama is pissing off his base” argument (not saying you made the argument.) again and again, that point is made, and again and again, people of color seem not to be included in “the base.” people go off about hippy punching. when i think hippy, i think groups of white middle class folks. (of which, by the way, my mother is a member.) it’s the same problem i have with mainstream, especially armchair feminism. the unique perspective of feminists of color is so often discounted, perhaps not maliciously so, but simply because of a lack of consideration for that perspective.
you said that obama was no longer a part of the students. i think, in making a statement like that, it is important to consider the race of the student. for many black students, obama is still very much a part of them as in “i never thought i’d see the day.”
Mnemosyne
@Suffern ACE:
Agreed. I just get very tired of the “what would FDR do?” crowd, especially when the answer always seems to be “the exact opposite of what I’m criticizing Obama for.”
The firebaggers of his day hated FDR. Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California as a Democrat in 1934 and was defeated in part because FDR threw his support behind the Republican in the race. And if you think Obama’s civil rights record is bad, may I introduce you to Executive Order 9066?
FDR was a great man who accomplished more for this country than any other president in the last 100 years, but he wasn’t a fucking saint who never made a misstep and I’m really tired of the WATBs who try to make him into one.
DPirate
@J: Actually, you are wrong. IF those are the two choices, you are better off going with the sociopaths. A sociopath is capable of turning on his master, whereas the whore just sucks cock.
@Suck It Up!: Yes, everything needs a jingle. It’s why you bought a 60$ coffee maker and drink wine, drive a foreign car, and don’t shop at the thrift store! (Or maybe you do/don’t; point being advertising works. All the blah blah blah regarding Mad Men around here, I’d think it would be in the forefront of everyone’s mind.)
Also, what is the Serious Information? How can people tell? Most people cannot discern the truth of a thing or even hold on to their own understanding in the face of media repetition.
Fact is 2008 was an aberration, and happened solely because the economy melted down and the republicans were in power. If the democrats want any chance at the future, they need to become more batshit, in-your-face crazy than the republicans. Find a message, the crazier the better, and repeat ad nauseum everywhere and everywhen. Build it up to apocalyptic levels and blame the reds. In fact, I’d begin by associating the red/republicans with red communists. Doesn’t matter what tenuous thread holds the argument together, so long as you keep at it.
morzer
@Angry Black Lady:
Dear ABL, I don’t disagree. When I suggested Angry Insane Black Lady had a ring to it, I was laughing at the silliness of some of your more agitated commenters, not at you.
DPirate
@mclaren: Protectionism.
morzer
@DPirate:
And what happens when there are no more cheap Chinese goods in Target? Voters are not going to be happy.
Mnemosyne
BTW, does anyone here remember how FDR got the New Deal through a Congress that was mostly run by Southern Democrats?
He agreed to not support legislation that would have made lynching a federal crime.
Imagine for just one minute if Obama had gotten a $2 trillion stimulus through Congress, but did it by agreeing to not support a repeal of DADT.
mclaren
@DPirate:
The world economy is now so globally connected that protectionism isn’t a realistic answer. (It never was: take a look at the Smoot-Hawley tariff — it made things worse for the G7 economies in the 1930s, not better, because by reducing global trade it hurt all their GDPs.)
Consider: that lawnmower you want to sell has a bunch of parts in it made overseas. “So we start making those parts back in America,” you say. Great, but we don’t have the manufacturing facilities anymore and we don’t have the workers to do those jobs. Moreover, shifting all the manufacturing back to America will greatly raise prices on the lawmower parts (and on just about everything else). So prices go up for everyone in the U.S. on just about everything, but the products stay the same.
That’s called a “decrease in the standard of living.”
Then there’s the elephant in the room, automation. Those factories in Taiwan that churn out lawnmower parts only have 3 humans working in ’em. The rest of the workers are robots. So even if you do erect a massive protectionist barrier and shift all the manufacturing back to America, you won’t get many jobs out of it — 2 or 3 warm bodies per factory, because all the manufacturing is so damn automated now. And this automation is not slowing down…it’s accelerating, with computers + algorithms increasingly able to take over high-level knowledge work, like reading X rays and diagnosing tumors accurately, or robotic surgery, or editing a video at scene transitions, etc. More and more jobs that used to be done by high-wage highly educated knowledge workers are now being done by software + algorithms.
A lot of people far smarter than I and far smarter than you have tried to figure out a quicky easy way to fix the American economy, and they’ve all come up empty. When you add offshoring + automation, capitalism breaks down. We keep needing fewer and fewer people to produce more and more things, and increasingly those people are Chinese PhDs willing to work for a couple bucks an hour.
Capitalism doesn’t operate under those circumstances. It’s like trying to run a toaster underwater. It short-circuits and blows up.
