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You are here: Home / Mr. Marlowe goes to Washington

Mr. Marlowe goes to Washington

by DougJ|  September 2, 20119:32 pm| 271 Comments

This post is in: We Are All Mayans Now

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I’m a pretty partisan guy, but there are conservatives I love talking politics with and liberals I hate talking politics with. The real divide for me — in terms of whose reasoning I can understand — goes like this. There are people who think that all we need is for a Mr. Smith type motherfucker to go pour his heart out about what he knows is right, there are people who think think what we need is a Continental Op type motherfucker to outsmart and out-trick the low-lifes who rule us now. Of course, it is true that liberals are much more likely to say that their guy is engaging in 11-dimensional prostitution for a greater cause, while conservaties are more likely to say that their guy genuinely believes that taxing capital gains makes the Baby Jesus cry, but that’s rule that has many exceptions.

What I don’t get about the Mr. Smith-lovers is where in their real lives have they ever seen that kind of thing working? I never have. Have you? I believe that, relative to other workplaces, my workplace is a paradise of reasonably aboveboard, rational decision-making, and I say that gratefully, not smugly. Even so, when something strange happens that I don’t understand, and I succeed in getting to the more or less bottom of it, it is usually more Big Sleep than Wonderful Life.

Straight-talking activists are great, Martin Luther King did more for this country than any post WWII president, it’s not even close. (And he was a canny operator too, to his credit.) But I’d like to know when a president ever operated this way successfully.

People say “I just want a president to fight for something.” What the fuck does that even mean?

You probably know the old Winston Churchill story. It’s not my favorite because I don’t like the sexist implications but here it is.

Churchill: “Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?”

Socialite: “My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course…”

Churchill: “Would you sleep with me for five pounds?”

Socialite: “Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!”

Churchill: “Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.”

If David Koch guaranteed Obama reelection if Obama allowed a little more offshore drilling or strip mining, Obama would be a fool not to take the deal. Ditto for if his advisers told him he guaranteed get enough “white working class voters” to get re-elected this way.

If Obama or Clinton or whoever cuts a shitty deal that enacts bad policy and gets nothing for it, politically, then shame on them. But when it comes to what kind of a person they are, we’ve already established that, I hope, because I sure don’t want Jimmy Stewart running the country.

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Reader Interactions

271Comments

  1. 1.

    fhtagn

    September 2, 2011 at 9:36 pm

    Accepting unenforceable guarantees in return for delivering concrete benefits to the other side in advance is a pretty stupid way to bargain.

  2. 2.

    Rick Taylor

    September 2, 2011 at 9:41 pm

    This seems reasonable, but most of the progressives I read argue the same way. Digby, Markos, Atrios, I’ve heard them all say they don’t object to hippy punching on principle; they’re just not convinced it’s working.

  3. 3.

    mike in dc

    September 2, 2011 at 9:42 pm

    It’s actually George Bernard Shaw who that’s originally attributed to.

  4. 4.

    Big Baby DougJ

    September 2, 2011 at 9:43 pm

    @Rick Taylor:

    I love Atrios, Digby, and Markos. I fear their critique may be valid.

  5. 5.

    Cat

    September 2, 2011 at 9:44 pm

    Straight-talking activists are great, Martin Luther King did more for this country than any post WWII president

    But….

    But I’d like to know when a president ever operated this way successfully.

    So you are saying there have been US Presidents who used MLK political strategies who weren’t successful?

    The closest I would say was Carter, but I’m pretty sure it was OPEC and his predecessors’ terrible middle east policy that did him in.

  6. 6.

    Big Baby DougJ

    September 2, 2011 at 9:46 pm

    @Cat:

    So you are saying there have been US Presidents who used MLK political strategies who weren’t successful?

    I’m asking for one who tried the strategy successfully.

  7. 7.

    fhtagn

    September 2, 2011 at 9:46 pm

    @mike in dc:

    Yeah. The famous Churchill/woman dialog is the one that ends:

    “Yes, madam, but in the morning, you will still be ugly”.

  8. 8.

    beltane

    September 2, 2011 at 9:46 pm

    I really hate to disagree with you, Doug, but it seems what you’re saying is that the real power in this country is in the hands of a tiny corporate elite and that if the President accedes to all their demands, he will be permitted to retain his role as figurehead. That may be fine and dandy for the figurehead, but it is disastrous for the country and the vast majority of people who live here. This is about power, and a leader who is unable to instil fear in his or her enemies is not really a leader at all. Perhaps we need less Mr. Smith and more Don Corleone of the left.

  9. 9.

    Spaghetti Lee

    September 2, 2011 at 9:47 pm

    There’s a couple political beliefs I hold that I think have kept me from being as disappointed and angry at Obama as other people. 1) There’s not much one person can do to change the way Washington works, 2) Leverage is the most powerful force in politics, and 3) It’s almost certainly more complicated than you think it is. Of course, the extent to which I’ve held on to these ideas in a subconscious yet active attempt to not be disappointed is questionable.

    But I’d like to know when a president ever operated this way successfully.

    FDR is one that comes up. He had a few things that Obama doesn’t, namely more sincere and long-lasting public goodwill, a more desperate situation, and more institutional control of congress and other entities (I think at the height of the new deal there were something like 75 Democratic Senators and 315 Democratic Reps). LBJ is another one that comes up, but what he had behind him is, well, 30-40 straight years of pretty much unbroken victories for liberalism and progressivism, from people like FDR and the like. Sure, his willingness to be an asshole to get things done and his ability to take his enemies by the short and curlies didn’t hurt, but also he had hella momentum. Obama had 30 years of momentum behind him from the other direction-30 straight years of increasing rightwing-ness in politics, media, and American discourse in general. I don’t know how, exactly, he was supposed to overcome that by himself. Overcoming that would take a concentrated effort by a huge number of people committed to the cause-you know, how the right got so powerful in the first place. But yeah, people who think the president is just some sort of wizard who can conjure up whatever he wants in terms of political success, and the only thing preventing it is cowardice or a lack of will, I’ve grown increasingly unable to stand them. It’s like magical thinking as applied to politics.

  10. 10.

    fhtagn

    September 2, 2011 at 9:48 pm

    @Big Baby DougJ:

    What exactly is your version of the MLK activist strategy? What rules out say … FDR … as a successful user of such a strategy?

  11. 11.

    beltane

    September 2, 2011 at 9:49 pm

    @fhtagn: Any such deals without an enforcement mechanism are not deals but are a particularly pitiful form of capitulation.

  12. 12.

    Big Baby DougJ

    September 2, 2011 at 9:51 pm

    @fhtagn:

    Do you think he could have been elected president?

  13. 13.

    General Stuck

    September 2, 2011 at 9:53 pm

    People say “I just want a president to fight for something.” What the fuck does that even mean?

    Reading the blatherings of our emoprogs, they seem to lock onto maybe three presidents, sometimes all at once, or individually, to stamp their little feets and holler “Obama is a wimp”, why can’t he be like so and so.

    That would be FDR, LBJ, Bush 2. And they latch onto the partly real, and partly unreal reading of history, of those presidents getting large, even landmark laws passed early in their administrations.

    But the thing is, there is a fuller reading of that history and the political environment these presidents were acting in, as post traumatic events immediately preceding these major legislative accomplishments. For FDR, it was a country flatly on its back in a profound economic depression. For LBJ, it was in the aftermath of the beloved JFK assassination, and George W Bush, it was the post trauma of 9-11.

    Obama came into office with some pretty serious problems, but not a depression, not in the wake of a huge domestic terror attack, or the murder of a popular president.

    He got HCR done, and a huge stimulus bill, with lots of cash for long term progressive initiatives. But actually, with a time trip back to 2008 and early 2009, we have traveled a long way from those dire economic conditions. To a point where conditions are bad, but not an emergency, at least as a country, from what it was.

    So, I think he fought for HCR, in fact, I know he did. And people who parse and whine he didn’t, are just full of shit. He fought for the stimulus, as well. The largest in history, let me say that again. THE LARGEST DISCRETIONARY SPENDING BILL IN HISTORY, and you know why I know he fought them. Because they passed into law.

  14. 14.

    Raven (formerly stuckinred)

    September 2, 2011 at 9:53 pm

    @Big Baby DougJ: Are you out of your mind.?

  15. 15.

    fhtagn

    September 2, 2011 at 9:54 pm

    @Big Baby DougJ:

    I believe FDR was elected president. Four times, in fact.

    I’d still like to know what you think MLK’s activist strategy was, because until you define it, you are asking a pretty empty question.

  16. 16.

    Big Baby DougJ

    September 2, 2011 at 9:55 pm

    @Raven (formerly stuckinred):

    Sometime before 2030.

  17. 17.

    beltane

    September 2, 2011 at 9:56 pm

    Instead of either criticising or defending Obama, perhaps we should just accept the fact that the presidency is nowhere near as powerful a position as it once was. If the Koch brothers and their ilk call the shots, any attempts at salvaging this country should be directed towards ousting them from power. The first step in winning a war should be recognizing who the real enemy is.

  18. 18.

    PeakVT

    September 2, 2011 at 9:58 pm

    People say “I just want a president to fight for something.” What the fuck does that even mean?

    It means that people understand that the temptations that present themselves to a politician once in office are tremendous, and they’d like some reassurance that they weren’t fooled into voting for a slick opportunist. Most people don’t have much more to offer to a politician than their vote, a favorable recommendation to their family, and a hundred bucks. The MOTU can offer a lot more.

  19. 19.

    JGabriel

    September 2, 2011 at 9:59 pm

    @mike in dc:

    It’s actually George Bernard Shaw who that’s originally attributed to.

    That’s my recollection too, but I’m not finding a good cite online for it. I think I read it in Holroyd’s biography of Shaw but it’s a decade and a half or two since I read it, and I can’t find the book here to verify it.

    .

  20. 20.

    Undeadpundit

    September 2, 2011 at 9:59 pm

    Can anyone explain to me what the author of this post is babbling on about?

  21. 21.

    Heliopause

    September 2, 2011 at 9:59 pm

    The real divide for me—in terms of whose reasoning I can understand—goes like this. There are people who think that all we need is for a Mr. Smith type motherfucker to go pour his heart out about what he knows is right, there are people who think think what we need is a Continental Op type motherfucker to outsmart and out-trick the low-lifes who rule us now.

    You know what pisses me off? People who shoehorn other people into tidy little categories so that they can deal with the category as they’ve defined it rather than what other people are actually saying. That’s what pisses me off.

  22. 22.

    BTD

    September 2, 2011 at 10:00 pm

    I don;t even know what your post is intending to say. Who are you taking about when you write:

    “The real divide for me—in terms of whose reasoning I can understand—goes like this. There are people who think that all we need is for a Mr. Smith type motherfucker to go pour his heart out about what he knows is right, there are people who think think what we need is a Continental Op type motherfucker to outsmart and out-trick the low-lifes who rule us now.”

    This is a very “some people say” post. Could you link to something that represent what you mean? This post reads like Jon Chait to me.

  23. 23.

    Little Boots

    September 2, 2011 at 10:01 pm

    oh, it’s like this doug, new thread? is it cause I mocked you down below?

  24. 24.

    Sam Houston

    September 2, 2011 at 10:01 pm

    Are you say Mr. Smith was a wimp? I was under the impression he used shame as a club and beat the crap out of the back-stabbers.

    Shame doesn’t work anymore so I wouldn’t suggest it as a strategy. Plus, congress now gets to have filibusters without anyone saying anything. Novel idea, eh?

    I want a no BS President like Truman or Eisenhower. I’ll admit I may have an unreal rosy picture of them. But the speeches of theirs I have read don’t seem to pull and punches or digress into “now, now, let’s be nice” monologues.

    Is my perception wrong?

  25. 25.

    Spaghetti Lee

    September 2, 2011 at 10:01 pm

    Maybe what we need is some sort of sabermetric system for politics. Talking about how Obama just has to use the bully pulpit reminds me of ESPN chatterers talking about who’s got more guts and who has to want it more. Now those things aren’t irrelevant, but I don’t think they should be a primary criticism, more like a deciding factor after everything else is in place. If there was some way to mathematically analyze what Obama has accomplished compared to what a hypothetical average president in his situation would have accomplished, I’d be interested in reading it. Just for my own musings, I think the stimulus getting passed was maybe beating the odds, but not by much. HCR getting passed was a big variation from the mean, but I’d put that more on Pelosi.

  26. 26.

    poco

    September 2, 2011 at 10:03 pm

    Paging joe from lowell here.

    http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/09/endless-disappointment/comment-page-1#comment-152462

  27. 27.

    J. Michael Neal

    September 2, 2011 at 10:03 pm

    @beltane: You can’t be Don Corleone if Robert Duvall and several lower minions threaten to go work for the other mob if you take a hardline. There are probably 8-10 Democratic senators (including Lieberman) who would vote with the Republicans on the kinds of things we would like Obama to push. That wouldn’t signal strength. It would signal futility.

    I think a lot of people don’t understand just how badly the fractures in the Democratic Party hamstring any attempt Obama might make to take a strong, left-wing opinion on anything. This includes Paul Krugman, who I don’t think understands politics at all.

    It’s not just that whatever policy he chooses wouldn’t pass thanks to a Republican House. If that were the case, it would be worth doing. It’s that 25+ House Blue Dogs would vote with Boehner and that the bill wouldn’t get a bare majority of votes, let alone pass a filibuster.

    What you would have then is stories about how opposition to Obama is bipartisan and he’s in a weak position and he’s a one-term president. Claire McCaskill, Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson and Holy Joe would be all over the television talking about how they can’t support such a radical agenda.

    It would be a catastrophe. It wouldn’t advance liberal causes; it would wreck them. I agree that there needs to be more rhetorical attention focused on these issues in order to try to build public opinion in our favor. But for a variety of reasons, it can’t be Obama taking the lead on it. It has to be legislators and people outside government. It has to be people who can take on conservative Democrats without committing professional suicide.

  28. 28.

    fhtagn

    September 2, 2011 at 10:03 pm

    @General Stuck:

    Would you accept that the Obama White House has screwed up its messaging pretty disastrously of late and given the strong impression that it rolls over whenever the GOP lifts an eyebrow of disagreement?

  29. 29.

    BTD

    September 2, 2011 at 10:05 pm

    Though the last graf sounds very much like my “pols are pols and do what they do” line.

    Yet, if someone suggested that I would expect Balloon Juice would put a “How Has Obama Failed You Today” tag on it.

    The thinking, it needs a little development, and, dare I say it, consistency.

  30. 30.

    Jewish Steel

    September 2, 2011 at 10:07 pm

    Speaking of speeches, Obama’s address to congress has been leaked.

  31. 31.

    SteveinSC

    September 2, 2011 at 10:07 pm

    If Obama or Clinton or whoever cuts a shitty deal that enacts bad policy and gets nothing for it, politically, then shame on them.

    Over here in this corner, we have a winner. The Obama presidency is dissolving around his ears, but here on the same small, and rapidly getting smaller, island are the diminishing band of true believers.

  32. 32.

    Little Boots

    September 2, 2011 at 10:09 pm

    Clinton had fractures. LBJ had fractues. jesus fuck, did LBJ have fractures! nobody gives a shit if you look like you might actually be worth voting for. that is what obama is lacking right now. a reason to say, yes, I want this thing and he will get it done. this maybe shit will not cut it. everyone stop fooling themselves. it will not work. never has.

  33. 33.

    General Stuck

    September 2, 2011 at 10:11 pm

    @fhtagn:

    I’ve already stated that it seems to me the debate scheduling tempest in a tea pot was a WH screwup. And I don’t buy the Boner said it was okay argument. It was a bad Idea, though obviously a tempting one for the sheer punkish thought of big footing the GOP debate. But it was already scheduled, and it was a bad idea to schedule it on the same day. No matter what Boner said, or didn’t say. I don’t see that as a cave. But an unforced error, yes. This WH, like all WH’s ain’t perfect.

    As far as anything else concerning the WH rolling over for wingers, giving them what they want. No i don’t see that happening. In fact, legislatively, the wingnuts have gotten pretty much nothing they have wanted, thus far.

  34. 34.

    beltane

    September 2, 2011 at 10:12 pm

    @J. Michael Neal: I agree that it can’t be the President himself doing this. He would need to cultivate enforcers so to speak. However, there is the perception that Obama is not really interested in this form of governance, and that is what is troubling. Maybe this is why I am one of the very few people who kind of liked Rahm Emmanuel as Chief of Staff.

  35. 35.

    fhtagn

    September 2, 2011 at 10:13 pm

    @General Stuck:

    But they’ve got everything they could have desired in terms of the WH agreeing that austerity is where we have to go, the unemployment rate being stuck at around 9% for the duration, and, in general, the country getting the impression that Obama is out of touch.

    That’s a lot of mistakes, especially for a president seeking re-election without, at this point, any discernable message.

  36. 36.

    Raven (formerly stuckinred)

    September 2, 2011 at 10:13 pm

    @beltane: So what impact did he have? Seems to me Obama has played it the same from jump street.

  37. 37.

    sherifffruitfly

    September 2, 2011 at 10:15 pm

    “There are people who think that all we need is for a Mr. Smith type…”

    False. Those people PROFESS to require that.

    And yet they never required that of Clinton. Not ever.

    Mr. DADT.

    Mr. DOMA.

    Mr. Medicaid cut.

    Mr. Nafta.

    Mr. Welfare cut.

    Glass-Steagal gone.

    Until it is plausibly explained to me how Obama loses for self-proclaimed “progressives”, where Clinton is clean as a whistle, there’s really only one conclusion to be drawn from this: “progressives” differ in no substantial way from teabaggers.

  38. 38.

    fhtagn

    September 2, 2011 at 10:17 pm

    @sherifffruitfly:

    Consider the following:

    Unemployment rate under WJC v that under Obama
    I feel your pain
    It’s the economy, stupid.

  39. 39.

    wrb

    September 2, 2011 at 10:18 pm

    rise of the common man and finding its apotheosis in the American City

    I like

  40. 40.

    artem1s

    September 2, 2011 at 10:21 pm

    Don’t see how you can’t count JFK in that category. and for the record I don’t think its too much to ask that the leader of the US be able to make an intelligent, inspiring case for his/her policies once in awhile.

    If I had to pick one over the other I would prefer someone who understands how the system works and is effective in working it and knows how to pick a staff that can get the job done. even if credit is never given where due at least then you get 4 years of competent governance once in a while. but we are currently living in a country full of psychotic extroverts who think that quietly going about ones business in a competent manner is some sort of dire disability.

  41. 41.

    General Stuck

    September 2, 2011 at 10:21 pm

    @fhtagn:

    As I wrote in an earlier thread today. No jobs will be lost or created, and no economic effect will occur in real life, from politicians simply talking about austerity. It is sad to see, but unavoidable, that we are in what is most likely a cold civil war, where it is very doubtful anything will get done to help the country, because the republicans are afraid it might benefit the evil Obama in his reelection. So it is all posturing, all the time, most likely.

    I think the Obama WH gets this full well. But until they start slashing spending right now, then I don’t call it austerity, I would call it something else, something like long term deficit reduction, which was what the debt deal was.

  42. 42.

    beltane

    September 2, 2011 at 10:23 pm

    @sherifffruitfly: This is just wrong. Almost all of my liberal friends were perpetually infuriated with Bill Clinton over the course of his presidency. In fact, the first time I heard the term “progressive” in its current context was from a very close friend who thought Clinton should be impeached for being a Republican masquerading as a Democrat.

  43. 43.

    Chris

    September 2, 2011 at 10:24 pm

    But when it comes to what kind of a person they are, we’ve already established that, I hope, because I sure don’t want Jimmy Stewart running the country.

    I watched that movie again for the first time since I was a teenager (far more cynical now), and this time around, I was struck by the sheer absurdity of the MacGuffin.

    Jimmy Stewart stands up against the building of a dam (with all the jobs and other benefits it would bring to his state) and in so doing brings the business of government to a complete halt… and why? Because he wants his Boy Scout Convention hosted in that particular location. At no point does it even occur to him that he could just move it a few miles upriver, both sides would get their way and everybody lives.

    Yeah, I know: I’m being silly, I realize it was just a plot device to put him into conflict with the Taylor Machine. But, it’s also exactly the sort of thing that I can see the Jefferson Smith believers in the real world doing.

  44. 44.

    clayton

    September 2, 2011 at 10:24 pm

    (I haven’t read the comments — on purpose.)

    Everything is short term at this point. The goal is as before: regain the House and the the Senate — with filibuster-proof majorities. Then in 2013 (I can’t believe I am typing that) we go full throttle.

    Pipe dream, I know.

    But it is the only way.

    Short term, Obama et al have to make deals and some are shitty. Long term, we deliver the goods and we make the changes that he promised.

    The alternative is grim. I don’t want to live with these tenthers anymore. I don’t want policy decided by 12% of the country.

    OK, now I’ll read the rest.

  45. 45.

    beltane

    September 2, 2011 at 10:29 pm

    @Raven (formerly stuckinred): Emmanuel had very little impact, but at least he was a colorful character compared to the bland corporatist Daley. If you’re going to insist on the hippie punching, better to do it in as flamboyant a way as possible.

    @General Stuck: Words matter. When I am constantly bombarded with terms like “austerity”, “belt-tightening” and “cutbacks”, I tend to become quite miserly as do most people. So yeah, using harmful language tends to have harmful consequences.

  46. 46.

    Spaghetti Lee

    September 2, 2011 at 10:30 pm

    Keeping in the general theme of the thread, I think Obama should praise the good Lord every day for how stupid, incompetent, and evil his opposition is. If Jimmy Carter got the chance to run against the current freak show instead of Big Daddy Reagan, maybe he’d be a two-termer as well.

  47. 47.

    J

    September 2, 2011 at 10:31 pm

    I was inclined to say WTF does it even mean to say ‘People say “I just want a president to fight for something.” What the fuck does that even mean?’

    I suppose it’s all in the force of the ‘just’–DougJ seems to understand the remark as though it meant ‘all I ask of the president is that he fight for something, regardless of whether he succeeds in doing any good–as long as he’s fighting, I’m content’. This is an interpretation which would never have occurred to me. Surely what most people who vent their frustration in this way mean something like,’ even if he can’t work miracles, even if he doesn’t get everything, even if there are disappointments, setbacks on the way, the president is in their fighting, by hook or by crook–and yes, if necessary, by compromising–for something worthwhile’. And I suspect that those who want to see more fight in the president aren’t interested in fight regardless of results, rather they think that though you don’t get everything you fight for, you don’t get anything you don’t fight for. DougJ seems to be echoing Obama’s (massively point-missing) response to his liberal critics, who he picture as naifs unwilling to tolerate compromise of any kind, no matter how small the sacrifice, how good the result or how limited the alternatives. It’s a big country, and I’d guess there are some people like that, but the vast majority of the president’s critics aren’t rejecting the necessity of compromise (when necessary and on the best terms possible) but doubting whether the president’s compromises are good ones. Those critics need to be convinced not that compromises are necessary, but that *THESE* compromises were. Win that point, and you will have shown that that president is a fighter! There’s a related point. Some battles are worth fighting and losing if, in so doing, one stakes out a objective that one can struggle for again and maybe win the next time round (e.g. the civil rights struggle).

  48. 48.

    aisce

    September 2, 2011 at 10:31 pm

    @ steveinsc

    The Obama presidency is dissolving around his ears, but here on the same small, and rapidly getting smaller, island are the diminishing band of true believers.

    he will be reelected by 5-7% at minimum, barring a second recession or catastrophic event, and anybody who says otherwise is either a fool or a bigot.

    @ sherifffruitfly (that’s far too many f’s in one name, dude)

    And yet they never required that of Clinton. Not ever.

    clinton was reelected with the lowest level of base enthusiasm for any president since eisenhower or truman. fucking nixon had more enthusiastic partisans. enough lefties despised the clinton/gore administration as to give 3% of the nationwide vote to nader in 2000. where do you think “both sides are all alike” came from? how a president is judged in the rosy glow of retirement is completely separate from their time in office. when reagan’s addled ass finally tottered away into the sunset, he didn’t have one-tenth the love he had later on from conservatives. or the nation in general.

    when obama’s two terms end, he’ll see his popularity poll numbers jump up to 80%. and in fifty years, everybody who voted in 2008 will swear they voted for him.

  49. 49.

    fhtagn

    September 2, 2011 at 10:31 pm

    @General Stuck:

    The problem is that stasis on jobs/ongoing 9% unemployment is exactly what the GOP and the corporate CEOs want. It makes it much easier for the GOP to go up against Obama in the election, and the CEOs get to force workers into badly paid jobs with poor hours and no benefits.

  50. 50.

    jwb

    September 2, 2011 at 10:33 pm

    @sherifffruitfly: What makes you think progressives cared for Clintonian triangulation? (I recall them as hating Clinton almost as much as they currently hate Obama.) In fact, who is the last Democratic President that progressives enthusiastically rallied around? Carter, definitely no. LBJ, no (Vietnam). JFK, like Obama there was a lot of enthusiasm when he was elected, but it had already faded when he was killed. Truman, no. You’d pretty much have to go back to FDR, and many on the left thought even he was a sellout. You just have to face up to the fact that the left stakes its identity in being malcontents. Truth be told, I find it both what’s best and what’s most infuriating about the left. But it does mean that when push comes to shove we always accomplish far less than we might have.

  51. 51.

    hilts

    September 2, 2011 at 10:33 pm

    I sure don’t want Jimmy Stewart running the country.

    I’d prefer Burt Lancaster, Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, Orson Welles, or Marlon Brando.

  52. 52.

    Chris

    September 2, 2011 at 10:33 pm

    @sherifffruitfly:

    Until it is plausibly explained to me how Obama loses for self-proclaimed “progressives”, where Clinton is clean as a whistle, there’s really only one conclusion to be drawn from this: “progressives” differ in no substantial way from teabaggers.

    Wait, what?

    Sorry, I usually don’t comment on the “Obot vs Emoprog” wars, but this doesn’t sound right – I’ve heard plenty of “progressives” complain about Clinton, chiefly the Third Way/triangulation thing, NAFTA, and yes, DADT. I’ve never gotten the impression that he was off the hook.

  53. 53.

    J. Michael Neal

    September 2, 2011 at 10:33 pm

    @Little Boots:

    Clinton had fractures.

    Yes and what, exactly, did he get accomplished in his second term? What I remember is a lot of people making identical complaints about him that you’re making about Obama now.

    LBJ had fractues. jesus fuck, did LBJ have fractures!

    Yes, but he also had a fundamentally different environment. That the Democratic Party was fractured as badly as it was meant a lot less given that the Republicans were every bit as much fragmented. The civil rights legislation got a lot of Republican votes. It was pretty much a non-partisan issue on both sides. Ideological, sure, but not partisan.

    With Medicare, there was a lot less fragmentation. To start with, the Democrats held 66 seats in the Senate and more than 300 in the House. When six of the Democrats voted against it, that was still 60 votes. Of course, even that doesn’t tell the whole story, because of the 27 Republicans that voted on the bill, 13 of them voted in favor.

    Do you think that an environment in which half of the GOP caucus votes for a Democratic president’s signature legislation in any way resembles Obama’s situation?

    nobody gives a shit if you look like you might actually be worth voting for. that is what obama is lacking right now. a reason to say, yes, I want this thing and he will get it done. this maybe shit will not cut it. everyone stop fooling themselves. it will not work. never has.

    Then we’re doomed because there is no conceivable way that Obama could make a plausible case that he could get something that you consider acceptable passed. Find me 13 Republican senators that wold vote for it, and then we can talk.

  54. 54.

    MD Rackham

    September 2, 2011 at 10:35 pm

    @General Stuck:

    The largest in history, let me say that again. THE LARGEST DISCRETIONARY SPENDING BILL IN HISTORY, and you know why I know he fought them.

    Yeah, you gotta love inflation. It always makes the most recent whatever the “LARGEST WHATEVER IN HISTORY.” But I think you forgot all the exclamation points your comment really requires.

  55. 55.

    Chris

    September 2, 2011 at 10:37 pm

    @J. Michael Neal:

    The civil rights legislation got a lot of Republican votes. It was pretty much a non-partisan issue on both sides. Ideological, sure, but not partisan.

    This.

    Everything was non-partisan back then, in that sense. The Democrats were split between a dominant Northern wing and a rebellious Southern wing, the Republicans similarly split between moderates and conservatives (Rockefeller vs Goldwater). What made the “liberal consensus” possible was that the liberal wing was dominant in both parties, while the two sets of conservatives hadn’t come together into a coherent whole yet.

    Good old days.

  56. 56.

    J. Michael Neal

    September 2, 2011 at 10:38 pm

    @J: You know, paragraph breaks were invented for a reason.

  57. 57.

    Phil Perspective

    September 2, 2011 at 10:41 pm

    @J. Michael Neal: You really have no idea how to use power, do you? Who enabled HolyJoe back in 2006? Who enabled HolyJoe again after he went around campaigning with Cranky McSame and Caribou Barbie? Do you really think someone like LBJ would have let HolyJoe get away with campaigning for Barry Goldwater?

  58. 58.

    hilts

    September 2, 2011 at 10:41 pm

    @jwb:

    You just have to face up to the fact that the left stakes its identity in being malcontents.

    Is this your answer to the question – Why won’t America embrace the left?
    h/t http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/08/26/michael_kazin_interview

  59. 59.

    Phil Perspective

    September 2, 2011 at 10:42 pm

    @Chris: Don’t forget “welfare reform”!!

  60. 60.

    SteveinSC

    September 2, 2011 at 10:43 pm

    @aisce:

    he will be reelected by 5-7% at minimum

    Maybe so, because the current republican clown-show really has no credible alternative. Perry is shot through with barely hidden vulnerabilities and that is just from the republican perspective: former democrat, love letters to Hilary or whatever they’re dredging up on him as we speak. If he fades, what do they have left? On the other hand if they were to try say Jeb Bush or someone like that, overcoming the teaparty freaks, then I think we’ve got a horse race. (In other news, a hat-tip to General Stuck for moderate, sensible posting. There must be an evil twin lurking here as well trying to give him a bad name.)

  61. 61.

    The Spy Who Loved Me

    September 2, 2011 at 10:43 pm

    @fhtagn:

    I think it was a little closer to “Yes, madam, but in the morning I shall be sober and you will still be ugly.”

  62. 62.

    hilts

    September 2, 2011 at 10:45 pm

    @Chris:

    The existence of SANE, RATIONAL Republicans serving in both chambers of Congress were remarkable old days.

  63. 63.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 2, 2011 at 10:46 pm

    @J. Michael Neal:

    Find me 13 Republican senators that wold vote for it, and then we can talk.

    I can do it, but they’re nearly all dead.

    Chuck Percy. Jacob Javits. Mark Hatfield. Ed Brooke. Margaret Chase Smith. Clifford Case. John Sherman Cooper. Leverett Saltonstall, George Aiken…

    The missing party from Congress, especially in the Senate, is the one composed of sane Republicans. There never were a lot of them, but there were always enough of them to prevent what we’re watching.

    The political landscape we observe presently is considerably different from the one in which The Rules arose.

  64. 64.

    The Raven

    September 2, 2011 at 10:46 pm

    I answered this one. Over a month ago. What I wrote was,

    Progressives had hoped that Obama was going to be one of the great and rare presidents, who, like Washington and Juarez, have been able to renounce power for the greater good. Link.

    Obama has shown, of course, that he is no such thing.

    If you defend Obama by saying that only a corrupt man could have gotten elected, then you are still saying that Obama is corrupt.

  65. 65.

    beltane

    September 2, 2011 at 10:48 pm

    @Chris: One of the problems now is that the Republicans have become a party based mostly upon ethnic affiliation and nothing more. Being that GOP voters gladly vote in what they see as the interests of their tribe as opposed to their personal interests, it is next to impossible to make any kind of rational appeal to them. There are millions of white people in this country who would convert to Islam before they voted for a Democrat, and this situation makes it almost impossible to govern as a Democrat in this country. I really don’t know what the answer is.

  66. 66.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 2, 2011 at 10:50 pm

    @beltane:

    I really don’t know what the answer is.

    More and better speeches, obviously.

    Seriously, the last time this came up the answer was four years of armed conflict and three quarters of a million dead.

  67. 67.

    Phil Perspective

    September 2, 2011 at 10:50 pm

    @beltane: Rahmbo and Daley are both corporatists, in case you’ve forgotten.

  68. 68.

    fhtagn

    September 2, 2011 at 10:52 pm

    @beltane:

    Shoot and eat more deep-fried white Southern cuisine?

  69. 69.

    J. Michael Neal

    September 2, 2011 at 10:52 pm

    @Phil Perspective:

    Who enabled HolyJoe back in 2006?

    The voters of Connecticut.

    Who enabled HolyJoe again after he went around campaigning with Cranky McSame and Caribou Barbie?

    People who desperately needed one more vote to pass anything.

    Do you really think someone like LBJ would have let HolyJoe get away with campaigning for Barry Goldwater?

    In the current environment and under the current Senate rules, I suspect that that’s exactly what he would have done. It’s kind of hard to say, given that the environment and rules would have prevented LBJ from having a pre-executive branch career that even vaguely resembled the LBJ produced by the 1940s and 50s.

    When there are 66 Democrats in the Senate *and* you can count on the votes of double digit Republicans on crucial issues, it’s really easy to tell a rebellious Senator to bend over and take it, because his vote is almost meaningless; he needs you a fuckload more than you need him. When the rules of both houses of Congress give party leadership and committee chairmen a lot more power over individual legislators than they have now, it’s a lot easier to tell a rebellious Senator to bend over and take it.

    None of that was true with Lieberman. Given that what he likes is publicity and being invited to blather on television, a public fight with Obama would have given him almost as much as losing his committee chair would have cost him. One thing I know about power is that in order to have it, you need to have leverage over whatever your trying to move. No one has yet explained to me what leverage Obama and Reid had over Lieberman that could have been used to both seriously punish him *and* keep his vote for major legislation.