Angry Black Lady
@morzer: oh i know! i was just riffing off your “not part of the audience” comment. damn the internet and its inability to convey friendly ribbing without use of emoticons! down with emoticons! up with people! why do people eat the mcrib?
i really should go to bed.
Yes That Danielle
@Mayur:
You do get that ABL didn’t actually write the letter, correct? I found the link to the letter and sent it to her, to pass on to the world, because I know it to be a view that she shares.
Just, you know, wanted to clarify that point.
Also, I read today that only 11% of voters under 30 turned out to vote. Not sure if that represents actual registered voters or people eligible to vote. Still, dismal numbers either way.
Blackfrancis
This is what I got from the liked article:
http://youtu.be/TRTkCHE1sS4
NobodySpecial
@Angry Black Lady:
This would be a valid criticism if, at the beginning AND end of each day of hippie punching, people attacked hippies in that context. But they never do, and you didn’t here, and the article you reference didn’t, either. So your moment of catharsis is just another poorly referenced, poorly directed bit of blame-shifting without a single hint of problem solving that everyone does now and again, but doesn’t need to have playing as their personal theme song.
For myself, I’m hoping that the most major and lasting effect of the coming reorganization of the House, Senate, and Party is that the powers that be finally recognize that if they want a fully activated group of workers across the spectrum, they have to quit shoving Blue Dogs and conservatives into all the positions of power and influence in the system. If you look at the list of committee chairs and powerbrokers, you find that the Baucuses and the Reids and the Bayhs of the party hold outsize power and influence in relation to who actually goes out and votes for Democrats and what they want from their government. It both stymies actual progressive legislation and depresses progressive voters, as we’ve seen these last two years.
KJD
ABL:
FYI Krugman has a 180 degree different view:
“Blame The Whiny Center
So, we’re already getting the expected punditry: Obama needs to end his leftist policies, which consist of … well, there weren’t any, but he should stop them anyway.
What actually happened, of course, was that Obama failed to do enough to boost the economy, plus totally failing to tap into populist outrage at Wall Street. And now we’re in the trap I worried about from the beginning: by failing to do enough when he had political capital, he lost that capital, and now we’re stuck.
But he did have help in getting it wrong: at every stage there was a faction of Democrats standing in the way of strong action, demanding that Obama do less, avoid spending money, and so on. In so doing, they shot themselves in the face: half of the Blue Dogs lost their seats.
And what are those who are left demanding? Why, that Obama move to the center.”
And he was a sharp critic of those who wanted to kill HCR once the PO was killed by Lincoln et al.
Recall
@mclaren:
t’s really fucking complicated, so I’ll break it down into bullet points.
1. The government.
2. Pays people.
3. To do stuff.
Nick
@NR:
government policies are only in tune with the electorate that comes out to vote for them.
Nick
@Alan in SF:
white people DID tell black people they needed to be patient in the 1950s. Learn history.
Nick
@NR:
even while the many liberal Democrats like Huey Long, future Alaska Senator Ernest Gruening and North Dakota Congressman William Lemke were calling FDR a corporatist sellout. Learn history, I’m tired of having to teach it to you.
Nick
@Sleeper:
If you can’t see your are being driven in the right direction, then you need to be given a map.
Linda Featheringill
Somebody probably beat me to it but I’ll say it anyway:
If your liver hurts, have your doctor check out your gallbladder. Ultrasounds don’t hurt a bit and they can do wonderful things with laparoscopic surgery, leaving your tummy muscles intact.
Just saying.
Be well.
Tom65
Sure, I’ll bite.
I WANT to punch some fucking hippies. Bunch of spoiled brats who voted in one, maybe two fucking elections in their entire life, and because they didn’t get everything they wanted in the first eighteen months of a Presidency faced with BIGGER FUCKING PROBLEMS, they take their ball and go home.
Grow some balls, asswipes. This isn’t Candyland. You want inspiration? Try this: thanks to your petulance, the GOP just took back the House and will now start dismantling every advance made. Further, they now control the narrative going into the ’12 election cycle.
Long term, jerkoffs. You’re doing it wrong.
fish
It’s true that it’s not FDR-level, but FDR could triangulate against, like, actual socia1ists and communists.
Good thing we are screaming at actual socialists and communists to fall in line here instead of allowing them to fight for what they believe in because grownups and shut up.
Mickey Dugan
I’m going to do the Obama thing.
Y’know – Look Ahead, Not Behind.
Why is everybody pointing fingers?
Time for me to stick my head back in the sand.
United We Stand, yes?
Wake me up when the horse race begins.
I’ll wager a bet, but the outcome doesn’t matter. DC United wins every time.