  70. 70.

    Southern Beale

    September 2, 2011 at 10:53 pm

    Well that was quick. Direct-TV’s on demand service is showing Sarah Palin “The Undefeated” already. That move was almost straight-to-video.

  71. 71.

    Ira-NY

    September 2, 2011 at 10:54 pm

    @jwb:

    There is a reason for this. Given the ideological make up of the American electorate, you cannot preside from the Left.

    The Left will not accept this and accuses Democratic Presidents of being spineless and such.

  72. 72.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    September 2, 2011 at 10:57 pm

    @J. Michael Neal: And actually, there’s a historical pattern for this. In 1937, when FDR threatened to expand the SCOTUS in order to get New Deal legislation to be ratified, southern Democrats aligned with Republicans and effectively stopped legislation – except for the minimum wage law – until Pearl Harbor.

  73. 73.

    hilts

    September 2, 2011 at 10:58 pm

    @Davis X. Machina:

    Chuck Percy. Jacob Javits. Mark Hatfield. Ed Brooke. Margaret Chase Smith. Clifford Case. John Sherman Cooper. Leverett Saltonstall…

    To be replaced by Jim DeMint, James Inhofe, Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann, Allen West, Steve King…

    This is the plot of one truly horrific science fiction movie.

  74. 74.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    September 2, 2011 at 10:59 pm

    @J. Michael Neal:
    @Chris:

    Everything was non-partisan back then, in that sense. The Democrats were split between a dominant Northern wing and a rebellious Southern wing, the Republicans similarly split between moderates and conservatives (Rockefeller vs Goldwater). What made the “liberal consensus” possible was that the liberal wing was dominant in both parties, while the two sets of conservatives hadn’t come together into a coherent whole yet.

    I think people today just do not understand how abnormal mid-20th Cen US politics was by the standards of the 19th Cen or (now that the Southern Strategy has run to its logical conclusion) it appears the 21st, because of the ideological straddle involving the two parties from 1933-1994. The Dems were anchored in the south, but with a strong liberal wing ideologically, mostly from the other sections of the country. Combine that with ideological allies in the other party’s liberal wing and there was a lot of leverage available to a liberal president, especially when you factor in that the levers of intra-party patronage and power (via control of fundraising) was much stronger in LBJ’s day than it is today, leverage which could be used to coerce conservative southern Dems (whose counterparts today are in the GOP) into supporting liberal legislation.

    And the other thing is that while “Dominant” might be too strong a word to describe liberalisms political position, certainly it was strong enough in both parties that it put the POTUS in the ideal position of being the Man in the Middle whom everybody else had to come to in order to broker deals.

    And deals needed to be brokered with some urgency because our national infrastructure was less developed back then than it is today, so there was lots of money to be made, and big business was eager get on with the job. Look at the history of the BLM and Bureau of Reclamation during the Go-Go years of hydroelectric dam building in the 1960s for just one example. Ditto with the growth years of the military industrial complex. Folks in Congress urgently needed to get bills passed because there was a metric shit-ton of money lying around to be converted into corporate profits, but to do that they had to go thru the POTUS.

    FDR and LBJ enjoyed tools of power and a position of leverage that Obama can only dream of. His position is much more similar to that of our presidents during the late 19th Cen, all of whom prior to TR were weak presidents. And when you start looking at how TR worked with Congress, it looks more and more like the way Obama is operating today, the more you dig into the details.

  75. 75.

    Sly

    September 2, 2011 at 11:00 pm

    @fhtagn:

    What exactly is your version of the MLK activist strategy? What rules out say … FDR … as a successful user of such a strategy?

    FDR spent his most of his administration either co-opting policies of the left and watering them down to the point where they were practically unrecognizable from their original incarnation, or flat out actively demolishing any leftist challenge against his authority over the Democratic Party (there’s a reason, for instance, why political machines across the country began losing serious power in the thirties).

    And, of course, this doesn’t rule him out as someone who utilized the same strategy as King. If nothing else can be said of the man, King knew exactly how to play to particular audiences in order to advance his agenda. He wasn’t a hero because he was pure, he was a hero because he was smart.

    @jwb:

    You’d pretty much have to go back to FDR, and many on the left thought even he was a sellout.

    You can actually go back to Lincoln, and that’s only if you want to stay within the era of the modern American state. Without such a limitation, you can go all the way back to Adams and Jefferson. Hell, in the 1800 election significant factions in both parties tried to screw over their respective Presidential candidates, and they ended up needing a constitutional amendment to prevent it from happening again.

  76. 76.

    eco2geek

    September 2, 2011 at 11:00 pm

    If David Koch guaranteed Obama reelection if Obama allowed a little more offshore drilling or strip mining, Obama would be a fool not to take the deal.

    You may not want a president who actually stands for certain principles, Big Baby DougJ, but I do.

    As to what Obama’s been up to recently, that’s been working out really well lately, hasn’t it.

  77. 77.

    fhtagn

    September 2, 2011 at 11:02 pm

    @Sly:

    I’d really like to know just what DougJ thinks was MLK’s activist strategy. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thing to ask.

  78. 78.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    September 2, 2011 at 11:04 pm

    @Davis X. Machina: And that’s a big part of the deal. The last time we had one party acting the way the Republicans are now, we had a Civil War.

  79. 79.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 2, 2011 at 11:05 pm

    @J. Michael Neal: The modern Senator has, especially in a small state — and there are a lot of small states — an enormous amount of campaigning autonomy. He or she is the baron of a largely independent fiefdom.

    I live in Maine, where you can’t spend more than $4 or $5 million even if you want to on a campaign, and so you have the ability to tell the party organization to get lost. And you can campaign successfully without a single Presidential visit or fundraiser. Challengers need that support, not incumbents.

    Bushes I and II may have summered in Maine, but you didn’t often see either of them with our Republican senators, first Cohen, then Snowe, then Snowe and Collins.

  80. 80.

    The Raven

    September 2, 2011 at 11:06 pm

    FDR spent his most of his administration either co-opting policies of the left and watering them down to the point where they were practically unrecognizable from their original incarnation, or flat out actively demolishing any leftist challenge against his authority over the Democratic Party

    Well, yes. But “the left” in FDR’s time was c0mmun1st and s0cial1st. Different left.

  81. 81.

    JGabriel

    September 2, 2011 at 11:06 pm

    @SteveinSC:

    Maybe so, because the current republican clown-show really has no credible alternative.

    Hey, does anyone else remember those idyllic, halcyon days when we all thought George Bush and the rest of the 2000 GOP primary field were equally non-credible?

    God, I miss those days.

    .

  82. 82.

    beltane

    September 2, 2011 at 11:08 pm

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ: So it looks like we’re reverting to our pre-superpower status of two hostile countries sullenly shackled together under a weak central government. Except that our military is stationed all over the world.

  83. 83.

    beltane

    September 2, 2011 at 11:10 pm

    @JGabriel: In 2000, I remember the media constantly reporting that Bush was “invincible”, and thanks to them he was invincible.

  84. 84.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 2, 2011 at 11:11 pm

    @beltane: Well, it’s less of a danger over there. The distance between Fort Sumter and the Charleston Battery was only a couple of miles. A few thousand miles, makes me feel better.

  85. 85.

    JWL

    September 2, 2011 at 11:11 pm

    So, a “Mr. Smith-savior mentality” is what delineates critics of the administration from rocked ribbed republicans?

    What utter horse-shit.

  86. 86.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 2, 2011 at 11:12 pm

    @beltane: Time magazine — and Time mattered then — had him winning the presidency in the early summer of 1999. Bush II was the anointed one in a way none of the present GOP eruption-infestation is.

  87. 87.

    J. Michael Neal

    September 2, 2011 at 11:13 pm

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ: On a different note, I’m close to publishing “Corporations Aren’t People”. The revised version has that quote you left on my blog inserted and footnoted.

    On that note, I should probably go post the essays I’ve written recently on the blog.

  88. 88.

    jwb

    September 2, 2011 at 11:18 pm

    @JGabriel: Truth be told, I don’t recall the 2000 election being particularly memorable until the surreal finish.

  89. 89.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    September 2, 2011 at 11:18 pm

    @beltane:

    So it looks like we’re reverting to our pre-superpower status of two hostile countries sullenly shackled together under a weak central government.

    Yes, I think so. I think the dynamism of the US govt during most of the 20th Century was made possible to a very significant degree by the way that the lines of partisan identity cut right across the lines of ideology and cultural identity that have always made the US a house divided against itself. And that criss-crossing matrix of multiple identities was itself a historically contigent accident resulting from the way the GOP split in half between its progressive and conservative wings in the 1912 election and the resulting mass migration of progressives into what was at the time a very reactionary Democratic party.

    I think our best hope for a repeat of something like that to happen again in the mid 21st Century will be if a Mike Huckabee-like figure ressurects authentic grassroots populism in the GOP and attracts left wing Dems over to his/her side. But in order for that to happen, first Wall St would have to give up on the GOP as a vehicle for exercising power and concentrate instead on colonizing the Dems. If you look at the influence of hedge fund money in Dem fundraising from the early 1990s to the present, I think that process may already be starting to take place but it has a long way to go yet.

  90. 90.

    fhtagn

    September 2, 2011 at 11:18 pm

    @Southern Beale:

    Travelling wingnuts gotta have their wholesome porn readily available while staying in love hotels and cruising Craigslist for “massage therapists”.

  91. 91.

    Southern Beale

    September 2, 2011 at 11:18 pm

    @eco2geek:

    You may not want a president who actually stands for certain principles, Big Baby DougJ, but I do.

    Don’t know if anyone here reads Harper’s, but I read the September issue today on the plane. There’s “A Letter To Barack Obama” by George McGovern that I found really interesting. He kinda made that point.

    I’d post a link but you need to be a subscriber to read it.

  92. 92.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    September 2, 2011 at 11:19 pm

    @J. Michael Neal:
    Thanks, I’ll look for it tomorrow. Unfortunately I’ve got to sign off now, and right in the middle of a fascinating discussion, too. [sigh]

  93. 93.

    Constance

    September 2, 2011 at 11:20 pm

    @hilts:

    To be replaced by Jim DeMint, James Inhofe, Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann, Allen West, Steve King…

    and don’t forget Mitch McConnell who said on the day of Obama’s inauguration (or was it the day after?) that he would devote the next four years to making sure that Obama did not get re-elected. I’m amazed Obama has been able to accomplish anything. The Repug assholes decided to skip governing for four years and just devote their lives to seeing that President Obama does not get re-elected. Is that not treason? Should they not be tried and when found guilty, executed? For chrissakes, they are not only assholes, they are traitors.

  94. 94.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    September 2, 2011 at 11:21 pm

    @Davis X. Machina:

    A few thousand miles, makes me feel better.

    A suggestion for your continued peace of mind: don’t google the words “airlift” and “Spanish Civil War, beginning of”

  95. 95.

    Chris

    September 2, 2011 at 11:21 pm

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ:

    I think people today just do not understand how abnormal mid-20th Cen US politics was by the standards of the 19th Cen or (now that the Southern Strategy has run to its logical conclusion) it appears the 21st, because of the ideological straddle involving the two parties from 1933-1994.

    I’ve heard that people back then thought the mid-20th century model – more bipartisan and fluid – was the new normal and simply meant that the country/society had become a stable and mature one. Guess they didn’t expect it would regress back to what it used to be.

    But you’re right, few people get it, and few people understand how short the “reasonable, bipartisan” era was – less than thirty years, starting in 1941 with Pearl Harbour and ending in 1968 when Nixon brought down the Democratic coalition (and even then, lots of rumbles beneath the surface). History books a hundred years from now will probably remember it as a slightly longer, 20th century version of the Era of Good Feelings (and with just as little impact on the nation’s long-term unity).

  96. 96.

    Sly

    September 2, 2011 at 11:22 pm

    @Belafon (formerly anonevent):
    The South started turning against FDR a bit before Court Packing. Much of the New Deal’s regulatory policy and public employment programs were viewed by the Southern Democratic elite as attempts to undermine the South’s brand of low-wage industrialism. And, in all honesty, they were kind of right.

    Southern opposition began during the TVA, but began to crystallize around the time the Wagner Act passed and Harold Ickes Sr. was made director of the WPA. Ickes began pouring money into developing public facilities in the rural black south and actively undermined the ability of the Southern Democratic elite to prevent WPA jobs to go to Southern blacks. Court Packing was more or less the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  97. 97.

    Southern Beale

    September 2, 2011 at 11:22 pm

    Anyone watch “The Green Room” on Showtime? Comes on Friday nights, a really interesting comedy show. Basically 4-5 comedians sitting around talking, sounds boring but it’s actually interesting. Right now they’re talking about how multinational corporations have become the modern-day equivalent of the nation-state.

    I’ll have to chew on that one for a minute.

  98. 98.

    LanceThruster

    September 2, 2011 at 11:23 pm

    I don’t think it happens in DC much but I do think there are instances of it in academics.

    Dr. Norman Finkelstein comes to mind.

  99. 99.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 2, 2011 at 11:23 pm

    @Constance:

    Is that not treason?

    No. Treason is the only crime defined in the Constitution, not (originally) in the US code, and for a reason.

    The Founders had before them the minatory example of treason charges as they were used in Britain in the 16th and 17th century.

  100. 100.

    cleek

    September 2, 2011 at 11:23 pm

    @JWL:
    it’s definitely some kind of “savior” mentality. that’s the only thing that can explain the constant screaming that Obama pull some magic legislative rabbit out of his hat and do things like “spend a trillion dollars” or “stamp out a couple of trillion dollar coins” or “stand firm and drive the country into a ditch”, or whateverthefuck.

  101. 101.

    JGabriel

    September 2, 2011 at 11:26 pm

    @beltane:

    In 2000, I remember the media constantly reporting that Bush was “invincible”, and thanks to them he was invincible.

    True story: The night of the 2000 election I walked into my local pub and asked the bartender to put on the elections.

    “Why?” one of the other regulars asked. “Everyone knows who’s gonna win.”

    “I don’t. Have you looked at the polls? No one has any idea who is going to win. If you do, tell me.”

    He didn’t answer.

    Two days later, he walked in, came directly up to me before even ordering a drink, and said, “I’m sorry. I was so wrong.”

    Anyway, we all know the history. Gore won the popular vote. The SCOTUS gave it to Bush anyway. Bush wasn’t invincible. He was just lucky, due to an accident of birth and Daddy’s Supreme Court picks.

    .

  102. 102.

    LanceThruster

    September 2, 2011 at 11:26 pm

    @Southern Beale:

    I’ve seen many good “Green Room” programs (thanks to On-Demand). The last one I saw had a larger than usual number of comics in the audience and Tony Clifton get thrown out for making a Santa/Jew joke (that and his constant interruptions).

  103. 103.

    cat48

    September 2, 2011 at 11:27 pm

    This is interesting. I read it yesterday. The prez may have gone “Howard Dean Scream Crazy” and started writing Executive Orders….

    On Wednesday, Obama took a now-familiar path in adopting a program–this time a jobs and infrastructure effort–that can happen entirely within his domain. Obama directed several federal agencies to identify “high-impact, job-creating infrastructure projects” that can be expedited now, without congressional approval.
    …
    One week before he will make a major address to Congress on jobs, Obama is making sure they know he plans to move forward without them. The president has also directed the Education Department to come up with a “Plan B” updating the 2001 No Child Left Behind law in the absence of congressional action. The message to Congress is clear: Do your work or we’ll do it for you.
    …
    Under Wednesday’s order, the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Transportation will each select up to three high-priority infrastructure projects that can be completed within the control and jurisdiction of the federal government. The effort is labeled as a “common-sense approach” to spurring job growth “in the near term.” In practical terms, that means speeding up the permitting and waiver processes for green-building or highway projects to get the government out of the way. One of businesses’ foremost complaints with government infrastructure projects is that the paperwork is too cumbersome and creates unnecessary delays, according to White House economic advisers.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/09/obama-rolls-out-a-jobs-plan-that-doesnt-need-congress/244420/

  104. 104.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 2, 2011 at 11:29 pm

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ: The general availability and reliability of the C-17 and C-5A/B makes it possible for me to sleep at night.

    They’d have to fly commercial — and even then, Delta would lose all their guns. They would, however, deliver them three days later, free of charge, in taxis.

  105. 105.

    Chris

    September 2, 2011 at 11:30 pm

    @Sly:

    The South started turning against FDR a bit before Court Packing. Much of the New Deal’s regulatory policy and public employment programs were viewed by the Southern Democratic elite as attempts to undermine the South’s brand of low-wage industrialism. And, in all honesty, they were kind of right.

    “Low-wage industralization” meaning using their own people as the cheap industrial version of cannon fodder? Kind of like the way in the last couple decades, their strategy to draw investment seems to’ve been offering their own people as a cheap and poorly protected labor force?

    Man. What’s it going to take for the South to join the 20th century, never mind the 21st? Or, you know, just invest in its people as something other than replaceable cogs in the robber barons’ machine?

  106. 106.

    Andrew

    September 2, 2011 at 11:30 pm

    First of all, let me state upfront that yes, I think Obama’s ozone decision was stupid and indefensible; no, Obama is not FDR; no, Obama is not as successful as FDR; and no, Obama does not have the kind of popular support FDR had.

    All that said, for those who doubt that FDR had his liberal discontents, here’s an old NYT clip:

    LIBERAL HOPE GONE, PROGRESSIVE SAYS

    …

    WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 (AP)

    Representative Amlie, Progressive, of Wisconsin, chairman of the American Commonwealth Political Federation, said today that President Roosevelt’s signal of a “breathing spell” for business meant “the end of New Deal liberalism.”

    Mr. Amlie asserted that the President apparently had decided to shut his eyes to the problems of the millions of unemployed and those living on charity.

    “The President’s popularity among some liberal, labor and farm groups has been based on the hope that before long he would do something fundamental about the fact that, although we live in an age of potential abundance, the people are forced to endure appalling and unprecedented poverty,” the Representative declared. “The President has now blasted that hope.

    “I have felt for a long time that the liberal supporters of the President were deluded by false hopes and I am grateful to the President for his clarification of his position.”

    (Cont.)

  107. 107.

    A Humble Lurker

    September 2, 2011 at 11:31 pm

    See, I think this can serve as a healthy litmus test. Stuff like this? Relevant, important, worthy of freakout and/or debate. Stuff like that speech reschedule is not.

    But reschedule gate is important ’cause it helps weed out true, rational Obama critics from the ODS sufferers who make everything personal. If you freaked out about reschedule gate, you’re the latter. If you didn’t, you’re the former. Simple.

  108. 108.

    andrewsomething

    September 2, 2011 at 11:32 pm

    @J. Michael Neal:

    This includes Paul Krugman, who I don’t think understands politics at all.

    ..snip…

    I agree that there needs to be more rhetorical attention focused on these issues in order to try to build public opinion in our favor. But for a variety of reasons, it can’t be Obama taking the lead on it. It has to be legislators and people outside government. It has to be people who can take on conservative Democrats without committing professional suicide.

    What I never understand about this position is that isn’t Krugman doing exactly what you claim to want?

  109. 109.

    Southern Beale

    September 2, 2011 at 11:33 pm

    Here’s what McGovern had to say about FDR in his Harper’s piece, and why Obama can’t be FDR:

    When President Franklin Roosevelt came into office in the depth of the Great Depression, he sought to stabilize and empower American society by introducing bold new initiatives: Social Security, the Public Works Administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Rural Electrification Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, among many others. These measures were sufficiently successful, as was his leadership during World War II, that he secured four terms in the White House. There was some congressional resistance but not enough to block the support of both political parties.
    __
    Like Roosevelt, President Barack Obama has inherited a serious economic crisis, but in his first two years in office he has been met with an even worse problem: the rigid opposition of the rival party leaders to national health care and nearly every other proposal he has made. The Republican House Appropriations Committee has even voted to terminate public funding for NPR and PBS. Neither during my four years in the House of Representatives, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House, nor through eighteen years in the U.S. Senate, under John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, have I witnessed any president thwarted by the kind of narrow partisanship that has beset Obama. He has tried to avoid such divisions by publicly explaining his willingness to compromise, but these gestures have been spurned. Some of his political critics have gone so far as to express the hope that the Obama Administration will fail, even avowing their determination to hasten that failure. What has happened, one is compelled to ask, to the love of nation?

    People want Obama to be an FDR or a Kennedy or a Clinton but they need to remember that we face a unique set of circumstances right now, chief among them being an opposition more forceful than ever because they are putting love of party and ideology over love of country, and they are backed by a propaganda machine spewing their messages via Limbaugh and Fox that didn’t exist before.

  110. 110.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    September 2, 2011 at 11:34 pm

    @Sly: Thanks for the additional info. From what I understand, is that 1937 was also pretty much when FDR stopped getting legislation through. If I understand things correctly – and I am speculating at this point – he started using a lot of the executive power given by the legislation that was passed, which worked because most of the public was behind him.

    And yes, a number of his programs were designed to change the way the economy worked. Can you imagine a Republican being able to pull off completely taking over the manufacturing sector the way FDR did during WW2?

  111. 111.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 2, 2011 at 11:35 pm

    @Andrew: Henry Wallace, not Howard Dean, was the first netroots Presidential candidate.

  112. 112.

    General Stuck

    September 2, 2011 at 11:35 pm

    @beltane:

    Words matter. When I am constantly bombarded with terms like “austerity”, “belt-tightening” and “cutbacks”, I tend to become quite miserly as do most people. So yeah, using harmful language tends to have harmful consequences.

    BS. Austerity in the context we are talking about here is specifically related to federal spending, that is a product of specific actions in governing to pass legislation. Talking about austerity in that arena, the one we are discussing means absolutely nothing with congressional acts and presidents signing those acts. What you think in your personal life means nothing. And if it did, it would likely be a good idea for people to start saving a little money, instead of running on plastic, for a plastic economy, of the equivalent to calling Cotton Candy an important source of nutrition.

  113. 113.

    lol

    September 2, 2011 at 11:36 pm

    @beltane:

    You’ve obviously missed the recent deification of Clinton as a liberal god in the past year or so. I’ve noticed that most Netroots type people don’t have a political memory that pre-dates the Dean campaign and the recent talk about Clinton just reinforces that.

    Clinton was a fighter! He stood up to the GOP!

    It’s that Netroots emphasis on FIGHTING and posturing and preening over actual results.

  114. 114.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 2, 2011 at 11:37 pm

    @Southern Beale: To find a similar level of a party’s commitment to rule-or-ruin, you have to go back to the late 1850’s — not a sanguine consideration.

  115. 115.

    General Stuck

    September 2, 2011 at 11:38 pm

    @cat48:

    You trying to ruin the Obama sold us out theme for the evening with good news and shit. that is mighty cruel of you.

  116. 116.

    andrewsomething

    September 2, 2011 at 11:38 pm

    @sherifffruitfly:

    Until it is plausibly explained to me how Obama loses for self-proclaimed “progressives”, where Clinton is clean as a whistle, there’s really only one conclusion to be drawn from this: “progressives” differ in no substantial way from teabaggers.

    Where do you get this from? In my circles, that may be “progressive,” there has been a joke for years that Clinton was our best Republican President ever. Welfare reform was quite enough to dirty him for me.

  117. 117.

    lol

    September 2, 2011 at 11:40 pm

    @andrewsomething:

    It’s the difference between

    “Obama needs to pass a bigger stimulus because X Y and Z!”

    and

    “Obama is a pussy who sold us out to Wall Street. Also too”

    Most Professional Left criticism falls into the second category.

  118. 118.

    Southern Beale

    September 2, 2011 at 11:41 pm

    Umm … John Cole is Tweeting some bizarre shit right now about cutting limes and there should be toilet paper under the sink. Is it time to stage an intervention or is he watching some strange movie?

  119. 119.

    Big Baby DougJ

    September 2, 2011 at 11:41 pm

    @Heliopause:

    You’re in one of those categories for me, sorry. Not everyone here is.

  120. 120.

    andrewsomething

    September 2, 2011 at 11:41 pm

    @lol:

    It’s that Netroots emphasis on FIGHTING and posturing and preening over actual results.

    This has always been my problem with Markos. Anyone with a D after their name that acts tough is who he pushes. He’s never been one for policy.

  121. 121.

    jwb

    September 2, 2011 at 11:42 pm

    @Southern Beale: I love it when John goes all CAPITALS in his twitter feed.

  122. 122.

    Southern Beale

    September 2, 2011 at 11:44 pm

    @jwb:

    Yeah it’s funny but I have no clue what it’s about. Must be some kind of inside joke or something.

  123. 123.

    aisce

    September 2, 2011 at 11:44 pm

    @ cat48, general stuck

    In practical terms, that means speeding up the permitting and waiver processes for green-building or highway projects to get the government out of the way. One of businesses’ foremost complaints with government infrastructure projects is that the paperwork is too cumbersome and creates unnecessary delays

    indeed, reducing red tape and federal paperwork is surely both “howard dean scream crazy” and the obvious turbocharging our moribund economy needs.

    fucking paper work reductions. fewer environmental reviews will surely save us.

    but instead of seeing this as the desperate and pathetic straits the administration finds itself in with congress actively sabotaging it at every turn, it’s instead obviously political genius. admit it, you just saw the words “executive order” and “jobs” in the same sentence and started touching yourselves straight away, didn’t you?

    fap obots, fap!

  124. 124.

    Katharsis

    September 2, 2011 at 11:45 pm

    What @J said.

    Although I would disagree with this:

    ..[W]hat most people who vent their frustration in this way mean something like,’ even if he can’t work miracles, even if he doesn’t get everything, even if there are disappointments, setbacks on the way, the president is in their fighting, by hook or by crook—and yes, if necessary, by compromising—for something worthwhile’. And I suspect that those who want to see more fight in the president aren’t interested in fight regardless of results..

    I think it is this simple. In some ways what we are asking of the President is actually the job of the he said/she said media, and on that point neither one does an effective job. It’s absolutely aggravating to hear the same people complain about Manic Progressive wanting more ‘bully pulpit’ one day, and then complain about the Village not seeing outside the republican narrative the next. Yeah for pragmatism!

    Here’s a question: If the President is sooo powerless that he can’t do the things we want, but is sooooo important that the world will end if he isn’t re-elected, then what does it matter who sits in the White House? As long as who ever it is, is, a Democrat right?

    Boiled Egg(D) for 2016!

  125. 125.

    Southern Beale

    September 2, 2011 at 11:46 pm

    @Davis X. Machina:

    …you have to go back to the late 1850’s—not a sanguine consideration.

    Yes. We all remember how THAT turned out …

  126. 126.

    cat48

    September 2, 2011 at 11:47 pm

    @General Stuck:

    I was on Twitter all day and everyone was talking about “the sellout” on EPA which is to be reviewed again in 2013 & I was a little miffed b/c he’s blocked the AT&T merger & announced today that Regulators were suing 17 BANKS & NO ONE mentioned either action. Cnbc was really talking about the ATT block & the Banksters being sued though! Sigh……

  127. 127.

    Big Baby DougJ

    September 2, 2011 at 11:47 pm

    @andrewsomething:

    I think Markos is half-activist/half-operative. When you look at how nuts the average DKos commenter is, you have to (at least in my opinion) give Markos lots of credit for keeping the tenor of the front page as sane as it is.

    I certainly didn’t mean this post as a slap at Kos.

  128. 128.

    jwb

    September 2, 2011 at 11:48 pm

    @Southern Beale: Ok, John’s seriously drunk now. He just invited everyone to his house for the weekend.

  129. 129.

    J. Michael Neal

    September 2, 2011 at 11:49 pm

    @andrewsomething:

    What I never understand about this position is that isn’t Krugman doing exactly what you claim to want?

    Some of the time, yes. Hell most of the time. I *like* Paul Krugman. I just don’t think that he understands politics at all. That’s not entirely a criticism, either. That lack of understanding probably improves his bully pulpit exercise.

    It just means that a lot (not all, but most) of his criticism of Obama needs to be viewed through the fact that he doesn’t understand politics. It would be nice if he realized that he doesn’t know much about the subject and should perhaps keep it in mind when he tries to analyze why Obama does things Krugman doesn’t like. Maybe, just maybe, it isn’t because Obama’s an idiot.

  130. 130.

    eco2geek

    September 2, 2011 at 11:51 pm

    @Southern Beale: That is very true. Could you post a link to a story that explains why people elected those partisan dickwad Republicans to Congress? Because I don’t get it.

  131. 131.

    CaseyL

    September 2, 2011 at 11:51 pm

    It’s always a delight when people with real knowledge and insight into American political history turn up in these discussions. I should have that kind of perspective, but I don’t, so finding it here it very helpful when I get to feeling depressed and hopeless.

    JMichael Neal, TLTIA, and Chris bring up something I have mentioned: the great liberal era of 1930-1968 was indeed anomalous. I attributed it to the duration and strength of FDR’s 12 years as President; it had not occurred to me (and it should have) that the non-ideological nature of both political parties also had a lot to do with the politics of that era. It’s amazing to look back and realize there were very liberal Republicans, and very racist Democrats. (Don’t forget how Lieberman got into the Senate: by defeating the very liberal Republican Lowell Weiker.)

    It’s possible – deeply deeply unfortunate but possible – that people who say the US is basically a center-right country are correct. Because, if that were not the case, our politics would be much different than they are. I don’t care how compromised and useless the MSM is: if most citizens valued liberal politics, we would by god have more liberal politics.

  132. 132.

    aisce

    September 2, 2011 at 11:51 pm

    @ cat48

    blocked the AT&T merger & announced today that Regulators were suing 17 BANKS

    those are good things to be talking about. let’s instead bring up some random executive order telling the transportation department not to require firms to fill out forms 17-b and 103-f to receive federal funding in a timely fashion. just for kicks.

  133. 133.

    General Stuck

    September 2, 2011 at 11:52 pm

    @aisce:

    Are you completely stupid? It is hardly mundane paper word speeding up to get construction projects approved faster and able to start constructing and hiring people. Idiot.

  134. 134.

    General Stuck

    September 2, 2011 at 11:55 pm

    Seriously, there are some of the stupidest motherfuckers on the internet tuned into BJ these days. Where once there was little suffering much of fools here, now it is routine.

  135. 135.

    aisce

    September 2, 2011 at 11:58 pm

    that dastardly federal bureaucracy! choking the economy with their pointless and insidious red tape and keeping our galtian heroes from being able to Put Americans Back to Work! (so important, i even busted out the shift key, whoa)

    now that those bureaucrats are out of the way, employment will surely explode! three cheers to president obama!

  136. 136.

    jwb

    September 2, 2011 at 11:59 pm

    @J. Michael Neal: That and Krugman rarely passes up an opportunity to take a swipe at Obama, which is sort of the Krugman version of “both sides do it.” The formula for being a pundit from the left is not that you need to take a shot at the President whenever you criticize the Republicans, but rather the opposite: whenever you feel you need to criticize the President, be sure to take a shot at the Republicans as well. But you spend the vast majority of your time advocating for the policies you think are best and criticizing Republicans and very little time criticizing the President and your Democratic allies.

  137. 137.

    Southern Beale

    September 3, 2011 at 12:00 am

    @Katharsis:

    Here’s a question: If the President is sooo powerless that he can’t do the things we want, but is sooooo important that the world will end if he isn’t re-elected, then what does it matter who sits in the White House?

    I’ve come down to the realization that politics can’t fix our problems. Yes, there are little things here and there that can be done, it’s not completely useless, but in terms of turning this ship of state from its dead-on course for that gigantic iceberg, no. We’ve gone too far, too much is broken, too many corrupted and failed institutions.

    The only thing that works, I’ve concluded, is changing the culture and you do that through the arts: movies, music, literature, etc. The right knows this, this is why they’re desperate to get a foot in the door with their “Red Dawn” remakes and “Atlas Shrugged” movies.

    And they’re working to discredit the arts with their “Hollywood liberal elite” and “liberal media” smears. Today at DFW airport I stopped i the bookstore and saw amid all the right wing wackadoodle titles one called “Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV.” They are relentless in their effort to attack the arts — and there’s a long history of totalitarian-types attacking artists and writers. The arts threatens the status quo and the power structure.

    So that’s where we should operate, and thankfully technology makes that easier than ever before.

  138. 138.

    Chris

    September 3, 2011 at 12:01 am

    @CaseyL:

    It’s possible – deeply deeply unfortunate but possible – that people who say the US is basically a center-right country are correct.

    For now. One can hope that’ll eventually change.

    I think someone here said a while ago that we’re center-left in terms of the policies we want, but center-right in terms of who we elect. Or, as I put it, people want to elect Republicans but still get Democratic results.

  139. 139.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 12:02 am

    @MD Rackham:

    Name the adjusted for inflation larger discretionary spending bills then.

  140. 140.

    cat48

    September 3, 2011 at 12:03 am

    @aisce:

    The way that article read to me was that he was going ahead & authorize the Infrastructure Projects to be done with an Executive Order & SCREW CONGRESS passing anything & also writing his own School Regs. Cong. won’t do. Maybe I’m reading it wrong as I didn’t copy all of it. There is a link though.

  141. 141.

    Southern Beale

    September 3, 2011 at 12:05 am

    @jwb:

    Ok, John’s seriously drunk now. He just invited everyone to his house for the weekend.

    LOL LOL LOL. I hope he’s cooking! Some of those meals look pretty awesome. Let’s load up the crack van, folks!

    :-)

  142. 142.

    lol

    September 3, 2011 at 12:06 am

    @Katharsis:

    There’s a huge gap between “powerless” and “not as powerful as the Pony brigade thinks”.

  143. 143.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 3, 2011 at 12:07 am

    @Katharsis:

    if most citizens valued liberal politics, we would by god have more liberal politics.