Besides, it’s for entertainment-purposes only.
August J. Pollak
This was in the San Francisco Gate?
Mark Morford thinks young voters read newspapers?
August J. Pollak
Exactly how many elections do you expect “young voters” to have voted in, Einstein?
les
The fucking “democrats aren’t good enough to inspire me” assholery has gotten us 30 years of bad governance and now the fucking craziest major party in world politics. Keep waiting, dickheads. Being informed and voting is a civic duty; if you can’t be bothered till the magic pony is in your bedroom, you should be lectured and butt-kicked. Guess what, idiots? If you can’t be bothered to vote until the magic has happened, it will never happen.
Tom65
Uh, one or two? Kind of my point – they have no concept of the long game.
henqiguai
@Nick (#221):
Hell, whites were still telling African-Americans “to be patient, give us time to adjust” in the ’70s and beyond. In fact…
Jules
My 18 year old voted in both the primaries and midterm and has no use for lazy, whiny ass slackers (his words) who could not make the effort to vote.
And here in Arkansas they had weeks to get around to voting….
None of the other guys his age he works with voted even though the talked about the election. Just trying to get them to see that this that happen now will effect them.
Maybe next time around the rallying cry should be “do you really want your grandparents making all the decisions?”
Angry Black Lady
@NobodySpecial: first, my comment was in response to another commenter. second, i’m not going to engage any of this “hippy punching” bullshit anymore. it’s ridiculous. it’s a buzz term to avoid having to make a cogent argument.
just yell ZOMG HIPPY PUNCHING and ignore the fact that some of the people you claim are hippy punching ARE “hippies” and continue to ignore my concerns about race. then again, if i make the “race” argument at the beginning and end of every day, wouldn’t that be playing the race card? maybe i’ll just let the white folks tell me what i should do.
every time anyone says “hippy punching,” i’m going to say “darkie ignoring.”
how’s that?
::yawn::
Angry Black Lady
@Linda Featheringill: ha! thanks linda. it was just a dumb reference to the fact that i drank a lot at the rally.
ruemara
@mclaren:
Normally, I find you to be a loony. Progressive, but loony. However, in this case, you are spot on, succinct and 100% correct. I would only add 1 thing; and these green jobs, without protection from outsourcing, without an insistence that manufacturing be done in America, won’t do a damn thing more to bring real jobs back.
DaBomb
@Angry Black Lady:
That has always been a huge problem amongst some white liberals.
I have expressed this sentiment before on this blog, that the online community makes only a small percentage of the base. Most of the base, people of color, don’t even know who Ketih Olbermann is.
And they still support the President two-fold.
NR
@Nick: Right, because FDR put the administration of Social Security in the hands of private corporations that skim 20 cents of every dollar off the top for profits.
Learn the definition of corporatism, I’m tired of having to teach it to you.
lamh31
@Angry Black Lady:
I ain’t a lesbian (and nothing wrong with that…lol), but from one sista to another, I think I love you
FlipYrWhig
@fish: The online “left” isn’t even remotely socia1ist or communist. It’s basically a bunch of people who think that using the word “plutocrat” makes you totally hardcore and that typing on a computer is praxis. Bring on the real left and let a thousand flowers bloom. It’s getting a bad name from the poseurs on the Intarwebz.
Angry Black Lady
@DaBomb: let’s make it happen! i’m tired of being ignored! [email protected]lamh31: i’m flattered! let’s have cyber drinks.
DPirate
@morzer: They are happy now?
@mclaren: Well, firstly, saying Americans aren’t capable of working in a factory is just silly. Likewise that we haven’t the capacity. There is machinery all over the place rusting away. Re-tooling certainly takes investment, but to simply state that it is impossible is flat wrong. Also, your scenario is not called a decrease in the standard of living if we consider that every penny is retained by the economy somewhere, including those who now have no income/no job, instead of flying overseas. The bleeding of our cash out of our economy into foreign hands is what I call a decrease in the standard of living. Not just for the lawn-mower purchaser, but for everyone.
The rest I basically agree with. Automation isn’t going to stop. In fact, the sci-fi scenario of all labor being performed by automaton is daily nearing. So, to extrapolate, someday there will be no job for anyone. Fine. What difference does it make to us today, except to realize that we need a new way of structuring society?
But here we are still. The basic problem, as I see it, is that US$ need to remain on US soil. Every dollar that leaves the country, whether it is due to offshoring wages or foreign purchase or whathaveyou, depresses the US economy in equal measure. Sure there aren’t quick and easy fixes, but these people that you cite who are far smarter than you and I ought to realize that the current situation is untenable and find some solution. If they cannot, then I submit they are no smarter than anyone else, and should not be relied upon as arguments from authority.