    The Left has been, throughout the developed world, in a thirty-year secular decline, regardless of the country. Who in the OECD is left of where they were in 1975-1980? Germany — no. UK — no. Good-bye Clause Four. France — no. Mitterand talked a good game about opposing nationalization, though . Italy — no. Canada — no. The US — no. Scandinavia — no. (The Meidner plan doesn’t get talked about much any more, does it?)

    I’m not sure what caused it, and I’m not sure what to do about it, but it’s real, and people write books about it, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t begin with Obama’s election, and it wasn’t going to end with it.

    The Left’s response too often, right across the OECD, has been nostalgia.

  144. 144.

    wilfred

    September 3, 2011 at 12:08 am

    Reduced to:

    “In order to have the Great Society, I had to give them Vietnam.”

    Choose terms and substitute as desired.

  145. 145.

    Southern Beale

    September 3, 2011 at 12:09 am

    @eco2geek:

    Could you post a link to a story that explains why people elected those partisan dickwad Republicans to Congress?

    Because of the economy, that’s why. Because of money polluting our electoral system, because November 2010 was a low-turnout election like midterms always are and when people don’t vote Republicans win.

  146. 146.

    dogwood

    September 3, 2011 at 12:12 am

    @beltane:

    Instead of either criticising or defending Obama, perhaps we should just accept the fact that the presidency is nowhere near as powerful a position as it once was.

    In terms of domestic policy, the president has never been as powerful as most Americans assume. The office has become completely mythologized. Democratic malcontents seem to think George W got everything he wanted, but that’s not the case at all. He couldn’t privatize SS, or reform immigration. And he wouldn’t have passed tax cuts, Medicare Part D, NCLB, and the AUMF in Iraq without Democratic votes. GWB was no master politician who knew how to intimidate Congress. He didn’t have to mess with Lincoln Chaffee, because he never needed his vote. There were plenty of Democrats to make up the difference. With 66 Dems. in the Senate, a great deal of LBJ’s bullying was because he enjoyed it.

  147. 147.

    Anne Laurie

    September 3, 2011 at 12:14 am

    @Southern Beale:

    Is it time to stage an intervention or is he watching some strange movie?

    As a loyal eavesdropper, I’m just hoping he meant ‘tanqueray’ (gin) not ‘tang’ (the orange powder)…

  148. 148.

    Chris

    September 3, 2011 at 12:16 am

    @Davis X. Machina:

    From your first link,

    If young people today are at a loss, it is not for want of targets. Any conversation with students or schoolchildren will produce a startling checklist of anxieties. Indeed, the rising generation is acutely worried about the world it is to inherit. But accompanying these fears there is a general sentiment of frustration: “we” know something is wrong and there are many things we don’t like. But what can we believe in? What should we do?

    Enormously accurate, IMO.

    And it’s one of the reasons for the current deadlock, and the problems reformists have in this country. No matter how unhappy with the status quo people are, no one has a politically viable alternative, e.g. an alternative that people will follow.

    I get the sense that less and less people actually believe all the shit the conservatives are touting as their solutions, but they don’t have anything else to believe in, so they stick to the system out of inertia. “Man, Wall Street just absolutely SUCKS, but it’s impossible to fix it and there’s nothing the government can do that’ll make things better, in fact it’ll probably make them worse, so why bother.”

  149. 149.

    Southern Beale

    September 3, 2011 at 12:17 am

    But if you talk to people, and when people are polled, they agree with center-left policies more than center-right policies. For example, poll after poll has said people are more concerned about jobs than the deficit; here’s another one from CNN today:

    About two-thirds think the president should focus more on creating jobs right now, even if it means less deficit reduction.

    But what we get from Congress and Obama is more of the same, more deficit reduction and “job creating ideas” like tax cuts. I mean christ, how come it was never mentioned today amid all the hand-wringing over the sucky August jobs numbers that, um, we gave those so-called “job creators” their tax cuts the GOP demanded and apparently it hasn’t worked! So, maybe we should try something else!

  150. 150.

    TheWorstPersonInTheWorld

    September 3, 2011 at 12:19 am

    @Southern Beale:

    Umm … John Cole is Tweeting some bizarre shit right now about cutting limes and there should be toilet paper under the sink.

    I keep saying it but no one listens: Cole is a raging alcoholic on a downward spiral, and a closet case to boot. I hope to be around BJ when he comes out on both counts.

    Fun!

  151. 151.

    Southern Beale

    September 3, 2011 at 12:19 am

    @Anne Laurie:

    Oh duh, tanqueray of course. I was wondering what the “tang” was… didn’t think they still made that stuff.

  152. 152.

    Southern Beale

    September 3, 2011 at 12:21 am

    @TheWorstPersonInTheWorld:

    I keep saying it but no one listens: Cole is a raging alcoholic on a downward spiral, and a closet case to boot.

    I knew I liked him for a reason!

  153. 153.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 3, 2011 at 12:22 am

    @Southern Beale: Something started before 2010…. I’ve posted this before — CNN figures — but what the hell. Here’s the most-likely-to-vote demo:

    2010 mid-terms, 65+ voters — R +19 (House)
    2008 presidential, 65+ voters — R +10
    2006 mid-terms, 65+ voters — R +0 (House)
    2004 presidential, 65+ voters — R +5
    (CNN/VNS did not have 2002 national exit poll numbers)
    2000 presidential, 65+ voters — D +1

    Bush had tried to privatize Social Security, yet its recipients rewarded his party by failing to vote for the ultimate winner in a Presidential election for at least 40 years.

    Something happened, beginning in 2008, to roughly double the GOP’s appeal to the single most-likely-to-vote demographic, and whatever it was, to almost double it again two years later.

    I’m guessing 2008 was when it started to get, ahem, dark out. And that whatever happened in 2008 mattered a lot to older — in other words, the likeliest of likely — voters.

    Obama won because enough of everyone else, more or less immune somehow to the Great Negro Freakout, voted in ’08 — the economy was already flat-lining.

    The House turned over in ’10 because not enough of everyone else, more or less, voted. The economy was still flat-lining, so some of that was the economy, but a lot of it is I suspect, much darker. 70-seat swings are very, very rare beasts.

  154. 154.

    FlipYrWhig

    September 3, 2011 at 12:22 am

    @andrewsomething: I think Markos _is_ hung up on “toughness,” or he wouldn’t have run so many glamor shots of Scott Kleeb in denim and Jon Tester in Carhartt. But back in the day, Markos used to carry a torch for… Mark Warner, a charisma-challenged technocrat whose best asset has always been a competent management style in a conservative-leaning state. He backed a pompous culture-war conservative Democrat, Brad Carson, in Oklahoma. The original point was finding Democrats who would win, ideology TBD, and single-issue litmus tests were anathema. I don’t understand what Markos wants in politicians anymore, but it’s immensely different from how it started out.

  155. 155.

    Anne Laurie

    September 3, 2011 at 12:23 am

    @Southern Beale:

    I was wondering what the “tang” was… didn’t think they still made that stuff.

    From what I hear, it’s still available at the dollar stores, where more & more Americans are shopping these days. (sigh)

  156. 156.

    aisce

    September 3, 2011 at 12:25 am

    @ cat48

    well, you did get it wrong, probably because you’re emotionally invested in “SCREWING CONGRESS.” it’s a bad article. it conflates different things.

    the administration can do a workaround on congress on education policy given its broad waiver abilities. but it can’t appropriate money out of thin air.

    the executive order doesn’t create new spending. it doesn’t create new projects where none would have been previously possible. it expedites generally appropriated money into directly appropriated spending on specific projects that can break ground a few months faster by having to go through less oversight. a lot of “green” projects were authorized in 2009-2010, not all of them have gotten going yet. they’re trying to get the stragglers going faster. that’s all it is.

    it’s what you do when you’ve run out of things to do, and it addresses a “problem” that isn’t even in the top 30 of things that are dampening the recovery. there’s simply no executive order that can get around republican congressional sabotage. sorry.

  157. 157.

    Southern Beale

    September 3, 2011 at 12:32 am

    @Davis X. Machina:

    Well, I don’t see your numbers as convincing about a change .. seems to me they show 65+ have always been the GOP base, the white ones at least. Do you have numbers from the 90s?

    GOP’s social conservative message appeals to the “offa my lawn” crowd and all that. They may hear Bush talk about privatizing Social Security but they don’t believe it will actually happen.

    People have always tended to vote Democratic in Congressional and state races, but Republican in Presidential ones. People in the South at least. That’s changed over the years and around here I think religious conservatism and issues like abortion have been a factor.

  158. 158.

    Southern Beale

    September 3, 2011 at 12:33 am

    @Anne Laurie:

    Americans need to stop shopping and start planting victory gardens, like in the good ol’ days. Stick it to Kraft and Coca Cola and the rest. Ah well. A girl can dream.

  159. 159.

    FlipYrWhig

    September 3, 2011 at 12:34 am

    @Southern Beale:

    For example, poll after poll has said people are more concerned about jobs than the deficit

    Yes, but what do they want the government to _do_ to “create jobs”? That poll question irritates me because it presumes the connection it’s trying to test. But a lot of people don’t get it.

    I want a pollster to ask people, in an open-ended way, what they would like to see the government do to “create jobs.” I would be surprised if those answers lined up with liberal ideas very neatly.

    I think a lot of people who want the government to do more to create jobs, who would pop up on the good-guy side of the poll result you quoted and which would seem to support your idea of their center-left predilections, _also_ don’t want the government to spend money freely or to hire people for “government work.” They mean they want the government to cut taxes on businesses so that they can make more money and hire more people.

  160. 160.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 3, 2011 at 12:34 am

    @Southern Beale: 60+ voters have never not voted for the ultimate presidential winner in my political lifetime.

  161. 161.

    Sly

    September 3, 2011 at 12:37 am

    @Chris:

    Man. What’s it going to take for the South to join the 20th century, never mind the 21st?

    Sharecropping is a helluva drug.

    The irony is that if you told a member of the Southern elite in 1855 that they could have nearly as cheap and malleable a labor force through debt dependence as they had with chattel slavery, they would have had you lynched as a Yankee interloper. Equally ironic is that this was an economic class that knew all to well the perils of unsustainable private debt, as one of the major reasons the Southern states backed the Continental Congress (and scoffed at Hamilton’s proposal to Federalize the state debts) was its subservience to London creditors.

    @Davis X. Machina:

    The Left has been, throughout the developed world, in a thirty-year secular decline, regardless of the country…. I’m not sure what caused it, and I’m not sure what to do about it, but it’s real, and people write books about it, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t begin with Obama’s election, and it wasn’t going to end with it.

    I think the answer lies in 1970s stagflation. It was a problem to which the liberal establishment didn’t have much in the way of a solution, because Keynesianism up until that point didn’t really have a good theoretical framework for how you can have high inflation and anemic growth simultaneously.

    Then along came Milton Friedman, who convinced the political elite that you can still have technocratic management of a capital economy with out all the messiness of democratic accountability and the empowerment of labor. This paved the way for the Reagan/Thatcher consensus; that the ideal solution to stagflation was to smash the power of labor and substitute the fall in aggregate demand from stagnating wages with an expansion of consumer credit. People can’t afford bread? Let them eat credit cards and home equity loans.

    The problem is that even if you accept the fact that labor had too much entrenched power, which is problematic in and of itself, all such a process does is transfer that power to creditors; you’re now relying on debt finance for providing both capitalization and demand. Creditors are making money on the front end and the back end, and its not a coincidence that the largest growth sector of the past three decades has, overwhelmingly, been finance.

  162. 162.

    FlipYrWhig

    September 3, 2011 at 12:41 am

    @Southern Beale:

    That’s changed over the years and around here I think religious conservatism and issues like abortion have been a factor.

    I’m a fairly recent emigre to the South, and not _that_ far south, but I’ve been curious about this for a while. Do you think Democrats also shifted right in the South, perhaps in pursuit of voters who themselves shifted right due to culture-wars stuff? Or were they pretty much always this way, on a different wavelength from the liberal=Democrat national scene? Were Southern Democrats ever known for being liberal or progressive? (Is it Fulbright who I’m thinking of as the famous Southern-prog-Dem?)

  163. 163.

    Southern Beale

    September 3, 2011 at 12:42 am

    @Davis X. Machina:

    That’s because 60+ voters, you know, VOTE. I wish we could get our young people to vote in similar numbers.

    Nate Silver did a post a long time ago looking at the elections and the ultimate deciding factor was mobilizing the base. Not sure if this is the post or not, I think it may be.

  164. 164.

    FlipYrWhig

    September 3, 2011 at 12:43 am

    @Sly: Maybe it’s the rum talking, but your last 3 paragraphs are like a killer app to me. They would seem to explain quite a lot.

  165. 165.

    Southern Beale

    September 3, 2011 at 12:46 am

    @FlipYrWhig:

    Well I think Democrats have always been pretty conservative down here. Outside of urban areas, in particular. You know, the last 20 years or so have really seen social issues come to the forefront of our politics. Yes there was stuff happening in the 60s and 70s, but it’s escalated recently … stuff like marriage equality and gays adopting kids .. there’s been a lot of social change in the past few decades and that’s threatening to a lot of folks down here. People don’t like change — you know we do things slower down in the South.

  166. 166.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 3, 2011 at 12:47 am

    @Sly: Sassoon’s magisterial One Hundred Years of Socia1ism more or less reaches the same conclusion.

    @ Southern Beale: pp. 205 ff. on the elderly vote, going back to 1980. 10% of the electorate, 15% of those who actually cast ballots.

  167. 167.

    Southern Beale

    September 3, 2011 at 12:49 am

    Fun chatting with y’all tonight. I’m going to turn in. Get to go pick up the dogs from the kennel first thing in the a.m. where they’ve been boarded for 2 weeks. There will be much rejoicing!

  168. 168.

    FlipYrWhig

    September 3, 2011 at 12:52 am

    @Southern Beale: Re-reading that post, which I remember enjoying at the time, I feel like Silver is mucking things up by referring to “the base,” when all he really means is partisan turnout. At least in that piece, he doesn’t see a difference between “Democrats” and “the Democratic base.” But we’ve had massive fights here and elsewhere triggered by the idea that the Democratic base is, in essence, _liberals_. And, to tie in a few threads of the same discussion, IMHO the example of the South shows that there are loyal Democratic voters who aren’t liberal at all, and may qualify as “the base” in some discussions but not others.

  169. 169.

    Davis X. Machina

    September 3, 2011 at 12:53 am

    @Sly: Sassoon’s magisterial One Hundred Years of Socia1ism more or less reaches the same conclusion.

    @ Southern Beale: Schultz and Binstock’s 2008 Aging Nation: The Economics and Politics of Growing Older in America pp. 205 ff. on the elderly vote, going back to 1980, never more than 3% off the national vote.

  170. 170.

    Yutsano

    September 3, 2011 at 12:54 am

    @Southern Beale: Fair warning: your face may indeed lose skin from all the tongues. :)

  171. 171.

    Little Boots

    September 3, 2011 at 1:00 am

    so who’s awake? come upstairs if you are.

  172. 172.

    gwangung

    September 3, 2011 at 1:07 am

    @FlipYrWhig:

    But we’ve had massive fights here and elsewhere triggered by the idea that the Democratic base is, in essence, liberals. And, to tie in a few threads of the same discussion, IMHO the example of the South shows that there are loyal Democratic voters who aren’t liberal at all, and may qualify as “the base” in some discussions but not others.

    Dude, yeah. More tribal identity politics.

    And a lot of the problems come from people not being able to conceive that others who are allies can actually think differently and have varying values. And they’re not wrong or evil to think that way.

  173. 173.

    Sly

    September 3, 2011 at 1:14 am

    @FlipYrWhig:

    Were Southern Democrats ever known for being liberal or progressive?

    Populist, yes, but not progressive in any meaningful sense of the word.

    The two ideologies position different elements as the root of societal decay. Progressivism blames local elites (robber barons, organized crime, local politicians, etc) and sees higher governmental authorities as a kind of cop on the beat to police the excesses of those elites. Populism sees the root of social decay as a foreign contaminant, the solution to which is the further empowerment of local elites to serve as a bulwark against it.

    There are, of course, outliers.

  174. 174.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    September 3, 2011 at 1:25 am

    What we need is a Republican House, Senate and President in 2012. Why? Because it would make just about everyone happy. The right will swoon with joy, the M$M will be singing Happy Days and the left will be able to (once again) whine about everything the Republicans do. I think it’s the perfect solution to our problems.

    That and I think America deserves it. We really deserve it.

  175. 175.

    PanAmerican

    September 3, 2011 at 1:28 am

    @Davis X. Machina:

    I suspect it has to do with the decline in unskilled labor jobs in manufacturing and farming with a high likelihood of death or dismemberment. THAT sort of circumstance will get a person to collective action – marking time at the big box or in the cube farm? Not so much.

  176. 176.

    Anne Laurie

    September 3, 2011 at 1:46 am

    @Odie Hugh Manatee:

    That and I think America deserves it. We really deserve it.

    Chroist Jaysis, dude, I though you had at least one kid!

    I’ve had, by historical standards, a pretty good run — if the Talibangelical Free Market Republic of Willardstan decides to incentivize their death-to-liberals program, well, that’s one reason I made the decision, all those years ago, not to propagate my scrambled genes. But from those of you who have descendants to worry about, I expected a little more fight.

  177. 177.

    RadioOne

    September 3, 2011 at 2:05 am

    I’ve never seen “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” but because of this post I did watch a few clips of it.

    The anger and rhetorical populist bullshit from that movie from Mr. Smith definitely made me think of the Tea Party. I’m sure his cause was just, and that his opponents were awful people, but the legacy of the GOP looking to old movies to justify their tactics would remain intact if they included “Mr Smith” in their cannon.

  178. 178.

    The Raven

    September 3, 2011 at 2:29 am

    It also seems worth adding that Obama is probably an econo-denialist. As far as anyone can tell, he is, in Keynes lovely phrase, one of the “slaves of some defunct economist.” He believes that austerity really will create jobs. So some of the things he could have done, that so far as anyone can tell would have worked, he didn’t do, because he didn’t believe the science. These are the things that Brad Delong refers to as “unforced errors,” and they’re the reason why Krugman is so down on Administration economic policy: from Krugman’s viewpoint it is no more reasonable than climate denialism.

    It’s hard to imagine Obama not doing better on jobs, if he used better economics.

  179. 179.

    J. Michael Neal

    September 3, 2011 at 3:15 am

    @RadioOne: Don’t get me started on It’s a Wonderful Life and how all of the good things Jimmy Stewart did are exactly the kind of things that led to the financial collapse of 2008.

  180. 180.

    Arclite

    September 3, 2011 at 4:16 am

    Dougj
    I wrote a comment yesterday that you seem to be responding to. Im a bit late to this party (camping on the beach and just had time to check the site). First, i don’t believe in magical thinking. And i think Obama has accomplished a lot of good things. But I am frustrated at his technique. He rarely seems to push his opinion and stand his ground.

    You asked, when do i use this in real life? I am a QA manager. My coworker is the development manager. He often proposes process changes and other things that would make his life easy, but mine more difficult. I have to vigorously defend my position. Sometimes i can sway him to my position. Sometimes he suggests things so stupid that i refuse to budge an inch on his proposals. Often i suggest a compromise that suits us both. The point is that i have ideas about the way things should be and i defend those vigorously. I expect the president to do the same. Not reveal his breaking point at the start of negotiations. Not unilaterally take major policy ideas off the table

  181. 181.

    zoot

    September 3, 2011 at 6:46 am

    the Churchill story establishes what kind of person Churchill is…and it ain’t pretty. At least for the woman in the story you could say she is an entrepreneur. What can you say about Churchill? And the real sexist part is its use as being complimentary to Churchill by being used as an example of how clever he was, when the story only shows him to be a low life needing to pay for sex.

    obama’s per-capitulation caving on everything and undermining progressive programs and standing for nothing is not a virtue in any way, shape, setting, or condition. To punctuate in contrast how awful obama is, where would civil rights be today if MLK approached civil rights the way obama approaches ‘fighting for the average American’ [cough].

    The on-going effort by obama’s whores trying to turn his much worse than do-nothing presidency into a virtue is like trying to make a pathetic John sound clever.

  182. 182.

    harlana

    September 3, 2011 at 6:56 am

    Well, I just wanna say I was taken quite aback last night on the phone with my mom when she told me she and my dad were quite interested in Buddy Roemer and that she is “hurt” and disappointed in Obama, whom they have always supported. She is very concerned about trade issues and the fact that we have exported all our jobs. This guy is talking the talk and they like it. She was quite excited.

    For MY parents to be excited about a republican (and I believe my dad is going to donate to this guy’s campaign – I didn’t even know who he was or that he was running in 2012!), is unprecedented in recent years, because of whats happened to the republican party.

    Lifetime, 80+ year old Dems, giving money to a republican?! I’m still trying to process it all (and investigate this guy as well). I’m not saying they won’t vote for Obama, they absolutely will. But they are looking for real answers to this nation’s jobs crisis, not a bandaid that will carry us over for maybe a few years and then somebody like Jeb Bush gets elected in 2016.

    Anyway, I dare anyone to call my mama a firebagger! ;p

  183. 183.

    Joseph Nobles

    September 3, 2011 at 6:59 am

    My operating hypothesis with Obama is that he’s a constitutional law professor. He thought he could make Washington work the way James Madison wrote it down, or at least how Thomas Jefferson thought it read. However, Congress has had almost 250 years to figure out every angle and dream up plenty of new ones.

    And yet, for all the storm and noise, he has gotten major legislation through the Congress, with as many fingerprints on the laws as possible. This latest drop of the draft ozone rule is quite disappointing, and should and will be scored as a broken promise. However, the letter blocking the implementation of the rule quite clearly read that this will be a second-term issue. There is plenty that EPA has done that should be lauded by Obama’s environmental allies, and this rule can serve as the first draft to expedite the new scientific review. No doubt with a second-term Lisa Jackson as Administrator, it will be.

    A government has always been the proxy for civil war, and Obama is President during a rather nasty peak in hostilities. It would be really nice if we his political allies would find his back and keep the knives out of it.

  184. 184.

    harlana

    September 3, 2011 at 7:09 am

    Obama is probably an econo-denialist

    This is what scares the shit out of me! I thought the man was smarter than that, I really did. If he keeps this up, we’re fucked for the long term.

  185. 185.

    harlana

    September 3, 2011 at 7:28 am

    @FlipYrWhig:

    I think a lot of people who want the government to do more to create jobs . . . don’t want the government to spend money freely or to hire people for “government work.” They mean they want the government to cut taxes on businesses so that they can make more money and hire more people.

    Curious that, considering the number of private sector jobs created this past month were cancelled out by public sector layoffs commandeered by republican governers. Cut, cut, cut government spending = more and more people added to unemployment rolls. I don’t understand what is so hard for people to understand about that, it’s mystifying and downright scary.

  186. 186.

    John S.

    September 3, 2011 at 7:49 am

    @arclite:

    When your development manager is backed by a board of people who are committed to fucking you over, and only THEY have the authority to enact policies, then maybe your analogy would have merit.

    But since their isn’t one man Obama can hash things out and acheive results with the way you can at work, your analogy is severely flawed and totally useless as a thought exercise.

  187. 187.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    September 3, 2011 at 7:50 am

    @Anne Laurie:

    Two kids, actually. The adult one thinks that we need a good dose of the right too…lol! She’s even told us that she does not want to bring a kid into the mess things are now. It’s her decision to make and I couldn’t argue with it anyway. Neither can her Mom. The younger one is a mid-teen that’s just learning about politics but he already doesn’t like anyone but Obama. And he really doesn’t like Teahadists, he lost a friend to a couple of them (his parents). Seems they don’t want their son around libruls.

    They’re probably afraid of the positive influence.

  188. 188.

    Chris

    September 3, 2011 at 7:51 am

    @Sly:

    I think the answer lies in 1970s stagflation. It was a problem to which the liberal establishment didn’t have much in the way of a solution, because Keynesianism up until that point didn’t really have a good theoretical framework for how you can have high inflation and anemic growth simultaneously.

    I love how the first major crisis since the 1930s somehow destroyed everyone’s faith in Keynesian economics, but no matter how many clusterfucks laissez-faire economics get us in (Long Depression, Great Depression, early 1990s recession, Great Recession), everyone’s all “no, no, give it another chance, this time everything’ll be fine, the REAL problem is that we weren’t laissez-faire ENOUGH!”

  189. 189.

    harlana

    September 3, 2011 at 7:51 am

    Digby nails it. I experienced this personally – unemployment sure helps but you are better off getting ANY job as soon as possible because your chances of being hired for a decent job are much better, the shorter your unemployment time (if they are willing to hire an unemployed person in the first place). So while you’re working your ass off at that shitty job you’d better be prepared to constantly re-tool your resume to each specific opportunity, mentally and emotionally prep for interviews and shine like a diamond (while you’re trying to not stress about having to go back to said shitty job and what awaits you there for the amount of time you are interviewing, every single time — then get rejected or strung along for weeks for an answer.

    IT BUILDS CHARACTER, RIGHT! awesome, such good “discipline” for us lazy American workers.

    Retraining? Bullshit. I tried that and that’s NOT how I got my current job. I am so grateful for my benefits which started this past Thursday. I am VERY, VERY lucky to be working again, getting benefits again, after so long, but I am making much less than I was a few years ago. Still, having the medical insurance is a blessing – I consider myself very fortunate considering the times and considering I’m one of those “older” workers who are, for the most part, screwed right now, probably for the rest of their lives.

    Again, the retraining stuff is total bullshit, don’t wanna hear this meme again, know from personal experience it’s a joke. The university gets money and even the very best of us, those smart, well-educated ladies with 15+ years of experience got pretty much nothing except a headache and angst about trying to learn new shit when you’re old. Part of what appealed to my mom about Roemer is that he acknowledged the elephant in the room, “retrain for WHAT?” – don’t waste the time you are eligible for benefits retraining, scour the streets for a job — IT’S A CROCK people

  190. 190.

    Sly

    September 3, 2011 at 7:55 am

    @RadioOne:

    I’ve never seen “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” but because of this post I did watch a few clips of it.

    Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is to American politics as 1776 is to the American Revolution: Heart-warming, but only because it basically has to mislead the audience about how things actually transpired in order to be heart-warming. Both in motive and actual practice, the vast majority of filibusters throughout American history have looked absolutely nothing like Jefferon Smith’s one-man crusade against corruption.

    To see what a filibuster looks like, turn on C-SPAN2. If there a bunch of Senators mulling around, seemingly aimless, with classical music playing and the words “Quorum Call” appearing at the bottom of the screen (something like this), you’re watching a filibuster in action. It’s not exactly a riveting showdown between the forces of justice and tyranny.

  191. 191.

    Chris

    September 3, 2011 at 7:59 am

    @Sly:

    The two ideologies position different elements as the root of societal decay. Progressivism blames local elites (robber barons, organized crime, local politicians, etc) and sees higher governmental authorities as a kind of cop on the beat to police the excesses of those elites. Populism sees the root of social decay as a foreign contaminant, the solution to which is the further empowerment of local elites to serve as a bulwark against it.

    Really? I thought populism, from William Jennings Bryan through Huey Long, was pretty progressive in laying blame on the robber barons and local politicians.

    I thought the defining thing in the South was “populism but not liberalism.” As Huey Long proved, you could be wildly successful in the South as a redistributionist. What made them back off from liberalism was the social issues and especially the civil rights. (That, and the fact that as money got redistributed, the South was much less poverty-stricken in the 1960s than in the 1930s… so they could more easily afford to indulge their white power inclinations).

  192. 192.

    harlana

    September 3, 2011 at 8:02 am

    oh yeah, i went off on that rant after seeing Hilda Solis last night going on about retraining – stop feeding the people false dreams, it’s tragic, it makes me want to cry, it gives a lot of people false hope. I’m not saying some won’t benefit, but most will be wasting valuable time and government money that could best be used elsewhere, like, you know, perhaps creating a job here or there?

    Oh, and if you have “retrained” you’d damn well better be prepared to donate your time to an internship if you hope to get anywhere in a field that is new for you. Yes, you’d better be prepared to work for free.

  193. 193.

    Chris

    September 3, 2011 at 8:04 am

    @RadioOne:

    I’m sure his cause was just, and that his opponents were awful people

    His opponents were awful people.

    His cause was just? Eh. https://balloon-juice.com/2011/09/02/mr-marlowe-goes-to-washington/#comment-2756202

  194. 194.

    harlana

    September 3, 2011 at 8:11 am

    shit, slap my mama! what am i saying?? all we need to do is cut corporate taxes and remove regulations that keep the job-creators from hiring!

    ((begins drooling complete with glassy-eyed stare))

  195. 195.

    Sly

    September 3, 2011 at 8:44 am

    @Chris:

    Really? I thought populism, from William Jennings Bryan through Huey Long, was pretty progressive in laying blame on the robber barons and local politicians.

    Robber barons and their political allies, for populists, lived somewhere else. Specifically, they lived in the cities. William Jennings Bryan’s populist crusade, for instance, wasn’t so much about the evils of bankers, but New York bankers. Both progressivism and populism essentially began as backlash movements against the corruptions of industrialization and urban life, the primary difference being their geographic origins; progressivism in the urban sphere, populism in the rural sphere.

    Essentially both movements blamed the same people, but have different frames of reference that informed their political strategies. It also needs to be mentioned that progressivism and populism never really developed as coherent ideological systems on their own, and are much more rhetorical than theoretical.

    The theoretical aspects of both movements more or less have been and continue to be borrowed from elsewhere. Much of contemporary progressivism is simply liberalism with a different name, likely because progressives and liberals have been on the same side long enough to the point where there has been significant blending of the two. Likewise, populism tends to have a reactionary bent in the United States because local elites have cultivated it among local populations in order to enlist their aid against outside threats. The Tea Party is basically a suburban form of populism, blaming both the urban poor and urban elite (i.e. who they see as liberals) for all their problems.

  196. 196.

    ornery

    September 3, 2011 at 8:56 am

    Um … quick, someone explain to Dougie the meaning of ‘principle’ …

  197. 197.

    Chris

    September 3, 2011 at 8:56 am

    @Sly:

    Okay, in that case I get it. I’ve heard that the history of the Progressive Era was about rural Northerners, rural Southerners and urban immigrants all agreeing that robber barons and their hold on the country sucked, but coming at it from such different perspectives that they couldn’t form a unified front (that didn’t come until the New Deal and fell apart afterwards). Progressivism vs populism seems to be basically that story.

  198. 198.

    El Cid

    September 3, 2011 at 9:05 am

    @Sly:

    I think the answer lies in 1970s stagflation. It was a problem to which the liberal establishment didn’t have much in the way of a solution, because Keynesianism up until that point didn’t really have a good theoretical framework for how you can have high inflation and anemic growth simultaneously.

    Do recall that the type of inflation most feared during the 1970s was that of wage inflation — not just a consumer product price inflation, but the spiral between the two.

    Unemployment, for example, massively reduced under Carter, from 7.5% on taking office to 5.5% in mid-term.

    It was then that the Fed (pre- and then during Volcker) ratcheted up interest rates beginning in 1977. Unemployment then shot back up to a height of 7.8% in 1980.

    The Fed got control of the wage-price spiral in part by throwing 2% of workers out, after which the ‘Reagan miracle’ was to throw massive amounts of money into government spending.

    The story, however, is that unemployment only began to come down after the Fed action, when in reality unemployment had continued declining until such time, including before Carter.

  199. 199.

    Chris

    September 3, 2011 at 9:06 am

    Gotta run, but before I do, having covered urban/rural here’s a North/South question: who were the elites in the South after the Civil War (when slave owners weren’t allowed to run things that way anymore), and what was their relationship with the elites in the rest of the country?

    Cause my understanding was that they tended to be pretty cozy with the robber barons running the country (that “South’s brand of low-wage industrialism” would’ve sat well with them I’m sure). But the way you describe populism in rural areas, makes it seem as thought the elites and the regular folk were both dead-set against “foreign” interlopers from the rest of the country.

  200. 200.

    Southern Beale

    September 3, 2011 at 9:07 am

    @Sly:

    Essentially both movements blamed the same people, but have different frames of reference that informed their political strategies.

    Interesting. I’ve been dong some research on the liberal movement of the ’60s and ’70s, last night you mentioned the “stagflation” of the ’70s, and a couple books I mentioned used the sucky economy of the ’70s as the spark igniting the “back to the land” movement, homesteading, etc.

    What I find interesting is the similarities between the hippies & youth revolt and today’s Tea Party — the mistrust of government, for example. Is anyone really surprised that a generation raised on mistrust of the government would become a generation of senior citizens who harbor antipathy toward the goverment?

    I used to view the liberalism of the 70s as pro-Democratic but I think that’s just because I grew up in an urban, liberal area. I think a lot of that liberalism was really more of the “don’t trust anyone over 30, don’t trust anyone in authority, don’t trust any established institution.” And that has created folks in their 50s, 60s & 70s who, surprise surprise, don’t trust the government, don’t trust established institutions, etc.

  201. 201.

    cleek

    September 3, 2011 at 9:15 am

    @Andrew:

    First of all, let me state upfront that yes, I think Obama’s ozone decision was stupid and indefensible; no, Obama is not FDR; no, Obama is not as successful as FDR; and no, Obama does not have the kind of popular support FDR had.

    no, Obama doesn’t compare to the great sanit of everything liberal: FDR. for one thing, Obama doesn’t have a 200+ vote majority in the House, and for another Obama hasn’t rounded up all of the Muslim Americans and put them in pens. what a failure!

    yes, history is easy when you compare a fictional version of one thing to a fictional version of another.

  202. 202.

    Emma

    September 3, 2011 at 9:26 am

    @harlana: She’s not a firebagger. She’s being taken in by pretty talk. No offense, but Americans do that a lot. They love snake oil cures. If you gave them a copy of the Republican platform and a million examples of the damage Republicans could do to this country, they would still worship the shiny.

    I’m beginning to think Ozone is right.

  203. 203.

    Emma

    September 3, 2011 at 9:28 am

    And the FDR worship is getting ridiculous. FDR compromised with the bad guys. He allowed them to define social security as mostly for white men, and he gave in to the racial hatred and put American citizens in concentration camps. He did it in order to pass legislation, but he DID IT.

  204. 204.

    harlana

    September 3, 2011 at 9:32 am

    @Emma: nah, not my folks, they are not like that, this is very unusual stuff here

  205. 205.

    danimal

    September 3, 2011 at 9:33 am

    Good discussion folks, sorry I missed out last night. A question for the lingerers (a little tangential, but meta-relevant).

    It is beyond obvious that for the past few years, August is a time for conservative aggression and liberal angst. Why? Is it presidential vacations and congressional recesses (even if they are NOT in recess, right, Mr Boehner)? What is it about our political calendar that causes the Tea Partiers to go crazy and liberals to engage in annual Extreme Navel Gazing?

  206. 206.

    Omnes Omnibus

    September 3, 2011 at 9:44 am

    @danimal: I don’t know; I spent the whole month on Martha’s Vineyard with my sailboat. Why do you ask?

  207. 207.

    danimal

    September 3, 2011 at 9:56 am

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Why do you ask?

    Well, as negative and upset as the liberal base is for the last week or two, there really isn’t much deep division in the ranks (we are nowhere near Kennedy/Carter acrimony, for example).

    But, if August is the high water mark for conservatism, as I theorize, they are in for a shellacking over the next several months. The conservatives, despite their confidence games on the blogs, are in a very weak position. They don’t have a groundswell of Tea Party anger to ride this year, nor do they have a new war to market or a charismatic presidential candidate to rally behind. It’s kind of the dog that isn’t barking.

    I hope you said hi to all my friends on Martha’s Vineyard, Omnes.

  208. 208.

    FlipYrWhig

    September 3, 2011 at 10:20 am

    @harlana: A lot of people don’t think “government jobs” are real jobs. They’re just handouts by another name. They’ll grudgingly concede that firefighters and cops have real jobs, and maybe teachers, but if you say that your idea for improving the economy is hiring more staff at the DMV and the county clerk’s office, you’re not going to win them over. I seriously think that there’s a HUGE disconnect over the link between “government spending” and “jobs,” and that’s true for a very large section of the populace.

    @The Raven:

    He believes that austerity really will create jobs.

    When have you ever heard him say anything like that? I’d be curious to see it. Everything I’ve seen suggests that he believes that spending cuts are necessary to “get the house in order,” but spending — which he’s likely to call “investment” — is what creates jobs. If there’s any causal link, which I don’t think there is for him, it might be that cuts remove debt as an argument against additional spending, and thus “cuts” can _lead to_ “jobs.” But they don’t “create” them, and I highly doubt that Obama has said or done anything to substantiate your claim.

  209. 209.

    grandpajohn

    September 3, 2011 at 10:26 am

    @General Stuck:

    as post traumatic events immediately preceding these major legislative accomplishments.

    Not only that , but all three had substantial majorities in the house and senate for most if not all of their terms in office

  210. 210.

    Emma

    September 3, 2011 at 11:09 am

    @harlana: I’m glad. The amount of “shiny shiny shiny or else” I find in the political discourse these days is terrifying.

  211. 211.

    Lojasmo

    September 3, 2011 at 11:14 am

    @harlana:

    A two year nursing degree is a cinch for an out of the box $50k/year job with excellent benefits. Lead pipe cinch.

  212. 212.

    Sly

    September 3, 2011 at 11:15 am

    @Chris:

    Gotta run, but before I do, having covered urban/rural here’s a North/South question: who were the elites in the South after the Civil War (when slave owners weren’t allowed to run things that way anymore)

    Those who could successfully make the transition to the sharecropping system. Some were members of the defunct planter class while others were yeomen who filled the vacuum after the planter class was destroyed via the end of slavery.

    The Civil War opened up a big Pandora’s Box in Southern political culture in the form of empowering the upcountry yeomen who weren’t the primary beneficiaries of the slave system. Some of these people supported the Union because they had chaffed under the heel of the planter class for a century or more, and were basically Andrew Johnson’s constituency. These were mostly the descendants of immigrants from the northern English borderlands, and are primarily the means through which white rural populism thrived in the U.S., basically putting blacks (both slave and free) and plantation aristocrats in the same group of adversaries.

    and what was their relationship with the elites in the rest of the country?

    In the short term, a somewhat odd one owing mostly to the fact that Northern elites of all political stripes didn’t really account for what the destruction of the planter class would do to the internal dynamics of Southern political power. You had all these debates in Washington during Reconstruction about how best to remodel Southern economic life, but they pretty much all failed to take into consideration how economic life was changing without their interference. Eric Foner’s A Short History of Reconstruction is probably the best book on the subject.

    Long term? It’s a bit more complicated due to the onset of Southern industrialism and urbanization after the war, and the simple fact that the interests of economic elite have never been a monolith; with every change in law, there are winners and losers. The lack of national business regulation allowed Southern industries (and their Norther counterparties) to undermine Northern competitors by suppressing wages via a variety of strategies.

    When the New Deal hit and the National Industrial Recovery Act gave businesses the power to establish national regulations, a lot of Northern businesses primarily used that power to reassert themselves. National child labor laws were one of these methods, incidentally. Much of the public discourse on child labor laws focuses on exploitative nature of child labor (and rightly so), but a big reason why national laws were passed was because Northern businesses had to comply with state child labor laws that, for the most part, didn’t exist in the South due to its textile economy (Arkansas and Kentucky were the only states to ratify the proposed constitutional amendment in 1924 giving Congress the power to regulate child labor). Same thing with national unionization laws.

  213. 213.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    September 3, 2011 at 11:19 am

    @FlipYrWhig:

    A lot of people don’t think “government jobs” are real jobs. They’re just handouts by another name. They’ll grudgingly concede that firefighters and cops have real jobs, and maybe teachers, but if you say that your idea for improving the economy is hiring more staff at the DMV and the county clerk’s office, you’re not going to win them over.

    My guess is that people have a sort of mental template in their heads for what constitutes a “real job” and one of the major components to that template is that the work done produces tangible output: something you can see, touch, feel, smell. Which means that jobs in manufacturing and agriculture feel more “real” than service jobs. Yet many goverment jobs are administrative/clerical in nature and by this standard don’t seem as “real”. People who shuffle paper (or in today’s world bits of data) around all day don’t seem to be doing anything because you can’t see what they’ve produced, at least not from a distance. Nor do they show obvious signs of hard physical labor; they are not eating their bread with the sweat of their brows. Therefore to a casual observer it doesn’t seem like they are doing real work.

    Of course this standard doesn’t apply to my administrative/clerical job, which seems plenty real enough to me. It only applies to the not-so-real job being done by that other guy over there. If you listen carefully to anti-govt rhetoric one of its signatures is that it is always very vauge and abstract and talking about people who are not in the room at the time of discussion. It is easier to demonize the govt if you dismiss the details of what people in the govt actually do and turn them into abstractions.

    This way of talking abstractly creates a sense of alien-ness about the govt, as if our govt came about because mysterious invaders from space had colonized the Earth and set up an administrative structure for their own purposes, which has nothing to do with us at all. If a visiting anthropologist were to listen to nothing but our anti-govt rhetoric they would never guess that our govt is the result of Americans exercising their capacity for self-governance and is actually the fruit of what we take the greatest pride in and what is the centerpiece of our mythology of American Exceptionalism: our democracy. In the final analysis people who hate the govt are hating democracy.

  214. 214.

    AlphaLiberal

    September 3, 2011 at 11:41 am

    People say “I just want a president to fight for something.” What the fuck does that even mean?

    Really? How can that possibly be a difficult concept? Suggest you review FDR for an example. Or even Dubya, for cripes sake.

    It would mean a President stating an actual belief (beyond “can’t we all get along”) that doesn’t waver with the wind (fighting pollution is important, say). Then the President would use their canny political abilities to speak for the policies, to box in their opposition, and to win as much as they possible can.

    It might include criticizing the opposition. Or going to their opponents’ states and advocating there. Or drawing a line in the sand. Or pointing out that Republican policies have failed.

    What we have with the current generation of Democratic leaders is a defeatist mindset. So, Obama looks at the political lay of the land and figures he can’t win so he will retreat — without a fucking fight.

    Obama screwed us on smog rules. He promised one thing, time and time again, and then folded like a cheap folding chair.

    I mean, if they cannot figure out how to win on saving our people from pollution they can’t win jack.

    Bottom line: Obama hates fighting. He cares more about his own image as a conciliator than the health and welfare of the people. And no fucking way are you the “adult in the room” when you cave in on defending the peoples’ health. No, Mr President, you are not a better person for it.

    People need to stop making excuses for him.

  215. 215.

    doofus

    September 3, 2011 at 11:46 am

    @Sly:

    Then along came Milton Friedman, who convinced the political elite that you can still have technocratic management of a capital economy with out all the messiness of democratic accountability and the empowerment of labor.

    I know we are still in the early stages, but I wonder if the credit shock of 2008 represents a challenge of comparable severity. (I would argue that it does, in that the break seems to have opened structural fissures that I think are currently irreconcilable.) I also wonder who plays Friedman in the current drama.

  216. 216.

    AlphaLiberal

    September 3, 2011 at 11:49 am

    This is the opposite of a fighting President:
    Did the White House double-cross its supporters on the smog rule?

  217. 217.

    AlphaLiberal

    September 3, 2011 at 11:54 am

    @FlipYrWhig:

    When have you ever heard him say anything like that? I’d be curious to see it.

    He has said that we need to reduce the federal deficit to create jobs. Just a few weeks back.

    Which is, you know, completely false.

    President Barack Obama will release a detailed deficit-cutting plan soon after his jobs speech, the White House said Friday, answering Republican critics who demanded more specifics during the debt-limit debate but reopening old wounds with the Democratic base.

    Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62589.html#ixzz1WuDI6mAs

    Lesson: to get Obama to address concerns of working people, we need to beat up on him like the Republicans do.

  218. 218.

    grandpajohn

    September 3, 2011 at 11:54 am

    @Chris:

    who were the elites in the South after the Civil War (when slave owners weren’t allowed to run things that way anymore)

    Well a lot of them were the carpetbaqggers who came from the north to take over running the governments and stealing enough to make themselves wealthy during a highly corrupt and mismanaged period of so called reconstruction. Somewhat similar to the reconstruction of IRAQ in which ability was ignored over cronyism

  219. 219.

    cleek

    September 3, 2011 at 11:56 am

    @AlphaLiberal:
    got a cite?

  220. 220.

    Omnes Omnibus

    September 3, 2011 at 12:03 pm

    @AlphaLiberal:

    It might include criticizing the opposition. Or going to their opponents’ states and advocating there. Or drawing a line in the sand. Or pointing out that Republican policies have failed.

    Are you aware of any of the these? Never heard Obama give a speech with “they drove the car into the ditch and now they want the keys back” metaphor? I get that you are frustrated, but try to stay in the general vicinity of the truth.

  221. 221.

    Omnes Omnibus

    September 3, 2011 at 12:10 pm

    @AlphaLiberal:

    It might include criticizing the opposition. Or going to their opponents’ states and advocating there. Or drawing a line in the sand. Or pointing out that Republican policies have failed.

    I have to call bullshit. Read through some of these. Remember the speeches with the car in a ditch metaphor? I certainly do. Try to stay somewhere in the general vicinity of the truth, if you could. As far as I am concerned, if you want to argue that he could and should have done more, go for it. Tell me what he could and should have done more of while you are at it. That is an discussion worth having. Simply saying that he has done nothing marks you as someone who either knows nothing or has an another agenda. Which one are you?

  222. 222.

    Omnes Omnibus

    September 3, 2011 at 12:11 pm

    @AlphaLiberal:

    It might include criticizing the opposition. Or going to their opponents’ states and advocating there. Or drawing a line in the sand. Or pointing out that Republican policies have failed.

    I have to call bullshit. Read through some of these. Remember the speeches with the car in a ditch metaphor? I certainly do. Try to stay somewhere in the general vicinity of the truth, if you could. As far as I am concerned, if you want to argue that he could and should have done more, go for it. Tell me what he could and should have done more of while you are at it. That is an discussion worth having. Simply saying that he has done nothing marks you as someone who either knows nothing or has an another agenda. Which one are you?

  223. 223.

    FlipYrWhig

    September 3, 2011 at 12:12 pm

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Co-sign. The only thing I’d add re: “real jobs” is that a lot of people are leery of paper-pushing in the public sector because they’ve been taught to resent that _those_ unproductive lazybones are being paid with Our Tax Money. Unproductive lazybones in the private sector, the thinking may go, are constrained by the success of the business, so their underperformance is self-correcting and doesn’t come out of _our_ pockets, while the ones in the public sector get to ride the gravy train as long as they like.

  224. 224.

    FlipYrWhig

    September 3, 2011 at 12:14 pm

    @AlphaLiberal: Nothing you quoted indicates that he believes cutting the deficit creates jobs. It indicates that he believes cutting the deficit is a good thing. But that’s not what the contention was.

  225. 225.

    Omnes Omnibus

    September 3, 2011 at 12:14 pm

    @AlphaLiberal:

    It might include criticizing the opposition. Or going to their opponents’ states and advocating there. Or drawing a line in the sand. Or pointing out that Republican policies have failed.

    I have to call bullshit. Read through some of Obama’s speeches (FYWP is calling my links to the website spam, so just look them up). Remember the speeches with the car in a ditch metaphor? I certainly do. Try to stay somewhere in the general vicinity of the truth, if you could. As far as I am concerned, if you want to argue that he could and should have done more, go for it. Tell me what he could and should have done more of while you are at it. That is an discussion worth having. Simply saying that he has done nothing marks you as someone who either knows nothing or has an another agenda. Which one are you?

    ETA: If the other attempts at posting this get released from moderation, I apologize for the multiple posts.

  226. 226.

    Keith G

    September 3, 2011 at 12:34 pm

    @AlphaLiberal:

    It might include criticizing the opposition. Or going to their opponents’ states and advocating there. Or drawing a line in the sand. Or pointing out that Republican policies have failed.

    It may also include taking on a fight that you will lose, but you will highlight the differences between the good guys and the bad guys. And some day that battle will be re fought with different energy and different results.

  227. 227.

    Corner Stone

    September 3, 2011 at 12:51 pm

    @Joseph Nobles:

    My operating hypothesis with Obama is that he’s a constitutional law professor.

    My operating hypothesis is that he’s a politician. An extremely successful one, by standards of politicians.

  228. 228.

    Corner Stone

    September 3, 2011 at 12:53 pm

    @harlana:

    oh yeah, i went off on that rant after seeing Hilda Solis last night going on about retraining – stop feeding the people false dreams, it’s tragic, it makes me want to cry, it gives a lot of people false hope.

    I saw a blurb of that too and it infuriated me. And I guarantee you we will see a big portion of Obama’s jobs plan include “retraining”.
    It’s all a big scam. Taxpayer money to for-profit facilities that benefit the unemployed in almost zero ways.
    Anytime I hear a politician say this I wish they would get a cream pie to the face.

  229. 229.

    Corner Stone

    September 3, 2011 at 12:56 pm

    @Arclite: Yeah, I always hate making “business” arguments regarding politicians, especially at the high levels.
    BWTS, I know if I had a bid for a client and I told them I couldn’t deliver that good or service because my suppliers were playing hardball, or my competition was hamstringing me somehow they’d thank me politely and give the bid to my competition.
    IOW, I don’t have the luxury of telling my customers there’s nothing I can do to remedy the situation.

  230. 230.

    eemom

    September 3, 2011 at 12:58 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Simply saying that he has done nothing marks you as someone who either knows nothing or has an another agenda.

    I venture a guess that anyone who christens themselves “alpha”-something neither knows anything nor has any agenda other than self-aggrandizement.

  231. 231.

    FlipYrWhig

    September 3, 2011 at 1:02 pm

    @Keith G: The trouble with that is that you also might reveal how little support the good guys actually have, and the other trouble with that is that losing said fight might mean that the next iteration through the issue underlying that fight happens 20 years later on even less hospitable terrain — as happened with HCR. A doomed crusade may have symbolic value in the future, but you can’t eat symbolic value in the future. Plus, temporary setbacks — e.g., failed procedural votes on DADT repeal — have led not to happiness with Obama’s highlighted differences but instead to further disappointment with the apparent failure. If activists are going to rage if he caves _and_ rage if he stands firm but loses, and thus the only commendable outcome is standing firm and winning — which, very often, given the nature of the Democrats to his right and the Republicans to his futher right, just isn’t possible — then there’s not a lot of incentive for this Bravely Losing Fight strategy. I don’t think activists respect the Bravely Losing Fight as much as they say they do.

  232. 232.

    Corner Stone

    September 3, 2011 at 1:05 pm

    @FlipYrWhig:

    The trouble with that is that you also might reveal how little support the good guys actually have, and the other trouble with that is that losing said fight might mean that the next iteration through the issue underlying that fight happens 20 years later on even less hospitable terrain—as happened with HCR

    Where would you put Prop H8 in this analysis?

  233. 233.

    FlipYrWhig

    September 3, 2011 at 1:19 pm

    @Corner Stone: Good counterexample. But the list of quixotic defeats leading to victories is very short, and gets shorter if you set the time frame to the length of, say, a presidential term. For that matter, movements are better at making that conversion than legislators. Legislators get gun-shy after they end up on the losing side of a vote on a high-profile issue. Which is why I heartily endorse the idea of liberal-lefty movements, plural, but I fear how long they take to progress.

  234. 234.

    Sly

    September 3, 2011 at 2:33 pm

    @AlphaLiberal:

    Really? How can that possibly be a difficult concept? Suggest you review FDR for an example. Or even Dubya, for cripes sake.

    FDR compromised on every signature piece of New Deal legislation to get them passed, and abandoned several proposed initiatives (like national health insurance) because they were declared dead on arrival. Ditto LBJ.

    George Bush passed nearly every one of his signature initiatives with at least a handful of Democrats backing him. Patriot Act, IWR, NCLB, Medicare Part D, the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, etc. The single exception is his push for Social Security privatization, which he pimped to the public for almost the entirety of 2005 before it died, never even getting a bill voted on in any committee.

    The man spent months going around the country, holding fake town halls with a pre-screened audience, and didn’t even get a bill introduced. So much for the power of the bully pulpit.

  235. 235.

    NR

    September 3, 2011 at 2:45 pm

    @FlipYrWhig:

    Nothing you quoted indicates that he believes cutting the deficit creates jobs.

    This is a direct quote from Obama:

    I do think that if the country as a whole sees Washington act responsibly, compromises being made, the deficit and debt being dealt with for 10, 15, 20 years, that that will help with businesses feeling more confident about aggressively investing in this country, foreign investors saying America has got its act together and are willing to invest. And so it can have a positive impact in overall growth and employment.

    So there you go.

  236. 236.

    virag

    September 3, 2011 at 2:49 pm

    @The Raven:

    today’s ‘left’ in american politics sits center-right on its best day.

  237. 237.

    virag

    September 3, 2011 at 2:56 pm

    @lol:

    it didn’t start as ‘obama is a huge pussy’ but his actions certainly pushed the dialog from ‘he needs to this because’ to ‘what the fuck is he doing? is he a pussy or a stooge’.

  238. 238.

    FlipYrWhig

    September 3, 2011 at 3:05 pm

    @NR:

    I do think that if the country as a whole sees Washington act responsibly, compromises being made, the deficit and debt being dealt with for 10, 15, 20 years, that that will help with businesses feeling more confident about aggressively investing in this country, foreign investors saying America has got its act together and are willing to invest. And so it can have a positive impact in overall growth and employment.

    Close, but even that isn’t saying that “austerity” “creates jobs.” It’s saying, as I mentioned earlier, that cuts have a positive effect, and one collateral effect from _that_ effect is businesses creating jobs. That may seem like a nitpicky distinction, but I think there’s a difference between contending that Obama believes that cuts create jobs, practically directly, on the one hand; vs., on the other, that cuts contribute to a process that comes back around a corner and stimulates foreign investing and the private sector. It’s not as though Obama is saying, we need jobs, so what’s the best way to do that, oh right, cutting spending! It’s more like he’s saying, we need jobs, so what’s the best way to do that, hmm, how about creating a climate where the private sector and foreign investors open the spigot, and what they tell us (which we know from the ratings agencies) is that improving the long-term debt outlook would nudge them in the direction of greater optimism, so aggressive long-term spending cuts could create that impression, and then there’d be some jobs that materialized because of all that.

    I mean, don’t get me wrong, in my view the much smarter thing for the government to do to create jobs would be to directly hire people to do work, and, you know, problem solved. But deficit-leery _Democrats_ don’t like that approach any better than Republicans do, so it’s off the table. So we have to do a bunch of roundabout things like tax breaks and other incentives for private-sector employers, which I find inefficient and Rube-Goldberg-esque myself, but which is all the Warners/Nelsons/McCaskills will abide, and if they don’t abide, it doesn’t happen.

  239. 239.

    phil

    September 3, 2011 at 3:08 pm

    C’mon, we’ve all known/worked for people like Obama. They know all the right people, went to the right schools, get along with everybody, and moved rapidly up the ranks of their chosen field. But they never actually get anything done.

  240. 240.

    JoyousMN

    September 3, 2011 at 3:23 pm

    You know even Paul Wellstone up here in MN did something like this. In 1996 he was in a fairly close race with Rudy Boschwitz.From Wikipedia: “Wellstone defeated Boschwitz again for re-election in 1996. During that campaign, Boschwitz ran ads accusing Wellstone of being “embarrassingly liberal” and calling him “Senator Welfare”. Boschwitz had significantly outspent Wellstone on campaign advertising and the race was closely contested.”

    In September of 1996, DOMA came before the Senate. Everyone expected Paul to fight it, but he didn’t, he supported it. (He later said it was the worst vote of his career) I’m convinced that he voted that way because he and his team were pretty sure he’d lose his re-election bid if he didn’t. It was a vote where he put political consideration over his conscious. He didn’t do that very often, but I’m sure the calculation was made that it was more important to keep his Senate seat, than to fight what was sure to be a losing vote in 1996.

  241. 241.

    Tehanu

    September 3, 2011 at 3:43 pm

    @J:

    … those who want to see more fight in the president aren’t interested in fight regardless of results, rather they think that though you don’t get everything you fight for, you don’t get anything you don’t fight for. … Those critics need to be convinced not that compromises are necessary, but that THESE compromises were. Win that point, and you will have shown that that president is a fighter! There’s a related point. Some battles are worth fighting and losing if, in so doing, one stakes out a objective that one can struggle for again and maybe win the next time round (e.g. the civil rights struggle).

    Yes! Exactly!

  242. 242.

    NR

    September 3, 2011 at 3:44 pm

    @FlipYrWhig:

    Close, but even that isn’t saying that “austerity” “creates jobs.” It’s saying, as I mentioned earlier, that cuts have a positive effect, and one collateral effect from that effect is businesses creating jobs.

    This is a distinction without a difference. Obama’s quote invokes the confidence fairy; he couldn’t be any clearer about that than he is. Even the Republicans don’t claim that cutting spending will directly create jobs; rather, they claim that cutting spending will lead to a more favorable climate for businesses to invest and that will create jobs. Which is exactly the same thing Obama said in that speech. There’s no difference.

    It’s also completely wrong and there’s historical evidence that it doesn’t work, but for some reason that fact gets overlooked. It shouldn’t.

  243. 243.

    Tehanu

    September 3, 2011 at 3:57 pm

    @Sly:

    Then along came Milton Friedman, who convinced the political elite that you can still have technocratic management of a capital economy with out all the messiness of democratic accountability and the empowerment of labor.

    He forgot the part where you can’t have technocrats who know how to manage a capital economy without educating your labor force. But when the moneyed elite have ALL the money, it won’t matter if they’ve destroyed public education so the rest of the population are ignorant serfs and the technocracy devolves into a feudal economy. Too bad Uncle Miltie won’t be around to enjoy the fruits of his teachings be strung up on the nearest lamppost.

  244. 244.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 4:11 pm

    @NR:

    You really are a shameless ignorant fool

    I do think that if the country as a whole sees Washington act responsibly, compromises being made, the deficit and debt being dealt with for 10, 15, 20 years,

    What do you think the above is saying? It is saying the same thing as every Keynesian says, from Krugman on down. It is saying long term deficit reduction is good for the things Obama states. He starts out with “10 fucking years from now” . Stop posting lies.

    And Krugman can go to hell for this.

    Meanwhile, they just keep reinforcing the perception of mush from the wimp, of a president who doesn’t stand for anything.

    Useless chickenshit firebaggers.

  245. 245.

    Sly

    September 3, 2011 at 4:24 pm

    @NR:

    the deficit and debt being dealt with for 10, 15, 20 years

    Heavens to Murgatroyd, the man is actually positioning a long-term problem as a long-term problem. Someone get me a mint julep and a fainting couch.

  246. 246.

    NR

    September 3, 2011 at 7:04 pm

    @General Stuck: You really are a complete fucking idiot. That quote from Obama is in response to a specific question about the current unemployment rate. He was asked “Is now really a good time to cut trillions of dollars in spending? How will we still create jobs?” He said that in response to that question.

    In the future, I’d suggest that before you call other people ignorant, you’d better make damn sure that you aren’t ignorant of what you’re talking about. Or you could just keep making an ass of yourself. Your choice.

  247. 247.

    Corner Stone

    September 3, 2011 at 7:10 pm

    @NR:

    @General Stuck: You really are a complete fucking idiot.

    QFT

  248. 248.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 7:22 pm

    @NR:

    That quote from Obama is in response to a specific question about the current unemployment rate. He was asked “Is now really a good time to cut trillions of dollars in spending? How will we still create jobs?” He said that in response to that question.

    It doesn’t matter what the question was, dumbass. It matters what he said with his answer, that doesn’t include having spending cuts right now, but he was okay with long term deficit reduction, stating in 10 years or more.

    God, lying asswipes are completely brain dead, and totally unable to absorb any information truthfully, that doesn’t support you Obama hate mind set. Or, you are working some kind of mission to troll Obama supporting blogs with your bullshit.

    @Corner Stone:

    So what’s the Texas insect up to tonight? Besides being a blow fly, buzzing around, shitting on itself and everything else.

  249. 249.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 7:34 pm

    Seriously, why would anyone in their right mind want to maintain a blog with liars and asshole trolls hijacking every thread? It is not honest debate, nor honest dissent. It is a lie, that seems to be growing daily as the feature of this blog, that once was concerned with honest pol debate. And was something of a gem in a sea of brittle turds. There are still some good people hanging on here, but the number is dwindling. They are the only thing that keeps me returning, at least for commenting on the threads.

  250. 250.

    Corner Stone

    September 3, 2011 at 7:49 pm

    @General Stuck: Sounds like an umpteenth GBCW!! is coming shortly.
    Fucking drama queen.

  251. 251.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 8:07 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    Sounds like an umpteenth GBCW!! is coming shortly.

    In your dreams. I will always be here to stuff your lying psycho ass down your semen stained throat. Goddam Ratfucking McCain voter.

  252. 252.

    Corner Stone

    September 3, 2011 at 8:35 pm

    @General Stuck: Ah, now I can sleep a little better knowing the Blog Sherf is right, rigid and responsible!

    “Oh Cole..please ban me! I’m asking you to ban me Cole! I dasn’t think I can walk away on my ownst!”

  253. 253.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 8:47 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    So when you step into the voting booth in 2012, and vote for Perry, will you come back here and keep lying to us for another 4 years, their grasshopper. All the while drinking down Perry’s spiny white jizm. That is the real Corner Stone. Slurp slurp slurp

    I might just quit again, just to see you lose your mind when I return, and search my blog again for evidence, and posting it on BJ, and then everyone laughing at you . You and fuckhead were the bigger clowns in that BJ episode. Anyone that was here then , will tell you that.

  254. 254.

    Corner Stone

    September 3, 2011 at 8:54 pm

    @General Stuck: More of a clown than you caterwauling all across a blog that’s not yours, begging the blog host for mercy? Begging him to ban you because he disagreed with you and you couldn’t take it? And unlike any other adult who had a mental breakdown you didn’t have the stones to just walk away, you had to drag it out over a five day Farewell Tour. Only to return to your usual double digit IQ musings after a couple days.
    Not sure there could be a bigger clown than that.

  255. 255.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 9:01 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    Teehee. Then being here near everyday since. That was two years ago, dude. You’ve been my personal bitch every day since, and will continue to be. Tell us now, Do you jack it at night for the chance to vote for Perry? Slurp slurp slurp.

    bwahahahahahha! Task Farce Ranger!! The Spaghetti O Kid

  256. 256.

    Corner Stone

    September 3, 2011 at 9:10 pm

    @General Stuck: Yeah Front Row Stuck, you’re here everyday. Where else would an agoraphobic shut in like you go?
    And you ain’t made a god damned lick of sense from that time to this.
    Why are you slurping when you fantasize about me masturbating?

    You’re flashing back to your youth when you rode the bus stops across country to find young homeless boys who you could take advantage of.
    You’re kind of a sicko.

  257. 257.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 9:28 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    Obama victory thread Barack Wins!

    Corner Stone celebrates

    Gotta admit. Can’t beat that. That’s the tops. Good luck with your wheelchair and oxygen.
    My point is this – for those who say anyone who doesn’t swallow the black spiny jism of Obama must be a REPUBLICAN can suck my freakin kook.
    And no, one example doesn’t make me anything on caucusing. But I will tell you that I witneessed R’s standing in line for O. Period.

    “You are a traitor to the Democratic Party.
    Go away.”

    Hey Ben?
    Fuck you, you fucking fuck. I’ve pulled a straight D ticket in every election of my adult voting life. In every national and every dog catcher, etc.
    I’ve given money, time and GOTV to D candidates for the last 20 years. What’ve you done?
    Fuck you.

    And lots more from The Real Corner Stone, alias, Task Farce Ranger!! Sicko?

  258. 258.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 9:31 pm

    Case Closed

  259. 259.

    Corner Stone

    September 3, 2011 at 9:52 pm

    @General Stuck: Those are some awesome threads. That was a good time. I enjoyed the fuck out of that.
    You keep trying this and I keep telling you, I don’t have one ounce of a problem with anything I’ve ever posted here.
    Unlike you, you whiny little bitch.
    “Wahhh, wahhh, John Cole I can’t take you turning the cold shoulder to me any longer. Ban me! Ban me!!”

  260. 260.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 10:06 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    I don’t have one ounce of a problem with anything I’ve ever posted here.

    I didn’t post that with any illusions a psychopathic worm like you would have any problems with what you say. I posted it so others can know who they are sharing their blog with.

    The Ban Me episode is small potatoes compared to your racist psycho presence. And yes, I requested Cole should ban me, if he was going to use the front page of his blog to fight over policy disputes, rather than do it in the comment section where I was at. And that offer is still operative.

    I have no problem with a blog owner feeling free to ban anyone, at any time. I think Cole’s noble effort to maintain a wide open comment section has failed, that should be obvious with whack jobs like you as protected regulars. I would gladly be banned and not complain a bit about it, if Cole would start using the banhammer for human waste like you. My big sin is bullying bullies like your sorry self. But that should be enough to also get banned myself.

  261. 261.

    NR

    September 3, 2011 at 10:10 pm

    @General Stuck:

    It doesn’t matter what the question was, dumbass.

    Oh, okay. You’re so stupid that you don’t understand the basics of human communication. Good to know. I won’t be wasting any more time with you.

    Anyway, the fact remains that Obama has said, publicly, on the record, that cutting spending will create jobs. So there we have it.

  262. 262.

    Corner Stone

    September 3, 2011 at 10:13 pm

    @General Stuck: You bullying anyone is like water running uphill. It doesn’t happen.
    You mouth a lot but you got nothing.
    Keep trying though dog. Maybe one day some one will care.

  263. 263.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 10:14 pm

    @NR:

    Anyway, the fact remains that Obama has said, publicly, on the record, that cutting spending will create jobs. So there we have it.

    No he didn’t say that. And you are a shameless liar to still maintain he did say that, with the quote you provided. Are you insane? On drug? do you not recognized the time of day and plain fucking english.

  264. 264.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 10:21 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    You mouth a lot but you got nothing.

    I got you. my very own Task Farce Ranger!!

  265. 265.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 10:44 pm

    You know Corner Stone, you might be good for something yet. Reading back over this thread, you could have finally been right about something. Maybe it is time for the effort to ban myself. Or, as it goes, give myself a little time out. Maybe a month. Yea, let’s try that, and see how she goes.

    pet threads exempted though, or Charlie pics in them.

  266. 266.

    Corner Stone

    September 3, 2011 at 11:06 pm

    @General Stuck: Nope. Let’s go 100%.
    It’s only fair, as an experiment and all.
    I’m saying you can’t do it.

  267. 267.

    The Raven

    September 3, 2011 at 11:40 pm

    Michael Bérubé explains it all, post.

    It’s brilliant, and I think people on all sides of this discussion could learn from it and enjoy it.

  268. 268.

    General Stuck

    September 3, 2011 at 11:48 pm

    @Corner Stone:

    I don’t bargain with racists

  269. 269.

    NR

    September 3, 2011 at 11:52 pm

    @General Stuck: You know, now that I’m reading your comments just for the entertainment value, they’re very amusing. You don’t find that kind of unintentional hilarity in very many places. Keep it up!

  270. 270.

    NR

    September 3, 2011 at 11:53 pm

    @The Raven: Bérubé’s commenters actually did a very good job refuting his nonsense.

  271. 271.

    The Raven

    September 4, 2011 at 2:04 am

    And, b’golly, we have Brad Delong laying out the economic critique of the Obama administration, post.

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